Here are a few words I scribbled down for LinkedIn the other day, re: Stanley Kaplan’s autobiography.
The book is short and needlessly self-congratulatory, but I do recommend it to people who want to know how prep schools for standardized tests came into existence. Kaplan’s importance comes from his revolutionary idea that students could study for standardized tests like the SAT and MCAT… and that studying could lead to significantly higher scores. To the contemporary reader that sounds like common sense, but when Kaplan went into business in 1938 the College Board had already spent years claiming the opposite to be true. They maintained that stance for decades as Kaplan’s business continued to grow. Curiously, both parents and educators bought into it. I’m not quite sure why, and Kaplan’s biography isn’t scholarly enough to suggest a reason. The College Board (and ETS) only softened their position in 1978 (!!) following an FTC investigation into standardized testing.
It’s important to note here that Kaplan REALLY liked tests and sincerely believed that they were a valuable part of the university admissions process. He makes a pretty decent case for the argument that tests (especially in the 1940s and 50s) helped schools to identify students with the potential for greatness. This contrasts with his competitors over at The Princeton Review who seem to have loathed the tests they helped students cram for.
Speaking of Princeton Review, there is a heckuva lot in here about Kaplan’s feud with those folks. That seems to be a grudge he took all the way to the grave.
I admit that I flippantly use the phrase “Stanley Kaplan Syndrome” (coined by David Owen) to refer to test prep “experts” whose “yearning for legitimacy” gives them curious ideas about the value of their work beyond the test sitting. I may scale back my usage of that term as Kaplan seems to have been a pretty decent dude.
A final note. When I am rich and go on a tour of famous sites in the history of testing, I will certainly pop into the former headquarters of Kaplan in Midtown Manhattan (which is still used by Kaplan, probably because they sold off the air rights to their neighbors). But what I really want to do is find the location of the first Kaplan school. It was apparently somewhere near the King’s Highway Subway Station in New York. If anyone here has an address for it, please let me know. I can excerpt the pages in the book that describe it.
