Nicholas Lemann ’76, dean of the Columbia Journalism School from 2003 to 2013 (“The Press Professor,” September-October 2005, page 78), has, among other works, written the definitive history of standardized testing, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999). A succinct new work, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing (Princeton, $22.95), puts the SAT and ACT and their use in a different perspective. If the ubiquity of standardized tests has come under challenge, he writes, “that isn’t a sign that the country has ‘turned against meritocracy,’ but that the tests, rather than representing an opposing force to the existing class system, by now, on the whole, reinforce it.” From chapter five, “Testing without Meritocracy”:
[T]he question of who should get the slots in highly selective colleges and universities…is not the primary issue in American higher education, especially from the point of view of enhancing democracy and opportunity.…Only about 1 percent of American undergraduates attend the 25 or so colleges that accept fewer than 10 percent of their applicants. Only 3 percent attend the 50 or so colleges that accept fewer than 25 percent of their applicants.….
The most obvious problem in American higher education today is…its failure to produce a more widely successful experience for most students. Only about 40 percent of entering students get a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only about 60 percent in six years.…[T]he current low degree completion rate is a glaring gap in the American opportunity structure, and bringing it higher ought to be an urgent national priority.
The Evolution of Standardized Testing
The United States made an idealistic bet on universal elementary education in the nineteenth century, and a similar bet on universal high school education in the early twentieth century, and a similar bet on universal higher education in the late twentieth century.… Today…our progress in this long-running project of demonstrating a commitment to ordinary people’s potential has stalled, because the massive higher education system we have built is not delivering the results it should for so many of its students.…What would most enhance opportunity for most Americans would be a successful passage through [public sector] institutions.
Could testing serve as an aid in that project? Yes, potentially, if it were testing of a different kind from what we have become accustomed to over all these years. The system of higher education testing built around the SAT and similar tests—aptitude tests aimed at selection—was not designed with the primary aim of distributing educational opportunity widely.…
The SAT…was designed to help elite colleges select a small handful of students.…It wound up having a far broader effect, because of its use by many more colleges and universities than the original group, and because of its large impact on the high school experience of millions of students who don’t go to highly selective colleges, in addition to the thousands who will. If, today, we define the problem…as improving the too-low graduation rates and…the student learning experience at a large number of relatively unselective universities, we would be drawn to diagnostic rather than predictive tests, to achievement rather than aptitude tests, and to criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced tests. And these…would have to go along with larger structural changes: a much greater emphasis on teaching and advising in higher education, and a strengthening of the curriculum in high school. This ought to be a national project on the scale of the project that brought us the current higher education admissions system, or on an even grander scale.
