TESTING

S.A.T.s Under Fire

With the snows of winter comes a traumatic experience for 1,400,000 of the nation's preparatory and high school students: they must suffer through the three-hour Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Much of the agony stems from the exaggerated belief of many students that their S.A.T. scores will determine whether they get into the college of their choice--or even any college at all. For the most part, the pain is pointless. A number of educators now contends that the tests are an imprecise indicator of future success--and colleges are relying on them less and less in picking their freshman classes.

One of the most outspoken critics of the S.A.T.s is Social Critic Martin L. Gross, a lecturer at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, who began his crusade against testing in 1962 with a book called The Brain Watchers. He calls S.A.T.s "the nail in the coffin of American intellectualism," since their emphasis on "certainty and right answers" makes test-taking ability "the criterion for college performance, and measures it badly." Gross and other critics deplore the pressure on students to score well on the tests. Many schools prep their students on the kind of vocabulary and mathematical skills tested by the exams; high school principals, as well as college publicists, tend to brag about high-average S.A.T. scores as badges of success.*

No Guarantee. Doubts about the S.A.T.s are shared by many university admissions officers. Yale's Admissions Dean R. Inslee Clark Jr. is not impressed by "multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests" as indices of a student's capability. The test scores, agrees Amherst Admissions Dean Eugene Wilson, "do not guarantee the presence of those human qualities and intellectual abilities we value most." Yale's Clark, as well as many Negro educators, feels that the tests' subtle orientation toward white middle-class values loads them against Negroes and other culturally deprived youths.

Actually, no one is more aware of the limitations of the S.A.T.s than the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., which produces and administers the tests, along with achievement exams in such specific fields as history and French, for the 782 colleges and universities that belong to the College Entrance Examination Board. Officials of E.T.S. continually warn colleges that the two S.A.T. exams (verbal and mathematical, scored from 0 to 800) are blunt rather than surgical instruments, and should not be used as the main standard in selecting students. Even E.T.S. officials rate high school grades as a better indication of how a student will perform in college.

At the same time, the E.T.S. examiners insist that their tests do serve a valid academic function. Since grading standards vary enormously among the nation's 24,000 secondary schools, the S.A.T.s at the very least provide admissions officers with a national common denominator in helping judge the thousands of applications they get every year. A high scorer from a small, little-known school is thus given greater consideration than he might have received from his class record alone. By the same token, the underachiever --the bright youth with poor high school grades--is often spotlighted by the tests, given a second chance to prove himself.

Fair Yardstick. The charge of bias on the S.A.T.s is an old one. Since they were instituted in 1926, educators have variously accused E.T.S. of loading them against girls, rural youths, and most of the country outside the Northeast; the Testing Service, in fact, spends about $500,000 a year on research to improve the exams. Although Negro students do less well on the S.A.T.s, College Board Official W. H. Manning argues that this merely "reveals the extent to which the disadvantaged person is cheated in his education." Any cultural bias in the exams, the testers add, reflects the fact that college instruction and grading are also biased in favor of students with a middleclass style of verbal ability. Sociologist David A. Goslin of the Russell Sage Foundation argues that reliance on vocabulary skills should not be considered an evil in itself. "If facility with the English language is necessary for success in our society," he says, "then a test of verbal ability in English is not an unfair yardstick."

Most U.S. colleges use the S.A.T.s with considerable sophistication and plead with both parents and students not to regard a low score as a guarantee that an application will be rejected. "If we get a boy out of a Harlem slum who scores 490," explains Harvard Admissions Dean Chase Peterson, "we know that compares to the 610 scored by a boy out of Newton." In general, colleges tend to rely much more heavily on high school records, recommendations of teachers and alumni associations, and personal interviews. Schools are far more interested in such traits as motivation, curiosity, self-discipline and creativity than in a student's ability to score well on S.A.T.s. So far, there is no test that can prove the possession of such intangible qualities--although E.T.S. is now trying to provide one.

PROFESSORS

The Man Who Invented Napalm Dr. Louis Fieser, 68, is one of the nation's most distinguished chemists. A professor emeritus at Harvard, he has won a number of national awards for his research into the chemical causes of cancer, and was a member of the U.S. Surgeon General's committee that issued the 1964 report linking cigarette smoke with the disease. Fieser was also a pioneer in developing laboratory production of vitamin K, the body's blood-clotting agent, and antimalarial drugs. Despite these impressive credentials of service to mankind, he has lately received a number of angry letters. Reason: back in 1943, Fieser invented napalm.

The discovery was something of a coup for Fieser. His research team at Harvard beat chemists from Du Pont and Standard Oil in a Government competition to develop napalm. In the course of his research, Fieser found a perfectly good civilian use for the product: it made a fine crabgrass killer, burning away its seeds while leaving good grass roots untouched. During and after World War II, he received several letters of thanks for his invention, which soldiers claimed saves thousands of American lives in battle. No one ever complained to him about the use of napalm until Viet Nam.

