<p><a href="NOTE:%20Bates,%20Bowdoin,%20Hamilton,%20Holy%20Cross,%20and%20Wake%20Forest%20are%20SAT%20Optional">B</a>**</p>
<p>The SAT and Its Enemies
Fear and loathing in college admissions.
by Andrew Ferguson
05/04/2009, Volume 014, Issue 31, The Weekly Standard</p>
<p>One Saturday morning this month, a quarter million kids or more will slump their way into the fluorescent tomb of a high school classroom, slide into the seat of a flimsy polypropylene combo chair-desk, and then, with clammy palms dampening the shafts of perfectly sharpened number two pencils, they will take the SAT. They will carefully mark only one answer for each question, as instructed, and they will make sure to fill the entire circle darkly and completely. They will not make any stray marks on their answer sheet. If they erase, they will do so completely, because incomplete erasures may be scored as intended answers. They will not open their test book until the supervisor tells them to do so, and if they finish before time is called, they will not turn to any other section of the test. And over the next three hours they will determine the course of the rest of their lives.</p>
<p>At least that's what a lot of them will think they're doing. They'll be wrong, of course--dozens of people have gone on to live happy and healthy lives after bombing the SAT--but they won't know it because an oddly large number of powerful forces in American society have combined to elevate the SAT to unlikely heights of influence and to impute to it unimaginable powers. You'll hear the SAT can wreck a person's future, even if only temporarily, or salvage a new future from a misspent past. The SAT can enforce class hierarchies or break them open; it unfairly allocates society's spoils and sorts the population into haves and have-nots, or it can unearth intellectual gifts that our nation's atrocious high schools have managed to keep buried. It is a tool of understanding, a cynical hoax, a triumph of social science, a jackboot on the neck of the disadvantaged. But rarely is it just a test.</p>
<p>Even the College Board, which administers the SAT, and the Educational Testing Service, which designs it each year, are sheepish about using the word. The SAT was originally an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test. When critics objected to the word "aptitude," for reasons we'll consider in a moment, SAT came to stand for Scholastic Assessment Test. Marketers soon realized that test and assessment have pretty much the same meaning, making "SAT" a kind of solecism, one of those repetitive redundancies that repeats itself--bad form for a test measuring verbal ability. So they gave up trying to make an acronym altogether. "Assessment" was dropped, and so was "test," and "scholastic" too. Today the SAT is officially just the SAT; the letters don't stand for anything, as if the test-makers were too timid to declare what they're up to.</p>
<p>And who can blame them? Critics of the SAT are eager to remind you that its intellectual genealogy traces back to the intelligence tests that eugenicists, racial theorists, and other creepy types promoted in the early 20th century as a way of purifying the gene pool.</p>
<p>"Racists worked hard to design a test that would confirm their racism, and they succeeded," says Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, an activist organization that has declared war on all standardized tests, especially the SAT. A large number of people in higher education share his disdain, both for the test itself and for the uses to which it is put, usually by themselves. Any gathering of college admissions professionals--deans, school counselors, private coaches--swells before long with a chorus of complaint about the SAT's deficiencies, even though most of them are bound, by habit, custom, or popular expectation, to use the test in their everyday work.</p>
<p>Now they're beginning to rebel, and the hostility grows more ferocious every year. It's fair to say the tide of elite opinion now runs solidly against the use of the SAT in college admissions. Last fall, the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) released a report calling on its members at last to act on their skepticism by taking steps to decommission the test for use at their schools. When the report was presented at the group's convention last September, the only complaints were that it didn't go far enough in condemning the test. "It's a lousy test," one NACAC member said heatedly on the convention floor. "It's destructive of what all of us here are trying to do."</p>
<p>This spring three more selective and well-known schools--Fairfield University, Connecticut College, and Sewanee: The University of the South--took NACAC's advice, announcing that they would adopt a "test optional" admissions policy, telling applicants they no longer were required to submit SAT scores but were free to submit them if they wished. The schools join dozens of well-regarded peers--Bates, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Holy Cross, and Wake Forest among them--in striking a blow against the SAT, and in being very proud of themselves for doing so.</p>
<p>Wake Forest's president, Nathan O. Hatch, announced his school's SAT policy in a much-discussed op-ed in the Washington Post. "By opening doors even wider to qualified students from all backgrounds and circumstances," he wrote, "we believe we are sending a powerful message of inclusion and advocating for democracy of access to higher education."</p>
<p>Hatch noted that on average, richer students score higher on the SAT than poorer students. He did not note that on average, Asian Americans perform better than whites on standardized tests, whites better than Hispanics, Hispanics better than African Americans, and, at least in math, men better than women. Any such gap, President Hatch said, is conclusive evidence of some crippling defect in the SAT--and provides sufficient reason to eliminate it from college admissions.</p>
<p>Like so many widely shared beliefs in the world of higher education, this argument is seldom challenged, even though it's a relatively novel view. The "achievement gaps" in SAT scores were evident 40 years ago, yet most liberal educators defended standardized tests. In their book The Academic Revolution, published in 1968, the sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman famously (famously for sociologists) expressed what was then still the majority view.</p>
<p>"Those who look askance at testing should not rest their case on the simple notion that tests are 'unfair to the poor,'" they wrote. "Life is unfair to the poor. Tests merely measure the results."</p>
