Stanley Kaplan

The people who created the SAT, back when the letters stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, thought they had made an exam that measured the pure capacity of students’ minds to absorb college material; the SAT was a direct descendant of early IQ tests. So imagine their surprise when one day in the 1950s, a Brooklyn, N.Y., high school principal arrived at the headquarters of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, N.J., bearing the news that a young man named Stanley Kaplan was operating a thriving little business out of his parents’ basement coaching students on how to raise their scores so they could get into better colleges.

It is beyond ironic that Kaplan, who died Aug. 23 at 90, became one of the central figures in the American meritocracy. The system was set up by reformers, but reformers from deep within the starchy education establishment. Kaplan, a dapper little man, the son of uneducated immigrants, was a complete outsider. He had gone into test prep only because he couldn’t get into medical school.

And although Kaplan and his business represented the single most potent argument against the SAT–namely, that the test was not a great equalizer but rather part of a system that could be gamed by people with money–Kaplan was the exam’s biggest fan. He depended on it economically–his company became enormously profitable after he sold it to the Washington Post in the 1980s–but more than that, he sincerely loved it. He thought it represented a doorway to opportunity that could be pried open through the application of a little money and willpower. That was something that hadn’t been available to him when he was young. One of the happiest days of his life came in 1983 when he was finally invited to the ETS as an honored guest.

Lemann is the author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy