The Big Test

Dates Covered: 1950 - 2000
ISBN: 0374299846
HH Rating:

Our Take

Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test purports to be a history of the SAT, a standardized test given to students applying to American universities. While he provides a decent start and a fair peek into the minds of the test's creators, according to the book's own index, mentions it 5 times in the book's last 150 pages. Indeed, after the first third of the book, Lemann appears to drop the subject entirely and goes on a literary walkabout. Before doing so, he maintains an even keel over the meritocratic waters of the American university system, starting first with SAT creator Henry Chauncey and investigating the creation of the University of California academic system, all the while praising, or at least noting, the varied goals that those involved held. His journalistic style reads more like that of a fiction writers', yet his personal interviews and access to some of the more salient records lend confidence to the material.

Unfortunately, it is after his description of the University of California system that he stumbles into the quagmire. He spends the middle third of the book describing future crusaders for affirmative action in California itself. The prose in these sections thunks dully:

Molly was entering her thirties and she wanted to start a family. In the early 1980s, she and Steve had two sons, nineteen months apart, Nick and Alfred, and bought a house in Pasadena.

Moreover, he spends a lot of time describing a system that clearly displeases him, yet doesn't seem to offer any solutions, despite berating the Supreme Court for being unable to do so, either. As a white Marco DeFunis sues the University of Washington for admitting minorities with less impressive test scores than his in 1973, the Court weighed affirmative action against good test-takers:

Did the Supreme Court, confronted with this direct, long-building, historic conflict between black progress and meritocracy-by-testing, find its way to an intellectual breakthrough that would resolve the conflict? It did not. The justices may have been intelligent, but they weren't, perhaps, wise enough to accomplish that. Instead they became confused.

Does Lemann offer a way out of this pickle, after patronizing that august body so? He does not. Instead, he offers a fictional utopia in the afterward.

Lemann does do a decent job examining the idea of a meritocratic society. Several of the chief characters in the early parts of the book express fascinating ideas about a society that might base its leaders on achievement and the intent to serve, to the point of implementing 100% inheritance taxes to level the playing field. Interestingly, these folks considered such equality democratic even when it smelled a little like something else. There are some fascinating people hiding in the first third of this book: it just looks like Lemann got lost on the way back from the market.

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