The test that took over

Nicholas Lemann flunks the SAT-worshipping American meritocracy.

By Caleb Crain

Oct 1, 1999 | There was little outcry in 1966 when Harvard Law School relaxed its test-score standards in order to admit more black students. The year before, Lyndon B. Johnson had signed an executive order quietly launching affirmative action, and no one had objected to that, either. The moves were so politically palatable that newspapers and voters scarcely even noticed.

The public would not be so indifferent today. In 1996, in a bitter, headline-grabbing fight, California voters approved Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in the state's public colleges and universities. Washington State voters and a Texas federal appeals court soon followed the California example. Why?

In "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy," journalist Nicholas Lemann offers a provocative answer. Affirmative action galls, Lemann suggests, because it depends on a premise that is not only unappealing but deeply un-American: At the top of the United States today sits a meritocracy, an elite who believe that their intellectual achievement earned them their high status. Meritocrats think of themselves as progressive and antiracist, but they are certified into the elite by the SAT, an IQ-like test on which whites and Asians consistently outscore blacks and Hispanics. Thus, as a compensation, faith in affirmative action has become one of the group's shibboleths. In "The Big Test," Lemann explains how the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the nonprofit corporation that administers the SAT, arrived at the center of America's educational culture. He suggests that the recent setbacks to affirmative action have thrown the meritocrats' assumptions about themselves into disarray. And then he argues that the meritocracy -- and ETS -- should be dislodged.

This is quixotic, but it makes for a good read. Most writers on affirmative action have given numbers and argumentation; Lemann gives personalities and plot. There is Henry Chauncey, president of ETS from 1945 to 1970, an affable Episcopal scion of one of the strictest Puritan families of 17th century New England. A former assistant dean at Harvard, Chauncey excelled at ETS thanks to his prowess at bureaucratic judo and his fervent, unskeptical love of all mental tests. There is James Bryant Conant, ETS's godfather. When the dour chemistry professor became Harvard's president in 1933, he undertook to turn the college's idle-rich-boy culture on its head, forcing the gentleman's C to defer to the scholar's A. There is Princeton psychology professor Carl Brigham, at first an ardent eugenicist, then the author of the first SAT, and finally a skeptic who recanted his earlier faith in intelligence as an inborn trait, writing instead that "test scores very definitely are a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else, relevant and irrelevant." Allan Nairn -- in the news recently as a journalist arrested and released in East Timor -- has a cameo as a young apprentice to Ralph Nader in the 1970s.

Focusing on changes in the admissions policies and academic cultures of Harvard, Yale and the University of California system, Lemann documents a historic shift that is hard to appreciate today, so completely do we inhabit the current dispensation. "The machinery that Conant and Chauncey and their allies created is today so familiar and all-encompassing," Lemann writes, "that it seems almost like a natural phenomenon, or at least an organism that evolved spontaneously ... It's not. It's man-made." This "machinery," Lemann emphasizes, is not even necessarily what its creators had in mind. It appalled Conant, for example, when the Selective Service hired ETS during the Korean War to identify the most intelligent American college students and reward them with a draft deferment. Even Chauncey had his moments of dissatisfaction, dreamily wishing for a test that measured something broader and more humane than the IQ-like characteristic captured by the SAT.

Next Page: The meritocracy's dirty secret: Whites with low SATs who go to fancy colleges earn the most money

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