Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, The

Nicholas Lemann's book is a call to review the issues of mass testing, affirmative action, accountability, access to opportunity. He writes with balance and fairness. But he hints that meritocracy screened by ETS, a private corporation, given the privilege of nonprofit status yet not accountable to the public, might not be quite the right thing for our society. Lemann explains the term "meritocracy" was coined by Michael Young, a young British Labour Party policy expert after the passage in Britain of the Education Act of 1944. A provision of that Act was to keep students in school until age 16. Then they took an IQ test when their natural abilities were thought to be stabilized, to determine which should move on to university preparation and which to vocational or technical training program.

Young objected to this and wrote a dystopic thesis in the vein of Orwell's Animal Farm and Huxley's 1984. His thesis was published in 1958 as The Rise of Meritocracy. With that publication the term meritocracy lost the pejorative connotation intended by its author and became a value held by many who would attempt to build the good society. Those using the term meritocracy tend to overlook its effect of changing a government controlled by the people (a democracy) to a government controlled by certain people (an oligarchy). In this case, those who pass the tests with the highest scores.

We now know that there is no automatic connection between wisdom or goodness demonstrated by personal action and intellectual brilliance as measured by tests. Tests "work" nicely to predict future academic performance because they ask questions of students requiring similar cognitive operations to those by which their future academic performances will be evaluated. There is a subtle circularity here that those who are awed by tests tend to miss. Of course those who know how to operate in the academic milieu in school are apt to perform at comparable levels in college or in a test of academic ability. The mystery is, if there is such a thing as natural ability, why is the validity of the putatively best test for it no greater than A? Have we been duped in a big way? Read The Big Test and decide for yourself.

Copyright National Association of College Admissions Counselors Winter 2001
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