The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy

by Nicholas Lemann

Book Overview

The widely acclaimed study of what's gone wrong in American higher education.

What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374527512
• ISBN13: 9780374527518
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Not what you think....

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.

Revealing

This book really is a secret history. The author is talking about a single test which has a huge impact on millions of people. The implications of the SAT are huge, but the reasoning behind it is something that is rarely mentioned explicitly. The author explains it all... It isn't that Lemann is simply against the SAT. This book isn't that polemical. We get the background of the test. The story of American education. I learned alot from that. I did not know that Yale limited the number of minorities and women up until the 60s. And that the children of alumni really were favored. You tend to think that things were always the way they are now ... And I also believed the testing service when they said that you can't cram for the SAT. Wrong.. And the discussion of affirmative action is right on target too. In a lot of ways people aren't given equal opportunities, and then when they are left behind the meritocracy says it is their fault...This book is very readable and thought provoking. The only thing I can say against it is like a previous poster, it is a little slow to start off with. But it picks up quickly enough, I thought.

To the Talents Belong the Spoils

The Big Test is not as I expected it to be, i.e. a profound expose of the Educational Testing Service and the unfairness of the SAT. It is however a revealing window into the process by which our elite universities have attempted to grapple with a self preserving desire to recruit the best and the brightest (and in private universities those most likely to provide alumni financial support) against a reality that their version of the best and the brightest (as measured by SAT scores) is not a sociologically neutral and colorblind polyglot of equally distributed talents. Perhaps the most profound element of Nicholas Lemann's book is the realization that intelligence is often far more than the simple ability to think and reason as tested by the SAT. While these characteristics are often those which ensure success in the academic world, there are other equally important skills which the elite academic world virtually ignores, e.g. artistic and creative ability, leadership, entrepreneurial spirit, people skills, and good old common sense (attributes far more common to the group which Mr. Lemann calls the Talents.)Nevertheless the distribution of the few positions available at the elite universities has become a battleground measured with far too much imprecision by the results of a single examination known as the SAT. Lemann notes that the distribution of these seats was formerly the "unfair" result of birth into wealthy and socially prominent families. Today, for the elite universities, the SAT has become virtually the sole measuring criteria in a search for those individuals whose academic talents and lifelong potential can certainly and surely be accurately and easily measured during a four hour examination on a Saturday morning in a pubescent display of intellectual gymnastics. Not!While the "Mandarin" class of liberal intellectual elite anoints itself with self importance and wrings its hands at the apparent unfairness of the SAT, it simultaneously makes certain its own children are fully prepared to excel on this examination. If there is a redeeming grace in all of this excess preoccupation with the SAT it is that ultimately the Talents (and not the Mandarins) prevail in American society. From this book it is clear that the SAT is not designed to ferret out and identify the Talents. Such an analysis is far too complicated for a number 2 pencil and a series of multiple choice questions.

Educators will enjoy this well-written social history

Shortly after World War II, a confluence of events resulted in the creation of the Educational Testing Service. James Conant Bryan, President of Harvard, wanted to extend the pool of students his university typically drew to the Midwest and other regions of the country. IBM perfected a machine that efficiently graded score sheets. Psychometrics matured under the war effort. Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean at Harvard, was given the opportunity to start a new organization that would handle entrance exams for the Ivy League. Various historical figures make cameo appearances in this well-written social history. It tells the story of the testing movement in America from its origins around World War I to the modern day. Most interesting is the description of events surrounding the genesis of the ETS. The more recent evolutions and convolutions of the story are not as interesting as the occasionally coincidental circumstances surrounding the birth of the ETS. Educators will enjoy reading this book to discover many things that are not well-known about the private organization whose influence, through the SAT and other tests, has become quite powerful in American life. Nicholas Lemann is a journalist and offers a perspective and style decidedly different than if this book had been written by one within the educational establishment.

From a reconstructed Mandarin

In "The Big Test" Lemann manages to nail down some of the feelings I've had about higher education ever since my days at an Ivy League University. The book has been erroneously sold as a critique of the SAT and ETS. It isn't. What it is a critique and history of the changing systems that we, as Americans, have used to transmit wealth and power form one generation to the next. While we are arguably the most socio-economically mobile society in the world, this historical constant remains; wealthy and powerful citizens usually have wealthy and powerful offspring. Lemann shows us how the old smarmy eastern prep school system was replaced by an ostensibly objective testing system that ETS dreamed would bring the best and brightest together at our top universities,. He displays and quietly rebukes the notion that we ought to be led by this grand class of intellects, selected at the nubile age of 18 by a testing device that looks almost exactly like an IQ test. He also shows those self same intellects to be rather pitifully deluded about their own importance. The secret part of the secret history that Lemann tells is how overt intergenerational replicaiton of social class was replaced by a testing regime that did very nearly the same thing, only under the guise of that all amercian merit and achievement. The secret is that the offically nonexistent upper class still functionally operates the way in did in the 20's. Whats more, he reveals this cautiously, telling us the history through case studies, yet pulling at nearly every important historical thread in the American tapestry. Only in the end does he draw his conclusions; a refreshing style in contrast the simplistic conclusion jumping that we absorb on the nightly news. The essence of the book is not given in its title, which has been taken as an invtitation to pigeonhole, but its subtitle: "The secret history of the American Meritocracy." That's really what the book is all about.