<p>Jencks and Riesman weren't fatalists about this state of affairs; they thought remedial programs in primary and secondary schools might help "close the gap," and "preventive measures" rectifying income inequality would be even more successful. Still, the gaps themselves weren't reason enough to abandon the tests or the university's interest in the aptitude that the SAT measured. Do you fire your doctor because you don't like his diagnosis?</p>
<p>Riesman and Jencks reminded their readers how it was that standardized tests like the SAT became essential to college admissions in the first place. Notwithstanding its ancestral ties to racism and eugenics, the SAT was introduced by progressives to accomplish the same goals that our contemporary progressives now say it impedes: democratizing higher education, uplifting the poor, ending the class spoils system, and making merit rather than accidents of birth the measure of success.</p>
<p>The irony is hard to miss. From the progressives' panacea in the mid-20th century to the progressives' bogeyman in the early 21st, the evolution of the SAT is a story about our shifting notions of merit, democracy, populism, the life of the mind, and what we expect from higher education--an industry into which the country pours many billions of dollars a year. In a way kids are right to be jittery. The SAT is more than a test, and always has been. If it's being condemned today, this is a grisly instance of the revolution devouring its children.</p>
<p>The SAT first became popular in the 1930s, when one side won an argument and the other side lost. The argument was over how college administrators should choose the students who would attend their schools--and who would, by extension, enter the country's leadership class in politics, business, and religion, at a time when fewer than 2 percent of American adults held post-secondary degrees. In the 19th century, those hoping to attend college submitted themselves to interviews with school faculty or took essay exams the faculty concocted. In 1900 a consortium of East Coast colleges formed the Collegiate Entrance Examination Board, the forerunner of today's College Board, to regulate the chaos. The board wrote and disseminated "achievement tests" as a way of standardizing admissions from one school to another. The tests assessed knowledge of English grammar and literature, American and ancient history, Latin and classical Greek--the fundamentals of the prep school curriculum, and the things that every educated gentleman was presumed to know. A high score virtually guaranteed college admission.</p>
<p>The system of achievement tests worked well for awhile. But before long the bluebloods at Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere were alarmed to discover that a disproportionate number of high scorers were not People Like Us. Many of them, indeed, were Jews. As Jerome Karabel tells the story in his magisterial history of college admissions, The Chosen, administrators quickly adapted. Personal interviews became common as a way of screening applicants. And the criteria for admissions were mysteriously enlarged. Admissions officers claimed to weigh ineffable qualities like "leadership," "breeding," "character," and "well-roundedness."</p>
<p>Karabel reprints a typology of applicants that Harvard admissions officers developed privately in the 1920s. Among the types:</p>
<p>Cross-country style--steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would
Boondocker--unsophisticated rural background
Taconic--culturally depressed background, low-income
Mr. School--significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation, plus excellent academic record.</p>
<p>You can guess which types Harvard preferred, no matter how well they did on the achievement tests.</p>
<p>Progressives of the era knew that these "objective methods" were just a dodge--a high-minded way of keeping the riffraff out, dividing the applicant pool between our kind and everyone else. One of those progressives, James B. Conant, was appointed president of Harvard in 1933. A product of a shabby-genteel Yankee family himself, Conant was the chief theorist and propagandist for the "meritocratic ideology," as Karabel calls it, that became the declared standard for selective college admissions in mid-century America: Access to an elite education should be based on academic ability rather than wealth or family background. Conant's view wasn't really an ideology so much as an ideal--one violated almost as often as it was honored, as today's progressive critics never tire of pointing out.</p>
<p>But still it was an ideal, and even often-ignored ideals have the power to shape events. Conant despised inherited privilege and the stratagems used to sustain it. (A pet cause of his was the 100 percent inheritance tax.) He was a scientist by training, a believer that reality could be quantified. And he was a democrat. He assumed that cognitive ability--the thing that made a man do well in school and, in time, might make him economically productive, a solid citizen, even perhaps a leader--could be identified and measured. He assumed that this ability, unlike economic power, was distributed equally across the population. His duty was to seek it out, and well-wrought tests would help him do it.</p>
<p>But not the tests that were being used in college admission, at Harvard and elsewhere. Tests of knowledge--achievement tests--by their very design worked against the meritocratic ideal, because they favored the members of one class over another. Who but the sons of privilege would do well on tests drawn from the curriculums of prep schools where the sons of privilege were taught? Far more promising, Conant believed, was the test of scholastic aptitude being developed by the College Board. The SAT claimed to measure not a grasp of facts but the acuteness of intelligence. It leveled the advantage that elite high schools gave their students by measuring the capacity to learn rather than learning itself. In time, Conant thought, the SAT could become a means to reward innate talent and break down the barriers to admission that wealth and privilege had put up. A favorite phrase was "diamonds in the rough," used to describe the jewel-like abilities lurking out there in the high schools of the vast Republic, in the intelligent kid hidden away in a bad school, or the bright boy with bad grades.</p>
<p>The SAT was built for mass use. It was based on the multiple-choice tests the Army had administered to draftees in World War I; those tests were likewise based on the now-infamous IQ tests developed, with racist intent, a generation before. The Army draftees of 1917 made for a human jambalaya unlike any the country had ever seen. The draft had roped in 2 million farm boys, city boys, math whizzes, boulevardiers, dullards, bookworms, sharpies, poets, rou</p>