As if College entrance exams weren't already stressful enough for high school students, one theory says that your single SAT score may largely determine where you end up in life -- how much you get paid, whom you work for and who listens to your opinions.
"The SAT is the personnel office of American life. It's the thing that determines where you end up in life," Nick Lemann said.
Lemann, journalist and author of the "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy," -- a chronicle of the creation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and its effects on American society -- said he "wasn't that interested in the SAT per se," when he initially began researching his latest book.
"I was interested in the question of : is there a system in the United States that determines who winds up where? If there is one, let's take a look at it and identify it precisely, figure out where it came from, who invented it, [and] what they thought they were doing," Lemann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, told The Dartmouth yesterday.
This system, Lemann found, is largely based on the SAT.
Those who perform well on the SAT in high school, Lemann explained, go on to attend prestigious colleges and universities. After receiving their bachelor's degrees, many of these students embark on careers in the private, rather than the public sector, of American life.
This was not the original intent of the test's founders, according to Lemann.
The SAT, invented by Princeton University professor Carl Brigham in 1926, was based on an intelligence test administered to American soldiers during World War I.
In 1933, Harvard University employed the exam -- which is partly based on tests measuring intelligence quotients -- in order to select students for a small scholarship program sponsored by the university. Several years later, the rest of the Ivies followed suit.
By 1941, the SAT grew in significance to become the primary examination used by American colleges in determining student acceptances.
The organization responsible for the widespread adoption of the exam, according to Lemann, was the Educational Testing Service.
"The significance of the ETS is that it's a private organization that was set up to be a kind of monopoly in the realm of tests for admissions into colleges and graduate schools," Lemann said.
In the mid-twentieth century, the first president of ETS, Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean at Harvard College, and James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, had a vision -- they expected that the SAT would "generate a leadership in the country with very high academic skills to run a slightly different type of America," Lemann said.
Conant assumed that after attending the nation's highest quality colleges, top scorers on the SAT would continue their educations at graduate schools and then go on to attain positions of leadership in the fields of science and government.
According to Lemann, Conant and his colleagues believed that the United States was heading the way of European countries such as Sweden in enlarging the size and scope of its government, thereby making the public sector an attractive place to work.
Instead, Lemann found that many students at the nation's top colleges, such as Dartmouth, find themselves working in the business sector, rather than its public counterpart, following graduation.
"I would guess it seems less enthralling to devote your life to government and public service when you've grown up in a country where everyone hates government," Lemann said.
Lemann contended that Conant and Chauncey did succeed in their attempt to create an intellectual elite, but added that this elite is a group of business advisors rather than civic leaders.
Furthermore, those who are not members of this elite class do not look to the intellectual elite for leadership, as Conant and Chauncey initially expected, according to Lemann.
"I think most people feel like, 'We have elections in this country and I don't want to be led by people from Dartmouth,'" he said, citing the College as one of the breeding grounds of the new intellectually elite class.
Although Lemann praised the current system revolving around the SAT for its ability to identify students with high academic talent and ensuring that they receive good educations, he claimed that the dependence on the exam has stymied improvements in public education.
"It takes pressures off the project of reforming high schools, making high school educations better, by giving colleges a way to cherry-pick students out of high schools without taking responsibility for the quality of the school system," he said.
In general, Lemann believes that some people benefit more from the SAT then others.
"If you are the kind of person who, for a variety of reasons, has your act together when you're a junior in such a way in that you can present yourself to a college as someone who would do very, very well in college America works for you," he said. "If you're not that person, America works less well for you."
