Ask any group of college students what brought them to school in Vermont and their answers will likely range from “skiing” to the family Jeep. Few will flash back to a certain four-hour exam that measured their brain power on a scale of 0 to 800. Those who do recall that sweaty rite of academic passage are more inclined to associate it with a number-two pencil than one 90-year-old psychemetrician living in Vermont.
The guy behind the graphite is Henry Chauncey, the Harvard-educated football-playing founder of the organization that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test — along with the LSAT, GRE and countless other entrance exams. Last month, after a long career of multiple choices, Chauncey finally got some real publicity for his life’s work. He is the subject of a two-part article about the “sorting” of American society that appeared this month and last in The Atlantic Monthly. Writer Nicholas Lemann stumbled onto the story while pursuing questions unanswered by his own study of American “opportunity” — The Promised Land — about the northern migration of blacks from the rural South to the city of Chicago.
“The old American dream of anybody being able to rise to the top, wasn’t applied in the ghettos of Chicago,” says Chauncey, explaining how Lemann ended up in the archives of the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service. “Meanwhile in this country we are worshipping meritocracy, or selection of the best. How do you put these two things together?”
This conundrum — how to provide greater access to education with a systematic means of selection — is what started the national discussion about standardizing testing in the first place. And piqued the interest of young Chauncey, the son of an Episcopal minister, who transferred to Harvard as a psychology student after a year at Ohio State.
Getting into Harvard was no problem. Chauncey had gone to Groton, a prestigious boarding school, and the long essay tests administered to wannabe freshmen were specially designed for preps. But with the exception of a dozen Ivy League institutions, admissions testing was a thing of the future. Especially during the Depression, the primary entrance requirement was the ability to pay. Informal scholarships — like the one Chauncey received — were both competitive and insecure.
In 1933, under new leadership, Harvard instituted a bold new scholarship program. Newly graduated, civic-minded Chauncey was placed in charge of the head hunting. But he needed a more efficient means of assessing scholastic aptitude — “a uniform means of comparing students from all across the highly localized American education system,” as Lemann puts it, “an academic equivalent of the standard gauge that the railroad industry had adopted after the Civil War.”
By this time the first multiple-choice scholastic aptitude test had been invented and tested at Princeton — by Carl Brigham, author of the racist Study of American Intelligence, for which he later apologized. Chauncey used the test and liked it. So much that he convinced other elite colleges to adopt it as well. In 1937, he organized the first simultaneous testing experiment at 150 locations around the country.
Still, it took a war to get the country really organized scholastically. The first large-scale deferment program, which involved testing thousands of young men for the Navy, propelled Chauncey to leave Harvard and head up a company that would later become the Educational Testing Service. The second, instituted as part of the Selective Service Act of 1948, brought his new organization windfall profits — and the biggest public relations challenge of his career.
Measuring intelligence is tricky business. Complicated by war, it is downright dangerous. While Chauncey was interested in using tests to level the playing field, others, like Hitler, were using them to justify discrimination, sterilization and genocide. IQ tests in particular tend to rub Americans the wrong way — perhaps because they rule out self-improvement as a means to better their brain power. Confusing scholastic aptitude and intelligence quotient, draft deferment and exemption, many people were up in arms when President Truman signed an executive order in 1951 to protect “superior scientific, professional and specialized personnel from active service.” Even television journalist Edward R. Murrow criticized the policy for encouraging a caste system based on intellect: a country divided into GI Joes and IQ Joes.
With determination and diplomacy, Chauncey rose to the occasion. He spent months defending the SAT, which he insists to this day is not a measure of native intelligence but “developed ability.” Good scores, he explains, have as much to do with “prenatal care, family support and community” as innate ability. The field of testing is controversial — “you get used to wearing a hair shirt,” he says. But as acceptance of the test grew, so did efforts to make it a better measure of scholastic potential. Chauncey concedes there are cultural biases and that the test may be overemphasized.
Even more startling, he has never actually taken the test. “I left that to my children and grandchildren,” he jokes. And after nine decades and two marriages, Chauncey has lots of both.
His eldest daughter convinced Chauncey — still able-bodied and active — to move to Wake Robin. Two years ago, he left his 340-acre farm in northern Pennsylvania for a neat little apartment at the continuing-care retirement facility in Shelburne. The living room is scattered with books — on democracy, artificial intelligence, Newt Gingrich. Clearly, the 90-year-old pioneer of educational testing has no intention of retreating from the world.
Soon after he arrived in Vermont, Chauncey started up a friendly correspondence with then-Vermont Education Commissioner Richard Mills. Without identifying himself — he worried that his interest would be interpreted as an “intrusion” — he made inquiries about the Common Core of Learning program, commented on its content standards and made a pitch for the most controversial of his own educational ideas: interactive multi-media instruction that would supplement traditional classroom teaching. “The teacher becomes a guide, a motivator, a discussion leader,” he explains.
But when it comes to the big questions — about school choice, evaluation and funding — Chauncey is hard to pin down. A Puritan-descended liberal, he “leans against school choice because it is much better to improve the schools.” He finds the portfolio system of evaluation “a good thing” but difficult to grade. And he believes the federal government should be more involved in funding education. “I’m no Newt Gingrich,” he proclaims with a laugh.
The commissioner job? “Out of the question,” he guffaws. “That one should go to a much younger person.”
Between his books and his progeny, Chauncey still gets an earful on education. One son handles admissions at Roxbury Latin, another ran the Science Development Park in New Haven for six years. Last weekend his granddaughter in Vermont — a South Burlington grad — made her way down to Mount Holyoke for freshman orientation. She didn’t exactly ace the test her grandfather defended with his life. “But the school has a nice paragraph about how if a girl goes to a good school, does well and has good recommendations, they don’t necessarily look at the scores,” Chauncey explains. Even after a century of standardization, some things never change.
This article appears in Back to School • 1995.
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