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

Journal of College Admission, Winter 2001 by Tyson, Dan

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy

by Nicolas Lemann, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999 $15.00, 406 pages, paperback

Reviewed by Dan Tyson, former (retired) college counselor at the Armand Hammer United World College (NM) and author of many articles in professional journals on admission reform.

The SAT has become a fixture of American secondary schooling. Students seeking access to college line up to take the big test by the hundreds of thousands. They do so hoping for a respectable college degree. Having that credential, the conviction is, starts one onto a career path toward success. Unlike most important issues affecting youth, mass testing sneaked into the American way of educating without public debate. How and why did this happen? What are its effects? Are they good for America? Could the meritocratic method be improved?

The story of the SAT could be deadly done as straight educational history or social theory or psychometry. Though it covers the ground of those academic disciplines it reads like a good novel. Lemann, skillful journalist as he is, describes the players in this drama with the skill of Dickens. The people who brought us the big test had human passions, ambitions, uncertainties, failures. He describes the moments of their epiphanies, the drama of their encounters, the agony of their decisions. Yes, he does reveal some surprising secrets as promised in the subtitle.

This book is a must read for every educator. Lemann artfully grounds this story of the SAT by focusing on the small group of elite self perpetuating establishmentarians who controlled Groton and Harvard. They tended to be Episcopalians, "old money" and historically in financial and political control of the direction of American society. World War I and the depression of the thirties, however, had shaken the confidence of the "episcopacy." James Conant, president of Harvard, a scientist rather than one of the clerics or humanities scholars who had tended to lead Ivy Universities, perceived the need to bring into Harvard more promising intellects than the elite boarding schools were producing in the thirties. Henry Chauncey, son of an Episcopal minister, a scholarship student at Groton, had returned, out of financial need (even though Harvard only cost $700 per year) to Ohio State for university. More provident relatives came to his rescue after a year and financed his subsequent education at Harvard. Chauncey in 1933 was an assistant dean at Harvard. Conant gave him the unprecedented assignment to select the 10 most gifted students he could find from the best public high schools in the MidWest to be given full scholarships to Harvard.

Since 1900, the College Entrance Examination Board, a small association of selective northeastern colleges and universities, devised essay tests to be taken by aspirants from the private feeder schools. Chauncey simply visited a few of the better Midwestern public schools and encouraged some of their most promising students to take the College Board's essays. Chauncy at Ohio State, however, had taken a psychology course taught by a protege of Terman and Thorndike at Columbia. He'd become fired with the possibility of using a scientific testing instrument evaluating "native intelligence."

Lemann's research includes Chauncey's own diary. Thus Lemann was able to document the earliest seeds of the ideas that eventuated later as The Big Test. Moreover, Chauncey, at 96, still lives in Vermont sound in mind and body. He gave generous help to Lemann in his reconstruction of the critical events which led to the establishment of the Educational Testing Service. Notwithstanding Chauncey's generous cooperation, Lemann has not produced a haigiography. The treatment is extraordinarily fair and this journalistic balance is one of the aspects of this work that makes it so credible.

Lemann thoroughly investigates and reports on the test makers of the mid-twentieth century: Emory Lindquist of the Iowa Tests and later ACT, John Stalnaker of the National Merit Corporation and their critics such as Stanley Kaplan and Banesh Hoffmann. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is his profiling of some bright minority students who took the SAT. Their scores were their entering wedge into the American Meritocracy.

Don Nakanishi, of east Los Angeles, son of Japanese American parents interned at Tule Lake for not disavowing loyalty to Emperor Hirohito, wound up on scholarship at Yale. So did Alice Young, daughter of a Chinese diplomat of the Mandarin class, stranded in American and impoverished by the revolution. So did Bill Lann Lee, whose parents immigrated from a poor fishing village in China and opened a laundry in New York. Bill's brilliance opened opportunity for him in the select Bronx High School of Science. From there, Bill got a scholarship to Yale.

These were just three of the small group of Asian Americans whose parents had immigrated from Japan and China and India, at Yale who, inspired by the respect they observed came to Hispanic and black student associations, forgot historic animosities and formed their own alliances and began successfully to press universities to open more opportunity to women and students of color. Lemann develops their personal stories of subsequent successes and failures dramatically into his narrative as they moved into graduate school and professional careers from the elevated launching pads of Ivy success. In short, Lemann sings eloquently the songs of heretofore unsung young American heros/heroines, in the struggle for equal rights.