Taking the SAT test has long been a critical part of the
college admission process. Great weight
is put on a person’s scores in considering acceptability for admission in the
majority of the most desirable schools.
Parents may spend many thousands of dollars and their child’s lifetime
preparing for this test. Lani Guinier is
no fan of the test and is appalled by the significance accorded it. In her book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy:Democratizing Higher Education in America, she rips into it, claiming
it does nothing to identify those who would merit recognition as potential
contributors to the health and well-being of society. Rather, it has become a tool for propagating
an aristocracy and establishing a plutocracy.
The SAT is now known simply as the SAT. Its original name, and the name under which
it was marketed to the nation, was the Scholastic Aptitude Test. As the name suggests, it claimed to be able
to separate the high academic performers from the low academic performers thus
allowing college admissions committees to better select the students in which
they were interested. Guinier tells her
readers that several studies have concluded that the performance of college
students is only very weakly correlated with SAT scores. A much stronger correlation exists between
high school grade point averages and college performance.
“So if the SAT does not measure
aptitude—and if it doesn’t even pretend to measure achievement—then what does
it measure?”
“The SAT’s most reliable value
is its proxy for wealth. It is normed to
white, upper-middle-class performance, as numerous studies have shown when the
test is viewed through the lenses of race and class.”
Guinier presents in tabular form the average SAT score as
a function of family income to support her contention. Here we will produce the equivalent result
from The Reproduction of Privilege,
an article by Thomas B. Edsall in the New
York Times.
The elite universities have always had high school
performance as an indicator of potential college performance but decided
against depending on it. At first
glance, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. Different school systems and different
regions possess a range of academic rigor, why depend on being able to sort all
that out? However, further consideration
suggests that the decision has its basis in some outmoded conclusions related
to what is responsible for exceptional performance. High school grades are indicative of both
basic intelligence and the hard work of the student. Both attributes are important for future
performance. The SAT came into
prominence in an era when academic performance was more likely to be viewed as a
result of a fixed and innate degree of intelligence. This was the era when it was thought that
testing could determine intelligence and identify those who could be depended
upon to be high performers. It was also
the era when eugenics was respected as a science in this country.
The notion of the SAT originated in the decision by the
United States military to allow university professors to test soldiers entering
service for World War I. Guinier
provides some suggestive comments.
“….Harvard professor and IQ-test
advocate Robert Yerkes convinced army brass to allow him to evaluate nearly two
million soldiers to identify top talent who could be promoted to the rank of
officer. The results were striking
according to Yerkes, ‘The native-born scored higher than the foreign-born, less
recent immigrants scored higher than more recent immigrants, and whites scored
higher than Negroes.’ In 1923, Carl C.
Brigham, a Princeton psychology professor and leading figure in the growing
anti-immigration movement of the time, authored a treatise titled A Study of
American Intelligence, in which he relied heavily on Yerkes’s findings to
conclude that ‘American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an
accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive’.”
Brigham would be selected to produce the first version of
the SAT (called the Scholastic Aptitude
Test) which became available in 1926. It
would be a based on a modification of the IQ test produced by Yerkes. Already, the separate concepts of
intelligence and academic potential were being conflated.
The most serious concern is that an IQ test constructed
by people who believed that intelligence was mostly genetically defined and a
function of race would almost have to be designed so that it reproduced the beliefs
of the designers. At the time there was
no data to match and the belief in intelligence as a measurable quantity was strong—how
else to design such a test than to make it agree with preconceptions of who was
intelligent?
Is it possible that the SAT was born under suspicious
circumstances? On that topic here is a
comment by Nicholas Lemann in an article from The Atlantic The Great Sorting.
“The overall results of
intelligence tests have always produced a kind of photograph of the existing
class structure, in which the better-off economic and ethnic groups are found
to be more intelligent and the worse-off are found to be less so. In
his book analyzing the results of the intelligence tests that the Army had
given recruits during the First World War, for example, Carl Brigham, an early
psychometrician and the father of ETS's leading test, the Scholastic Aptitude
Test, reported that the highest-scoring identifiable group was Princeton
students -- this at a time when, by today's standards, Princeton was a den of
carousing rich boys.”
“IQ tests have always heavily
stressed reading comprehension and vocabulary items like analogies and
antonyms, and so does the verbal section of the SAT. Back in the early days
Carl Brigham published a scale for converting intelligence-test scores to SAT
scores.”
A quick search finds those who hold the SAT in even less
regard than Lani Guinier. Consider this
from Rich Gibson, a professor at San Diego State University: The Fascist Origins of the SAT Test.
“The genealogy of the SAT is far
more authentic than the importance attached to the test's scores. The SAT was
born from the initial IQ tests, written by French psychologist Alfred Binet. In
the US, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes promoted the IQ test and made it a
popular instrument to determine who should be an officer, in a segregated
military, during WWI. Their IQ test was designed to prove the genetic advantage
of races they had already identified as superior. Terman and Yerkes were
executives in the American Eugenics Society…..”
