Think

In today's New York Times, Barbara Whitaker writes about the first results from the new and improved Scholastic Aptitude Test, administered by the College Board in the United States. Until recently, the SAT consisted of two equal parts: reading and math. Each section, scored out of a possible 800 points and graded electronically, was worth 800 points. The new portion, blogging writing, is also scored out of 800, and includes an essay worth 25% of one's final score.

Whitaker, I think, makes too much of a deal about the newness of the SAT - students who took it seem to be unimpressed with the notion that the writing component was being administered for the first on them. (So much for progress, I suppose.) Presumably, Kaplan and all those other SAT consultants will require a couple of more years to fine-tune their preparatory materials. In the meantime, a whole bunch of not-quite-college-bound students decided to use the good ol' five-paragraph essay format (Kevin Drum gives it the treatment it deserves here) to guarantee a spot in the mediocre middle. Let's also presume that this group of students overlaps considerably with what can only be another bloated bunch who share the thoughts of one Anya Kanflo, who told Whitaker, "It's difficult to know how they graded the essay, since it's the only part of the test not done through a machine.... There's always going to be a certain amount of bias on the part of the grader, even though there are two readers." (For the record, Anya supports the new section of the test: "You can't fake good writing. If you can't write a complete sentence, that's going to show, and I think that's a good thing for colleges to know." She scored a 9/12 on her essay.)

On the whole, the addition of a writing component to the SAT probably does more good than harm. Yes, enormous swaths of the high school student population might wind up revealing their inadequate writing skills. And yes, certain college programs - and, by extension, careers - require little in the way of decent prose. However, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine one of the new SAT's residual effects being the recognition that the ability to write reasonably well is undervalued and underappreciated, often only recognized when it's absent. If the SAT inspires young people (and their parents) to want to learn how to write, and forces teachers to dedicate already scarce time and resources to teach them, the Board should declare victory and go home.

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There are certainly those who see the latest evolution of the SAT as another chapter in an already too controversial history. Almost since its introduction, the SAT has been accused of making higher education - and social mobility - out of the reach of those who need it the most. For many Americans who saw in a post-secondary system endless opportunity for all children - black or white, rich or poor - the SAT did nothing but institutionalize an inequitable pecking order. While the question of access to education in Canada tends to focus on family income and the idea of the first-generation student (whose parents never went to college or university), the language and politics of higher studies in the United States is shrouded in the culture of racial awareness. Talk of Affirmative Action, quotas and the Supreme Court is heavily weighted in deeply personal feelings of an individual's identity within his own community and the greater America.

In his wonderful book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, New Yorker writer and Columbia Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann (who authored a brilliant profile of Karl Rove available here) chronicles the development of the SAT. In mid-century America, men like Henry Chauncey and James Bryant Conant, empowered by the new science of intelligence testing and a super-secretive organization called the Educational Testing Service, looked to the future, realized that the continued success of American society would depend on the careful stewardship of its institutions, and came up with a plan. The SAT, a test designed to accurately predict who would and would not succeed at college, would allow those who deserved it to assume positions of great responsibility - running the organizations and agenices that would keep America strong. (It's important to underscore the goal of the SAT. As a scientific test, it sought to provide its takers with scores that would correlate with their first-year college grades - not to test nascent ability, though the distinction remains contentious.)

In short, the founders sought to nurture, if not outright create, a large bureaucratic class based on nothing short of absolute merit.

Lemann's account of the devoutness with which the founders of the SAT brought to their work is deeply moving. A small group of men, inspired by those who came before them, sought to eliminate a class system (that handed down wealth, responsibility and power from one generation to another without regard to ability) with a mobile, fluid structure designed to enable progress, not entrench luck. Lemann details the rise and fall of Affirmative Action, and reluctantly dismisses the dream of the SAT's founders ("you can't undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking"). With a heavy heart, he acknowledges that standardized intelligence testing has done little more than replace one imperfect system with another.

If an equitable and equal division of wealth, responsibility and power were supposed to be the byproducts of the SAT, they have proven terribly elusive. Assessed on its face, it's easy to see why testing late teenagers may do little more than rubber stamp the pathways they're already on. After all, the horizons of our lives are not set at eighteen - they're set during childhood. The dream of Bryant and Chauncey was decent, respectable - to encourage the development of a society that can be left in the capable hands of a dedicated class - think of the Biblical Levites or Plato's Philosopher Kings. However, concentrating opportunity on a precious few doesn't fit with modern notions of equality and egalitarianism. In our day and age, we must raise the tide, so that all boats may be lifted.