Unlike some of the physicists who helped produce the atomic bomb, Fieser has no moral qualms about his role in producing one of modern warfare's most fearful weapons: "I have no right to judge the morality of napalm just because I invented it." Nor does he blame the Dow Chemical Co. for manufacturing napalm: "If the Government asked them to take a contract, and they're the best ones in a position to do so, then they're obliged to do it."

As a scientist, Fieser refuses to engage in debate on the Viet Nam war, on the ground that "I don't know enough about the situation." A researcher, he insists, cannot be responsible for how other people use his inventions. "You don't know what's coming," he says. "I was working on a technical problem that was considered pressing. I'd do it again, if called upon, in defense of the country."

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Scholae Latinae Bostoniensis Vita Aeterna Sit!

For more than three centuries, the Boston Latin School ranked with the very best American secondary schools --standing almost without peer among public schools. With an equal reverence for strict discipline and classical learning, Boston Latin could claim at least some part in the later success of a line of "old boys" that stretched all the way from Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein. But after World War II, as the city school system deteriorated, Boston Latin went into a sharp decline, and for a while seemed destined to become just another inept high school. Now, in a striking recovery, it once again ranks among the nation's best--largely because of a return to the fine old academic values it began with in 1635.

Worried by overcrowding, low admission standards and lax discipline, a group of alumni in 1961 persuaded the Boston school committee to institute competitive entrance exams and to transfer elsewhere students who flunk a subject two years in a row. The real rejuvenation started only with the appointment three years ago of Headmaster Wilfred O'Leary, an unashamed autocrat with a classics degree from Boston College who cracks heads as easily as he conjugates Latin verbs.

Instruct & Reprimand. Apprised of his tough ways as principal of Roslindale High, six teachers asked out even before he arrived. Since then, the new headmaster has got rid of 23 more. "You instruct, inspect, reprimand and relieve from duty," explains O'Leary, whose World War II stint as an Air Force colonel has given him a fondness for military metaphor. "A good school needs administration, perspicacity and guts."

There is no shortage of administrative fortitude now, and O'Leary plunges through the Byzantine web of bureaucracy as if it were not there at all. He encourages promising teachers to take the city's qualifying exam--then snatches them before any other principal even knows of their existence. "A good scholar is not necessarily a good teacher," he says. "A teacher must love boys first. Then he must have a good background in methodology and in his discipline." A good teacher, he might add, does not have to be a man; O'Leary has broken 332 years of Boston Latin's all-male tradition with the appointment of four women teachers.

More like a prep school than the average public high, Boston Latin has a number of programs not found anywhere else in the city system. There are eight advanced courses--equivalent to freshman-level work in college--in subjects ranging from chemistry to German. Boston Latin has also preserved much of its proud classical past. There are six classes in Greek, including a tough honors course conducted by ex-Fulbright Scholar Joseph Desmond. Nearly everyone takes five years of Latin (Boston Latin encompasses the seventh and eighth grades plus high school), and one of the top academic prizes is for the ancient, neglected art of public declamation.

Every March, 2,500 boys from Boston grammar schools are chosen to take Latin's entrance tests; only the top 550 or so are picked, and 20% of them now come from poor backgrounds. O'Leary makes no apologies for the "middleclass values" his school seeks to give them. "That's what made America," he says. "The Protestant-ethic. You can't improve upon it." Coat and tie are mandatory dress ("Good dress is related to good spirit, and besides, who wants to dress like a bum?"), and at least three hours' homework is required every night. Not surprisingly, the attrition rate is steep: 60% of those who enter fail to graduate.

Frills & Eyewash. Not all educators agree with O'Leary's aims or his drillmaster methods. "Education has to be a two-way street," says one critic, "and I doubt that it is at Boston Latin." Others complain that Boston Latin's curriculum is hopelessly outdated and irrelevant, and that its methodology and discipline are straight from the 17th century. O'Leary, in turn, chides some of the more permissive, student-oriented schools in the suburbs for teaching "eye-wash," "frills" and "too many purposeless programs."

With a staff and curriculum of his choosing and the highest admission standards in the city, O'Leary's main concern now is capital. Despite its glittering reputation, Boston Latin receives no more money per student than any other city school. The headmaster's proposed solution: a private endowment of $4,000,000 to supplement city funds. To achieve that would cap the career of a supremely confident and happy man. "I am one of those rare people who have achieved their life ambition," says O'Leary. "There is nothing I would rather have as my epitaph than 'Headmaster of Boston Latin School.' "

*Some representative mean scores of this year's freshmen on the verbal half of the exam: Bryn Mawr, 703; Vassar, 659; Princeton, 655; Johns Hopkins, 640.

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