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"Strivers," Lemann says, "makes too explicit what colleges do. There are things you can do in a subtle way that you can't do in an open, numerical way. It's like, if a guy goes up to a woman in a bar and says, 'What's your sign?' -- vs. a guy who goes up to the same woman and says, 'I want to have sex with you.' Some things are better done in a subtle way."

But such subtleties are beyond the means of large state schools, which purportedly cannot afford a large admissions staff to peruse each applicant's portfolio; instead, many of these schools now screen applicants with a numerical formula based on test scores and GPAs. Critics of standardized tests charge that these schools don't have their priorities straight -- and that a newfangled test can't make up for looking closely at individual applications, despite the expense. "Can they afford fat coaching contracts and big sports stadiums?" challenges Bob Schaeffer, the public education director of Fair Test, a standardized testing watchdog group.

Schaeffer thinks that the existence of the Strivers research opened the SAT to yet more criticism of unfairness. "ETS is gun-shy when anything suggests their test is not a flawless product," he says.

When confronted about the status of the Strivers program,, a spokesman for ETS ducked the question, saying that he believed the research was proceeding, but reiterating that ETS has "no plans to utilize it. There is no product."

Meanwhile, admissions offices in public universities in Texas, California and Washington are struggling to diversify their student bodies while obeying affirmative action bans. Since black and Hispanic students score an average of 100 to 200 points lower on the SATs than whites and Asians, Texas schools are maintaining diversity by automatically admitting students in the top 10 percent of their high school class. A similar tactic has been adopted at the University of California, which accepts seniors in the top 4 percent of their classes. Although it's a remote possibility, it is conceivable that powerful states such as California could someday drop the SAT all together. And that, says one industry observer, "would be a bad day for ETS."

Predictably, those who suffer the most from debilitated affirmative action laws and biased tests are the students themselves. Test and application fees are already burdensome to many families; costly preparation classes are out of the question. Furthermore, child psychiatrists theorize that impoverished minority kids realize by the third grade that they are being marginalized. Without exceptional parenting, these children are unlikely to jump faithfully into the waters of a mainstream education -- and standardized tests presume the takers are already capable swimmers. Anthony Carnevale, the ETS vice president who headed the Strivers project, told the Wall Street Journal that "a combined score of 1,000 on the SATs is not always a 1,000 ... [The Strivers program] is a way of measuring not just where students are, but how far they've come."

Perhaps it was this blatant admission that standardized tests are millions of Scantron bubbles away from being true gauges of potential academic ability that forced ETS to disavow its Strivers research. According to Winton Manning -- a former senior official at ETS who worked on a project strikingly similar to Strivers in 1990 and who was hired by the first president of ETS, Henry Chauncey -- "ETS still is carrying verbal and mathematical testing begun in 1934 or '36. I think that's a tragedy."
salon.com | Oct. 18, 1999

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