McNemar was born in Greenland, West Virginia in 1900. He obtained his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1925 from Juniata College, studied for his doctorate in psychology under Lewis Terman at Stanford University, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1931. In 1942 he published The Revision of the Stanford–Binet Scale, the IQ test released in 1916 by Terman. By the time he retired from Stanford in 1965 he held professorships in psychology, statistics and education. He taught for another five years at the University of Texas before retiring to Palo Alto, where he died in 1986.
