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What's good and bad about the SAT
THOUGH TODAY'S HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS may find it hard to believe, Harvard, Yale, and other leading universities weren't exactly bastions of the best and brightest before World War II. They educated primarily the progeny of the upper class-white, Protestant, male students, the products of New York and New England private schools, who were often more interested in debutante cotillions and sporting events than in the life of the mind. Many brought servants with them to Cambridge and New Haven.
James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University and one of the most influential men of his day, wanted to replace this aristocracy of birth and wealth with what Thomas Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy" of the intellectually gifted from every walk of life, who would be educated to high standards and then be given the responsibility of governing society. The creation of what Conant called "Jefferson's ideal," a new intellectual elite selected strictly on the basis of talent, and dedicated to public service, would, he believed, make America a more democratic country.
In 1933, he gave two Harvard administrators the job of developing a nationwide scholarship program for gifted students. The key to the administrators' work would be the creation of a single standard for evaluating the astonishing diversity of the country's highschool students. And the test Conant ultimately selected for that purpose-the newly developed Scholastic Aptitude Test-would become for many students a narrow path to the best opportunities-- and richest rewards-in American society.
In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Nicholas Lemann reconstructs the extraordinary story of Conant, the SAT, and their roles in making education the central element of opportunity in post-World War IT America.
His history is important and timely. A college education is fast becoming necessary to earn the middle-class salaries that workers won with less than a high school diploma in the days of America's industrial economy. The rise of teenage Internet entrepreneurs notwithstanding, selective colleges and universities represent the way to the top of American society for the majority of those who get accepted. They educate a disproportionate number of the nation's corporate lawyers, investment bankers, leading doctors, and influential academics, and they rely heavily on SAT...