The Big Test : The Secret History of the American Meritocracy

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in quantitative evidence & moral seriousness
Review: After a decade's research, the graceful prose stylist NicholasLemann has finally published his expose of the SAT, "The BigTest: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy." His conclusion: It's just not fair. How can you, he asks, "create a classless society by establishing a system that relentlessly classifies people"? But the bigger question is one Lemann relentlessly dodges: Can you create a classless society at all? The Khmer Rouge came closest, but to enforce classlessness, they still had to have two classes: the killers and the killees.

In the endless debate over mental tests, there's one sure-fire test of how morally serious an author is. Does he honestly grapple with the raw, hulking fact of human intellectual inequality? Lemann flunks his personal Big Test badly, as he spends 343 pages sidestepping this central reality.

The problem is that some people are simply smarter than other people. Yes, it helps to go to good schools and have parents who read to you and all that. Still, siblings raised in the same home routinely turn out highly different in intelligence. Even fraternal twins raised side by side aren't very similar. Only identical twins, who share the same DNA, tend to come out alike in IQ.

Is it fair that winners in this genetic lottery tend to be better able to provide for themselves? Of course not. But the relevant question for us is: What we do about it? Do we try to equalize mental ability? (Whacking smart kids on the head with a ball-peen hammer would be the most effective way.) Or do we treat brainpower as a precious natural resource that can benefit all of society?

Paradoxically, by focusing on usefulness rather than fairness, IQ tests like the SAT have helped eliminate much blatant unfairness. They've shown that discrimination is expensive. For example, everyone assumed men were smarter than women until pioneering IQ researcher Cyril Burt announced they were equal way back in 1912. After WWII when colleges began competing on their students' average SAT scores, they found that the easiest way to get more bright students was to stop discriminating against women. Similarly, this competition for brains also induced Ivy League colleges to finally stop mistreating Jews, the highest scoring ethnic group.

The Math portion of the SAT has been a huge boon to Asian immigrants. Software engineer and journalist Arthur Hu responds to Lemann's snide history of the SAT: "My father and mother from China sent 7 kids to MIT and Stanford on the basis of high SAT scores. Six of us are now in high tech and the other is a doctor. Isn't this exactly what the people who invented the SAT had in mind?"

Although Lemann shows no interest in technologists, we should note that the Math SAT has been a huge boon to American prosperity. It liberated a group so dispersed and downtrodden that it didn't even have a name until about 30 years ago: nerds. By identifying nerdy geniuses in high schools across the world, many of whom were too bored to make good grades, the Math SAT enabled them to form critical masses of computer geeks in nerd havens like Stanford and MIT. Out of these colleges grew the great high-tech incubators such as Silicon Valley and Route 128, which are the engines of the current American boom.

The effects of the Verbal SAT are more troublesome, though. Certainly it has bestowed upon America more clever lawyers, but that is, shall we say, a mixed blessing.

The Verbal SAT has also allowed America's future elite of journalists, academics, and policy wonks to cluster together at Ivy League universities at an early age. There they form career-boosting friendships with like-minded young verbalists.

That the SAT jumpstarts the careers of brilliant young scientists and engineers is an unmixed blessing because their precocious creativity is tested against unforgiving reality: If their Hot New Idea turns out to be wrong, their bridge falls down or their computer program bombs. Verbal SAT elitism, however, brings together at an early age the young people with the most dazzling rhetorical talents who can thus mesmerize each other with their soaring theories of how the world ought to work ... long before they have a clue about how the world actually works.

For example, for 20 years Lemann's neoliberal friends have been publicly attacking IQ testing and the SAT. Lemann's big book was to be their coup de grace. Year after year he searched for flaws in the numbers and logic of the IQ realists like Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. And then ... Lemann punted. Those hoping for a refutation of The Bell Curve in The Big Test will be disappointed. In fact, in this purported history of testing, there are almost no numbers and not much more logic. Left with apparently nothing analytical to say about intelligence that wouldn't embarrass either his friends or the truth, Lemann padded his book with endless personal details about some excruciatingly boring people. Fortunately for Lemann, since his natural audience of liberal verbalists aren't too comfortable with either numbers or logic, they'll no doubt appreciate having neither their mental skills nor their prejudices challenged. In summary, the best example of the nefarious impact of the SAT is Lemann's own book.