“The AES encouraged the linkage
of scientifically quantified intelligence test scores, race, and ‘race hygiene,’
to purify the ‘race’ of ‘low grade’ and ‘degenerate’ groups. In other words,
Terman, Yerkes, and many influential scientists in the US, believed they could
define exactly what intelligence is. They thought that intelligence is
race-based and can be tracked by genes, that intelligence is biologically
determined. They believed that to allow those identified as having bad genes to
propagate would be to threaten the entire society. Terman and Yerkes believed
some people are born superior, and the inferior are a threat to the general
welfare…..”
And then there is the story of the “father” of the SAT
renouncing his own offspring.
“Carl C. Brigham worked with
Yerkes on the Army IQ tests. Brigham wrote a book, ‘A Study of American
Intelligence,’ clearly stating his belief in the biological relationship of
race and intelligence, concluding that ‘race mixture,’ would pollute the gene
bank, making the society dumber and weaker. Brigham then made a few
inconsequential changes to the IQ test and called it the Scholastic Aptitude
Test. Later, he renounced his own book, and the use of the SAT as a sorting
tool for college admissions.”
Gibson is particularly irate about the use of what was
perceived as an intelligence test to decide who should be condemned to fight
and perhaps die in war, and who was too valuable to be placed at risk.
“….the SAT became a deadly
weapon. The rationale of racism, sexism, and class privilege built into the
test necessarily means, at its end, not just sterilization, but death. The SAT
was used to secure draft deferments during the Korean and Vietnam wars,
ensuring the wars were fought by working class youth, especially black youth.
Notably, people who might not have done well on the SAT, the Vietnamese,
defeated a power led by test-successes, educated at West Pointe.”
Nicholas Lemann provides a detailed history of how the
SAT evolved from the first testing performed by Yerkes and others and evolved
into the universal tool we have today in The Great Sorting. The event that
cemented the SAT’s role in our society was again provided by the US
military. During the cold war there was
much concern that the Soviets were assiduously sweeping up their brightest
children and providing them the best education and the best opportunities to
contribute to Soviet objectives. There
was a widespread belief that we should be doing the same thing.
In 1950 the Korean War began. Truman, an initial believer in universal
service, gave in to the pressure and on March 31, 1951 signed an executive
order authorizing a test of college students that would grant deferments to
those who received a high enough grade.
The SAT would be that test. The
notion of deciding who might live and who might die based on a measure of
intelligence via an IQ test was definitely controversial, but the military, who
thought of the SAT as an IQ test, was firmly in support. The marketers of the SAT for such consumption
were put in a delicate position and then, as now, always described the test as
one of scholastic aptitude.
Lemann provides this summary on the issue.
“What is remarkable is how
completely Hershey [head of Selective Service] believed that in the atomic age
there was a need to keep potential scientists out of the line of fire -- a need
so pressing that it necessitated abandoning all previous American ideas about
who should bear the burden of service in wartime. Once a principle is
established, it quickly takes on the trappings of tradition, and also generates
a constituency -- in this case consisting of universities and the broad
upper-middle class from which most of their students came. That may help
explain why there was barely any controversy during the Vietnam War over the
deferment of college students and graduate students -- even though, unlike
1951, it was a time of dissent -- or later over the abolition of the draft in
favor of a voluntary military, which meant that for the college-going class
there would be no obligation to serve at all.”
The SAT can’t be measuring intelligence as a fixed
attribute of an individual because a student can take a class providing
guidance on how to do better on the test.
Does that mean the preparatory work raised the student’s
intelligence? Intelligence must then be
a variable which means a snapshot from a single test makes no sense. If noncognitive factors, such as advice on
test-taking strategies, can make a change in test score, then how can the test
itself be considered a measure of scholastic aptitude?
So now we have ended up in a situation where the SAT may
or may not measure intelligence, and it may or may not measure scholastic
aptitude, but if you want to get into an elite school you better spend your
life preparing to get a good grade on it.
Let us return to Lani Guinier. She admits that the initial interest in
testing had a decent social motive.
Harvard initially expressed interest in a test that would only be used
to identify promising students from less-wealthy environments who would be
eligible for scholarships that would allow them to flourish at Harvard and
enrich it as an institution.
“A battle that had begun with
idealistic rhetoric succumbed to a Trojan horse: the SAT and a budding
testocracy confirmed the existing order as inevitable, because the tests
demonstrated that the elite possessed unassailable merit.”
The SAT is known to be an imperfect tool for predicting
who will be the “best” college students, but it serves a more important
purpose. It provides the elite schools
cover to go after the students they really prefer: students from rich white
families. The elite universities such as
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are really large corporations with a business
model that demands income from wealthy alumni.
The best way to create wealthy alumni is to coddle the children of
wealthy people. These schools set the
standard and other schools must follow.
To repeat: the SAT is a tool used to propagate an
aristocracy and to establish a plutocracy.
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