I finally found time to read Nicholas Lemann’s “Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline and Return of Standardized Testing.” This follow-up to Lemann’s own “The Big Test” is a slim pamphlet of a thing, but still very worthwhile.
I greatly appreciated the introduction, written by Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor. Like Lemman, Lewis and Cantor express considerable skepticism about the value of standardized testing. Of the book at hand, they note:
“This book, and the series of which it is a part, assumes that talent is distributed across the nation and world but access to opportunity is not. It invites the reader to understand the history of standardized testing and the creation of a testing industry that began with hopes of expanding opportunity and democratizing access at elite colleges, and it shows how, rather than shattering class privileges, the exams reinforced the relation between doing well on the tests and coming from families and neighborhoods with considerable resources. At its core the book asks us to think deeply about what is meant by merit. Can one test, taken over a few hours, tell us all we need to know about a potential candidate? It also cautions us that finding suitable alternatives to tests that have been validated over decades may take more than a minute. As important, it invites us to probe our commitment to equal opportunity in the United States by asking, what is the purpose of access to education?”
Unmentioned in the introduction is that Earl Lewis has been chair of the board of trustees of the Educational Testing Service since sometime last year. Knowledge that the fellow running the ETS board is seemingly a test skeptic may help clear things up for industry watchers who have been somewhat puzzled by the moves ETS has made in recent years. Indeed, ETS’s less-than-stellar Glassdoor page seems to be full of reviews written by former staffers wondering what the board is thinking.
I don’t mean the above to be a dig at ETS, of course. I share Dr. Lewis’s concerns about the use of tests in admissions. Go ahead and get rid of them all, I say. And I think that the recently articulated mission statement of ETS – to “rebuild the pillars” of education hand in hand with the Carnegie Foundation – is very exciting (if a bit quixotic).
But, with that said, if one were to subtract contemporary standardized testing from the ETS, there wouldn’t be much of anything left over there. As some will recall, the recent cessation of ETS’s 70-year involvement in the development and administration of the SAT contributed to the need for significant downsizing earlier this year.
