THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. - Review - book reviews

Much more troubling is the perverse influence the SAT has had on the nation's elementary and secondary education system. Adapted by Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychology professor, from crude intelligence tests used to sort U.S. Army recruits in World War I, the SAT was first published in 1926. It was a multiple-choice exam emphasizing word recognition (as is the test's verbal section today; the math section measures students' ability to reason mathematically and requires knowledge of basic arithmetic, geometry and algebra). But Lemann reveals that as early as 1934 Brigham repudiated the basic premise that the tests measured solely native intelligence. "The test scores very definitely are a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else, relevant and irrelevant," Brigham wrote in an unpublished manuscript which Lemann dug out of the ETS archives. ETS and the College Board, the organization of schools and colleges that sponsors the exam, acknowledged as much in 1994, when they finally changed the exam's name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Assessment Test.

Internal opposition to the SAT didn't subside as the test's influence spread rapidly in the decades after Brigham's change of mind. In the 1960s, a researcher at the College Board who would later become ETS's senior expert on the technical aspects of testing, argued in a report titled "Criticisms of Testing: Background Papers" that colleges should use the SAT and other ETS tests for placement rather than selection. After the report had been printed, the entire press run was shredded--on whose orders, the author, Win Manning, never learned.

By 1990 Manning was at ETS and arguing that ETS should take steps to reduce affluent students' advantage on the SAT.

Knowing that students from disadvantaged families tended to score lower on the test, he proposed comparing students' actual scores to the scores they'd be expected to achieve given their family backgrounds--on the premise that kids who greatly outperformed their class background on the test could be expected to do so in college as well. Manning argued that his idea would align the SAT more closely with Conant's original aim.

Colleges loved the idea. They saw Manning's new index as a way of diversifying their campuses without running afoul of the Supreme Court's Bakke ban on racial quotas. But Nancy Cole, then ETS's second ranking official and now the organization's president, responded by cutting off Manning's funding. "Imagine the hell that would break loose if the idea were instituted and every lawyer's and doctor's kid in America got an envelope in the mail containing a score that had been adjusted downward to account for the parents' high socioeconomic status?" Lemann writes.

Just such a controversy did break out recently, in the wake of press reports that Manning's idea has been rekindled within ETS. Almost immediately, the College Board's president, no doubt feeling the heat of Hades, attacked the so-called "Strivers" initiative with vague language about the importance of preserving the "art" of using SAT scores in admissions.