A Moral Test

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $27.)

When Henry Chauncey became the first president of the fledgling Educational Testing Service in 1948, he had a grand vision: He wanted to develop a series of multiple-choice tests, what he called a "Census of Abilities," that would sort, categorize, and route every American for his or her appropriate station in life.

The project proved too ambitious—some would say mad—to carry out. But Chauncey—as author Lemann demonstrates in this magisterial work of biography, history, and sociology—managed to create something that would become almost as influential: the Scholastic Assessment Test. Although it took a decade or so to sell colleges and universities on the SAT, by 1960 it was fast becoming what Chauncey called "the human equivalent of the railroad standard gauge." Just as our uniform railway system delivered goods to their destinations, so the SAT funneled young people to the appropriate institutions of higher education.

From today’s perspective, it seems slightly perverse that a multiple-choice test should determine the future of 17-year-olds. But in postwar America, when the SAT was in its ascendancy, everyone from army generals to university presidents wanted an efficient system of identifying bright kids from ordinary backgrounds who, with the proper education, could perform noble tasks like designing rocket ships or freeway systems. James Conant, president of Harvard at the time, believed this kind of testing could promote the formation of a "natural aristocracy." Bright students from places like Iowa would have the same education and career opportunities as those...