THE BIG TEST:
The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
By Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pages, $27
Almost everyone reading these words has had the experience. One day in your late adolescence you spend three hours answering multiple-choice questions. Then you wait to hear from the gods at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) about your membership in the American Elect. Four years later, if you made the first cut, you might repeat the experience to determine your fate in medical, law or graduate school. No one in his right mind believes that these tests accurately measure the full range of human intelligence, much less the personal intangibles that will come into play over your professional lifetime. But American higher education has made taking these tests a mandatory ritual for admission into its hallowed halls. In the old days, Americans were tested on the frontier or in the marketplace. Now they must prove their proficiency in verbal and mathematical calisthenics designed by academic technicians secluded in the woods outside Princeton, N.J.
Nicholas Lemann’s new book explains how this strange, indeed bizarre, situation has come to pass. The story begins at post-World War II Harvard, where two paragons of the old elite of wealth and blue-blooded lineage decided to transform the very system that produced their old-fashioned kind of aristocracy. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, and Henry Chauncey, a Harvard dean who became the founding father of ETS, both decided to make brains rather than blood the basis for entry into America’s colleges. It was a propitious moment, with the U.S. stepping onto the international stage as the dominant nation in the world and higher education about to explode in size and scope as the chief training ground for America’s Mandarin class of corporate and professional executives. Conant and Chauncey embraced the Jeffersonian vision of a truly “natural aristocracy,” whereby future generations of national leaders would be selected–as Jefferson had put it, “raked from the rubbish”–on the basis of intelligence rather than ancestry.
How this noble idea was transformed in the ensuing years into the ignoble practice of a national test that measures “scholastic aptitude,” which in practice translates into the talent to perform well on such tests, is the main theme of Lemann’s story. It takes him into the corridors of ETS; into the academic trenches where statisticians and technicians fight over the meaning of intelligence and how to measure it; into the admissions offices at Yale, where R. Inslee “Inky” Clark fights a guerrilla war against the Old Blues; then out to the University of California in the 1950s, where Clark Kerr establishes the beau ideal of standard-gauge meritocracy at Berkeley. The latter chapters of “The Big Test” then follow a series of successful products of the system as their careers in law and the academic world converge in California during the debate over the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. The last third of the book becomes an account of the meritocracy’s defense of affirmative action as a principled exception to the quasi-IQ criteria of the Big Test itself.
This, then, is a book about irony. The central irony is that the well-intentioned vision of an American aristocracy of genuine talent became a much narrower scheme that now, 50 years later, seems just as arbitrary as the ranking system it was designed to replace. A secondary irony is that American higher education, which is the most decentralized and diverse in the industrialized world, has adopted a centralized and standardized measure of success that even its most ardent defenders acknowledge assesses a narrow segment of the intellectual specimen. (It is as if the National Basketball Association teams picked players solely on the basis of their ability to make free-throws.) The final irony is that the efforts of colleges and universities to tinker with SAT scores in order to accommodate black and Hispanic candidates for admission–this is what affirmative action amounts to–has the complete support of ETS, even though the practice tacitly exposes the fatal inadequacy of its vaunted instrument.
Much as in “The Promised Land,” his book about the black migration to the North, Lemann has explored an apparently familiar subject and then shown that its impact on American history is much greater than anyone previously realized. In the former case, the domestic diaspora of 1890-1920 reshaped the demography of urban America. In the case of “The Big Test,” the decision to standardize the process of admission to higher education transformed the character of America’s professional class and revolutionized the rituals governing middle-class family life.
A book about testing procedures and academic politics would seem, on the face of it, to promise only vacant yawns. But Lemann knows he is telling a much larger story about the conscious creation of a new American elite. He also knows how to tell a story, one of those intangible talents that no SAT verbal score can ever measure. The result is a book that is intellectually serious and highly readable. “The Big Test” deserves to make the best-seller lists. It will surely win some prizes.
It left me with one bittersweet and lasting impression. Both standardized testing for college admission and affirmative action developed beyond public view in the groves of academe and the corridors of the federal bureaucracy. Both were improvisational solutions to real problems of access and equity. Upon scrutiny, neither solution looks very attractive. The problem of balancing our belief in freedom and equality persists. But the more you know about the operation of the current system, the more you conclude that there must be a better way.