Rating:
Summary: Not what you think....
Review: Having looked over the other reader reviews for this book, I am surprised by what the reviewers expected this book to be about. It is not an expose on the SAT. It is, rather, a look at the Test (capital letter intended). It is a look into the people and philosophies that shaped Educational testing and, to be frank, America itself.
Lemann portrays the key players involved in the testing movement, its propagation, and its continuation to the present day. He also gives to us a look into the Meritocratic (or rulers determined by their merit rather than money) society envisoned by Jefferson.
This is an extremely interesting book. This book will leave you thinking. You will challenge your own ideologies.

Rating:
Summary: Very short on valid analysis
Review: Lemann is a perfect example of a Bleeding-Heart Politically Correct liberal - the sort of egalitarian maniac that strives to sacrifice the QUALITY of our society in the name of E-QUALITY.

What sickens me about books like these is that the author - prior to any research - has his own deeply entrenched biases that he merely seeks to validate by picking out "evidence" in a very selective manner.

Lemann's analysis of the SAT is so short on statistical and technical detail that it resembles a poet trying to write about advanced physics. His approach is downright subjective in many ways, and merely confirms my belief that PC liberals like himself are a plague on American society.

I happen to be an Asian-American student who scored perfect on the Math section of the SAT and also did very well on the Verbal section. But my success in life is far from guaranteed. No, the SAT is not the most important factor determining one's future. It's one of many things that college admission officials look at. And what I find weird about Lemann is that he thinks that success in life depends on going to a prestigious private university; it doesn't.

In this Politically Correct world, the liberals can't come to grips with the fact that people are not created equal. There are fundamental differences between individual persons as well as between the sexes and different races. Almost no one thought otherwise until Marxist and socialist ideas wormed their way into Western politics and intelligentsia.

Equality of opportunity is the only true opportunity there should be, and the United States offers more of that than the vast majority of countries in the world. Equality of results is not only unrealistic, but highly undesirable.

What kind of dull place would our planet be if everyone were the same? If everyone had equal potential in track running and other sports, what would the Olympics be all about? If everyone had equal intelligence, who would we look up to as possessors of wisdom? The world is founded on inequality. It's the natural order of things.

Yes, inequality does bring injustice. But given a choice, any person would choose INJUSTICE and ORDER as opposed to JUSTICE and DISORDER.

Rating:
Summary: boring
Review: The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann is not a book for folks who have to take the SAT and want to do better, or a book for someone like myself, a high school teacher expecting an analysis of current or recent research about the SAT. The book does give an exhaustive and interesting history of the early days of the test, but focusses a great deal on the personalities of the people involved in the development of the test, rather than an analysis of the test itself. While this background is interesting, it did not lead me to the same conclusion as the author-- that the test has created an elite meritocracy of folks who are admitted to the top schools, and then automatically go on to top financial success, leaving all the low scorers far behind. There are far too many counter examples of people who are successful financially, or in other ways, for the premise of the book to hold without further evidence. I also know a couple of Ivy League grads who are poor.

I was bothered by his constant use of the pejorative term "mandarins" for well-educated people with good well-paying jobs. It made it seem that that the author was not really trying for an unbiased discussion.

There have been at least 1700 studies of various aspects of the SAT and its use in college admissions, and I found it quite surprising that these studies were largely ignored.

Even though the subtitle is "The Secret History of the American Meritocracy", the last third of the book, which is devoted to a description of the battle to end affirmative action in CA, seemed to have veered too far from its topic of the SAT. I felt that this part of the book was far too long, and minute in its description of the personalities of the people involved in that fight. Although parts of the book are interesting, you need to be a patient reader with time on your hands to wade through the extraneous stuff to find the meat. You might want to read just the last chapter where he makes his case for how college admissions should work.

Rating:
Summary: The 1967 Selective Service Qualifications Exam was omitted
Review: The book covered the 1951 'Draft Deferment Test' used during the Korean War, but I could find no discussion of the 1967 (April-July) Selective Service Qualifications Exam, which was used to determine if undergraduates and graduate students would maintain a '2S' deferment. I believe a score of 80 was needed for graduate study and a 75 for undergraduate study. It was a much more important exam than the SAT, GRE, ATGSB (GMAT), all of which I took.

Rating:
Summary: The Richmond Reviewer Is Right
Review: The previous reviewer is correct: the first third of the book indeed focuses on what the title leads one to expect and does, in fact, give a brief history of the haphazard evolution of the American SAT. However, the remaining two thirds is a loosely interconnecting series of vignettes which does not significantly illuminate the effects of the SAT I on American society in general. Interesting stories, but not what I was expecting.

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Read...
Review: This book is well written and informative. It should be on the "must read" list of anyone who has even a remote interest in the state of American education and public policy. In a functioning democracy, that should include all of us.

It is, however, an injustice to call this just a book. It is actually two books, roughly connected by a premise not sustained. The first book deals with the history and presumptions behind the present educational testing process as a selection method for determining access to higher education, and is by far the more important. The second book deals with the electoral process surrounding the affirmative action initiatives in California, and while interesting, is actually something of a cul-de-sac in proving what on the surface appears to be Lemann's main thesis.

Affirmative action is, even by Lemann's own admission, a judicially gerrymandered solution to problems created not by testing, but by previous inequities in society. While the faulty reasoning of the Warren court as interpreted by the Johnson Administration in developing the basis for affirmative action is at least as questionable as the faulty reasoning underlying the basis for educational testing, the two issues do not share a common causal relation.

It is almost as though Lemann started out to write a book about the California affirmative action inititatives and halfway through discovered a larger story, but was unable or unwilling to trash the affirmative action stuff to write the book that needed to be written.

Rather than making the affirmative action his ultimate proof, Lemann would have been better to make this a side argument in the larger question which needs be debated, "Whether the historical presumptions underlying the present testing system are valid, and as a result, does the testing system's role in determining college admissions need to be revised?"

The answer to both questions is, undoubtedly, yes. There are many additional indications that the present system is deficient, not the least of which is the number of extremely successful individuals who have eschewed the formal educational process (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Ted Turner, Steve Jobs, etc.) The relationship between the increasing mandarinization of our government and professions and the disaffectation of society as a whole is also especially relevant, as the other society which relied upon such methods ultimately self-destructed (the Chinese empire).

Unfortunately, by focussing on only affirmative action, and not providing additional proofs for what appears to be his main thesis, Lemann turns what could have been an extremely important book into one which is merely a well written and thought provoking read.

Rating:
Summary: De Tocqueville Would Find This Well Worth Reading
Review: When my daughters were just beginning the college admissions process a mere three years ago, I had no idea how things had changed or why--and the degree to which my own experience of the process had become irrelevant. This book does much to make that all clear, in prose which smacks of Tom Wolfe and is peopled with fascinating vignettes of characters, known and unknown: from Presidents James Bryant Conant, Clark Kerr, and Kingman Brewster to Henry Chauncy, "Inky" Clark, and Molly Munger, just to name a few. Lemann's thesis is essentially one of good intentions gone painfully awry. The Ivy League and other highly selective colleges have been debrided of old families and old money, only to be replaced by the narrowly proficient and unduly ambitious. It's not a pretty picture and one wants to believe it less important than Lemann and many applicants and their parents think. Much of the book appeared in a series of articles in the New Yorker and, unfortunately, is not much better than the sum of its parts. But I still heartily recommend this book. It puts our elite in focus and gives perspective to one of the most debated issues of our time--affirmative action.