High Scorer

By Richard Lacayo

The Scholastic Assessment Test is like the riddle of the Sphinx, an ordeal by questions that can make further progress on the road of life very iffy. Right answers put you on your way to Prestige U. The wrong ones could give you a lifelong personal stake in the debate over the minimum wage. In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 406 pages; $27), Nicholas Lemann describes the rise to power of the SAT and the keepers of its flame at the Educational Testing Service. Lemann is especially good at describing the "quiet coup d'etat" that the SAT accomplished in the 1950s and '60s, when it booted the Wasp elite by substituting classroom skills for the old-boy network as the key to college admission.

But in a nation where blacks were shut out of decent schooling for generations, the SAT ran straight into the complications of race. The second half of Lemann's book is largely the story of how the arguments for affirmative action collided with the presumptions of the meritocracy. What to do? Abandon the idea of an elite created by the universities, says Lemann, though he doesn't altogether define what should take its place. All the same, he's right when he describes the predicament of the ETS: "an institution in charge of individual opportunity" in a country where opportunity is "the thing that every single person is supposed to have as a fundamental right." Which is why, as his book adroitly shows, even if the SAT doesn't work perfectly as a scientific instrument, it works for sure as a lightning rod.

--By Richard Lacayo