The End of Meritocracy

Hell has frozen over.

The proof? The College Board, maker of the SAT, have dropped the analogies from their most fabled exam. Starting in 2005, students studying for the test will no longer be forced to ponder whether bark is to dog as drone is to professor. The portion of the test that gave nightmares to everyone I knew when I was applying to college has finally died what many in academia consider a deserved death.

The death of the analogy section is not the only change that will greet the crop of students who take the SAT in 2005. The test will also feature an essay component that will attempt to measure students' writing abilities.

Taken together, these changes mark a further development of trends the College Board initiated in 1994, when the Scholastic Aptitude Test formally became the Scholastic Assessment Test. In changing the test's name, the College Board formally admitted that the test does not measure aptitude--that is, innate intelligence--but rather scholastic achievement.

The change of the SAT from a glorified IQ test to a test of scholastic achievement has been praised by many. But the more recent changes to the SAT also spell the death of an idea once enshrined in American education: the notion that educational testing could lead to meritocracy.

Although the SAT has come under criticism for underrepresenting the scholastic achievement of women and minorities, when the test was first introduced in 1926, it was seen as a measure to make access to education more egalitarian than it had been. Backers of intelligence testing in education such as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, hoped the test would give a better chance at higher education to people outside the East Coast WASP elite. By instituting an intelligence test rather than a test of scholastic achievement, Conant and other reformers hoped to bring to the hallowed halls of Harvard bright students who, because of circumstances of birth, had never received the formal liberal arts training bestowed by the feeder schools from which Harvard and other elite universities drew their students.

While the SAT in its present form is clearly unacceptable as part of the college admissions process--it does a wholly inadequate job of measuring either aptitude or scholastic achievement--it is not clear that an assessment test, such as the Advanced Placement tests or the revamped SAT, will be an adequate substitute. Assessment tests will hurt bright students from impoverished school districts that cannot afford to offer AP classes. No adequate test exists that can do what the SAT was originally meant to do--that is, determine a student's capacity to handle intellectual challenges regardless of prior schooling.

While the AP and International Baccalaureate programs attempt to solve the problems of college admissions officers by standardizing school curricula, these programs are not sufficiently standardized to create a true opportunity for meritocracy, even among those schools that have adopted them. This is particularly true in the humanities. Students studying for the English or history AP tests may cover similar subjects or themes but do not necessarily read the same material. Questions on the English Language and English Literature APs must be extremely vague to take into account the fact that students have not read the same books.

The lack of a standardized curriculum for the humanities AP, IB, and SAT II tests is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. The culture wars of the last 30 years have left educators wary of any attempt to impose a standardized curriculum. Such attempts will only generate enormous criticism that a standardized curriculum will limit students' exposure to diverse curricula and their ability to develop diverse viewpoints about issues in the humanities.
Without a standardized school curriculum, college placement tests, and thus colleges, will no longer be able to serve the dream of meritocracy. Raw human intelligence has proven impossible to measure; assessments of achievement cannot produce a true meritocracy if not all students who have merit have an equal chance to achieve. As much as we might wish to believe otherwise, education is simply not able to solve all the inequalities of life or cancel out all the effects of divergent student backgrounds and abilities.

J.R. Wilheim is a Columbia College senior concentrating in religion and history.