Education: The Testmakers

In 94 towns and cities across the U.S. one day this week, hundreds of jittery boys and girls reported in at specified schools, sat down at the desks assigned to them, and waited for the clock to strike nine. For the next three hours they tackled questions for which none of them could have crammed. They matched pairs of words (POSSESS is to LOSE, as a) hesitate is to advance, b) cease is to recur, c) undertake is to perform, d) continue is to desist, e) produce is to supply); solved math problems and arranged given sentences into intelligible paragraphs (“a) Since his day it has undergone change, b) President James Monroe announced it in 1823. c) Its primary purpose, security for the Republic, has, however, remained the same, d) The Monroe Doctrine, one of the most famous statements of American foreign policy, has been in effect for more than a century”). Then, after an afternoon of hour-long objective tests in special subjects, the students’ papers were collected and sent off to be scored. The scores will in part answer a fateful question: Which of the boys and girls will get into college?

Hard to Escape. The organization that helps answer that question is Princeton’s Educational Testing Service (no kin to Princeton University), which in eight years has become an extraordinary power in U.S. education. It began when three separate groups—the College Entrance Examination Board, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the American Council on Education—decided that one central agency should take over the overlapping testing activities all three were carrying on. Under President Henry Chauncey, 51, onetime assistant dean of freshmen at Harvard, the E.T.S. soon expanded far beyond the college boards. Financed by student fees, test sales and foundation grants, it now handles about 2,000,000 tests a year, coordinates the scholarship activities of more than 100 colleges and universities.

Today, scarcely a student in the whole country can get through his education without having his destiny in some way shaped by the E.T.S.

Because of its size and power, the service has inevitably stirred up controversy. For one thing, some educators deplored the passing of the old essay question (“Discuss the consequences of the Dred Scott decision”) in favor of the objective type (“The chief justice in the Dred Scott Case was: 1. John C. Calhoun. 2. Roger B. Taney. 3. William Lloyd Garrison,4. Salmon P. Chase, 5. Stephen A. Douglas”). The new tests, said the critics, might be able to determine a student’s superficial knowledge of a subject, but they gave no indication of whether he could think or organize his material. The critics admitted that the objective questions were economical and easy to mark, that by eliminating the necessity for individual readers, they did away with many injustices. But still, the problem remained: Would not the new tests also do away with the more important and intangible values in education?

Beyond Facts. No one is more aware of that problem than Henry Chauncey and his 90 experts. Though the E.T.S. does make up essay examinations, Chauncey feels that in such a huge undertaking as the college boards, for instance, the objective question not only covers more ground but can be fully as searching as the essay. Before devising each test, the E.T.S. staff holds long conferences with teachers, professors and experts on the subjects in question. They draw up lists of possible problems, test them out on guinea-pig students, gradually weed out those that are too easy, too confusing, or irrelevant. But in all its tests, the effort of the E.T.S. is to get beyond mere factual knowledge.

In answering the question: “The lasting significance of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 lies in its provision for a) an Indian policy, b) universal manhood suffrage, c) the exclusion of the British from the Northwest territory, d) the settlement of the Northwest territory, and e) a method for admitting new states into the Union,” a student must know more than the bare provisions of the ordinance.

He must take into account that the ordinance’s Indian policy never became permanent, that universal manhood suffrage came much later than 1787, that the British question was settled before the ordinance, and that the settlement of the Northwest territory was of much less “lasting significance” than the method of admitting states into the Union.

In picking out two lines of poetry similar in some way other than in meaning (a) With jellies smoother than the creamy curd, b) When I consider how my light is spent, c) When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw), a student must show a high degree of literary perception. Each line has ten syllables, and each is in iambic pentameter. But only b makes little attempt to convey meaning through the sound of the words used.

Who’s an Engineer? With a $4,000,000 budget, the E.T.S. has made up testsfor law and medical schools, the armed-services academies, for the Knights of Columbus,the American Board of Surgery and the National Science Foundation. It is now trying to find ways to predict what sort of person will make a good salesman, a good minister or an engineer. It has brought new order to the nation’s various scholarship programs, and to a large extent, it has eliminated the advantages that the private secondary schools once had in preparing for the old. more predictable college boards.

But having found an economical way of testing whole masses of students, has it sacrificed the individual to a bunch of IBM machines? That, says President Chauncey, is something the colleges and graduate schools must remedy themselves. “It is,” says he, “interesting that when colleges first use our tests, almost without exception, they place too much faith in them. We emphatically discourage such dependence. There is no more a right way or wrong way for all colleges to choose their students than there is for all men to choose their wives.”