On 2009-10-31 Privacy, Please, Maryland, USA wrote: Although the background of the SAT is only part of this book (not the whole thing, as the title would lead you to believe), the history of the SAT that is presented is fascinating, and probably the best part of the book. The book shows how colleges and universities, which were originally intended to promote scholarship and educate professors, had their focus changed by standardized testing (in the author´s opinion) and eventually became seen as the gateway to well-paying careers for those people who were not born into wealth and privilege. The author also portrays the class differences and the struggle for public funds between different types of colleges - private vs. public, and community college with the more advanced institutions of higher learning.
The SAT was intended to provide an impartial system of separating the best and the brightest students from others. I am sure that by now the vast majority of Americans who have taken the SAT and other standardized tests - in some cases over and over - are well aware of their limitations and the fact that some otherwise smart people just do not do well on such tests. Nevertheless, this book makes a compelling case that with the advent of the SAT and the ensuing competition between colleges for the students with the best scores, many socioeconomically or educationally disadvantaged people (perhaps disproportionately African-American) are being excluded, not just from a supposedly better education, but also from the better job opportunities that a highly ranked school brings, based on their inability to score well on standardized tests.
It´s unclear just who (if anyone) is the ´villain´ in this story. One gets the impression that the author meant to write a condemnation of the standardized testing industry. However, the history of the test shows that it did serve to open the doors of higher education for some immigrant and minority groups, such as Jews and Asians. Also, the schools themselves, as well as the people who regard doing well on a standardized test and getting into a ´good´ school to be the be-all and end-all of success, come off as being pretty screwed up. As other reviewers have noted, the author insinuates that not doing well on the SAT, and consequently not getting into a top school, is a big handicap in life; perhaps this is what he was taught by his own family or culture. The reality is that some people manage to do well in life without scoring highly on tests or going to an ´elite´ school and the importance of both aspects is likely overemphasized by the author, just as it is overemphasized by some segments of society.
Midway through, the book shifts gears and devotes the last section to highly personalized descriptions of a legislative struggle over public school tax funding and affirmative action. While those who are interested in the state legislative process might enjoy the insights, I thought this section went on way too long and in the end did not portray any of the schools or people involved, much less affirmative action programs, in a positive light. Nor did I think that the problems and issues involved were that related to SAT scores as the author would like you to believe. I think this should have been an entirely different book, and the story of the SAT might have been better just told on its own and left for the reader to think about, rather than grafting on what seems to be an obvious agenda on the part of the author.
. And summed up by saying Will make you question the U.S. educational system. Currently The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy has an overall rating of 6 over 10.
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy can also be found in the following searches:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux claimed This brilliant book shows us for the first time the ideas, the people, and the politics behind the fifty-year-old system that deter mines the course of Americans´ lives. It began as a utopian experiment--launched by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, and Henry Chauncey, head of the brand-new Educational Testing Service (ETS)--to use the then-young science of intelligence testing to assess and sort American students fairly and dispassionately in order to create a new democratic elite that would lead postwar America to progress, strength, and prosperity. No writer before Nicholas Lemann has gained access to the archives of the all-powerful ETS, and none has understood the significance of this extraordinary drama. But now, in a remarkable synthesis of vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, he reveals the secret history of this major effort to unseat the quasi-hereditary male white elite that had run America. Lemann´s narrative goes across a huge range of subjects, places, and times--from Cambridge and wartime Washington to contemporary California, from the think tanks and policy centers where educational testing was invented to the schools and class rooms where the test forms are handed out. And he describes the consequences, for individual lives and for society as a whole, of this effort to create a new meritocracy. For the utopian experiment didn´t turn out as planned. It created a new elite but also generated conflict and tension, particularly over the issue of race, and America is now a society whose best-educated, most privileged, and most powerful people seem to be leaders without followers--prosperous, resented figures who don´t hold the country together around their ideas yet who are trying, like the old elite, to perpetuate themselves down through the generations. Lemann shows that this American meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. The Big Test is superb social history and analysis that not only explains the origins of the inadequate system we are all living with but asks profound moral and political questions about what makes for a good society, and what condition the United States is in today.
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