false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg 49202 2 Nicholas Lemann's <I>The Big Test</I> starts off as a look at how the SAT became an integral part of the college application process by telling the stories of men like Henry Chauncey and James Bryant Conant of Harvard University, who sought in the 1930s and '40s to expand their student base beyond the offspring of Brahmin alumni. When they went into the public schools of the Midwest to recruit, standardized testing gave them the means to select which lucky students would be deemed most suitable for an Ivy League education. But about a third of the way through the book, Lemann shifts gears and writes about several college students from the late '60s and early '70s. The reasons for the change-up only become clear in the final third, when those same college students, now in their 40s, lead the fight against California's Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative aimed at eliminating affirmative action programs.<p> Do these two stories really belong together? For all his storytelling abilities--and they are prodigious--Lemann is not entirely persuasive on this point, especially when he identifies the crucial moment in the civil rights era when "affirmative action evolved as a low-cost patch solution to the enormous problem of improving the lot of American Negroes, who had an ongoing, long-standing tradition of deeply inferior education; at the same time American society was changing so as to make educational performance the basis for individual advancement." Lemann's muddled transition is somewhat obscured by frequent digressions (every new character gets a lengthy background introduction), but a crucial point gets lost in the shuffle, only to reappear fleetingly at the conclusion: "The right fight to be in was the fight to make sure that everybody got a good education," Lemann writes, not to continue to prop up a system that creates one set of standards for privileged students and another set for the less privileged. If <I>The Big Test</I> had focused on that issue, where equal opportunity is genuinely at stake, instead of on the roots of standardized testing, where opportunity was explicitly intended only for a chosen few, it would be a substantially different book--one with a story that almost assuredly could be told as engrossingly as the story Lemann chose to tell, but perhaps with a sharper focus. <I>--Ron Hogan</I> 48130 1999 The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy total:64|5:20|4:26|3:16|2:2|1:0| 64 256 114 8 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 5 0 false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 27 19:17:53 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 27 19:59:46 -0700 2008 ...more...]]> 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 3 0 false Sat Jul 21 23:35:39 -0700 2007 Sat Jul 21 23:40:55 -0700 2007
1) I was interested to learn how we as a nation talked ourselves into using the SATs and ACTs as the prim...more...]]> 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Thu Aug 20 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 25 07:17:27 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 25 07:24:51 -0700 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Fri Feb 22 22:22:51 -0800 2008 Sat Jul 12 20:21:14 -0700 2008 more...]]> 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2003 Sat Nov 24 15:28:48 -0800 2007 Sat Nov 24 15:34:23 -0800 2007 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 5 0 false Tue Jan 06 18:30:25 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 06 20:50:18 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 3 0 false Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2000 Sat Sep 15 19:04:50 -0700 2007 Tue Sep 18 21:07:49 -0700 2007
I highlight fascinating, and not exciting in any visceral sense. Then again, it is about the SAT isn't it???]]> 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Sun Jul 20 10:44:26 -0700 2008 Sun Jul 20 10:47:12 -0700 2008
]]> 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 5 0 false Tue Dec 15 07:53:53 -0800 2009 Tue Dec 15 07:53:53 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Mon Dec 14 10:05:30 -0800 2009 Mon Dec 14 10:05:30 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Sun Dec 06 17:28:16 -0800 2009 Sun Dec 06 17:28:16 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Fri Dec 04 14:06:35 -0800 2009 Fri Dec 04 14:06:35 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 5 0 false Wed Dec 02 21:16:44 -0800 2009 Wed Dec 02 21:16:44 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Tue Dec 01 21:47:59 -0800 2009 Tue Dec 01 21:47:59 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Sun Nov 29 11:00:55 -0800 2009 Sun Nov 29 11:00:55 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Sat Nov 28 16:29:14 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 28 16:29:14 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Sun Nov 08 19:01:04 -0800 2009 Sun Nov 08 19:01:04 -0800 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 4 0 false Thu Oct 22 07:29:41 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 22 07:29:41 -0700 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Tue Oct 06 02:32:51 -0700 2009 Tue Oct 06 02:32:51 -0700 2009 49202 0374527512 9780374527518 60 8 4.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358001m/49202.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49202.The_Big_Test_The_Secret_History_of_the_American_Meritocracy 0 0 false Sat Oct 03 06:09:46 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 03 06:09:46 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=49202