Books, Arts & Manners : Status Anxiety.

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann (Farrar, Straus, 406 pp., $27)

Proponents of racial preferences in higher education are on the defensive these days, having suffered major defeats in the Hopwood case and in battles over ballot propositions in California and Washington. Most recently, fear of legal challenges has led both the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts to back away from the race- driven admissions policies they have pursued for decades. We are not yet at the beginning of the end. But we may at least have reached the end of the beginning.

For many years, advocates of preferences claimed that all they wanted was to give minority applicants just a bit of a break, a slight edge to compensate for the fact that the playing field was not yet level. Race, they always said, was "just one factor among many" in the admissions process. It has become harder to keep singing that tune, because so much evidence to the contrary has leaked out. Although William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's 1998 brief for preferences, The Shape of the River, offers the familiar "just one factor" argument, the authors' own statistics demonstrate beyond all doubt that black applicants admitted to elite schools in 1976-77 and 1989-90 (the two years studied) were given a huge boost because of their race.

A huge boost, that is, if you think that objective measures of academic qualifications like SAT scores are meaningful. But admitting black students with scores 300 points lower than those of their white and Asian classmates is not giving an unfair preference, if you maintain that the SATs are so riddled with racial and class bias that they tell us nothing useful about the cognitive skills and intellectual potential of applicants.

Denying the validity of standardized tests has become the fallback position for preference advocates, and it is the central argument advanced by Nicholas Lemann in The Big Test. Lemann claims, extravagantly, that standardized tests are nothing less than "the organized way we have of deciding who ends up where in American society." A high score, he asserts, guarantees you not only a spot in a top school, but success later in life. A low score dooms you to a mediocre college at best, and blights your career prospects. And that is scandalously unfair, in Lemann's view, because the SAT, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, and all the rest mainly measure your social-class background. Since the tests determine who wins and who loses in life, in his view, they serve to perpetuate the existing racial and class hierarchy. To make our educational system and, indeed, our entire society more egalitarian and democratic, the tests must go.

Part I of The Big Test provides a short history of the origins and development of the Educational Testing Service. The prime mover behind it was James Bryant Conant, who in 1933 assumed the presidency of Harvard University determined to transform its student body, replacing those more distinguished for their breeding than their brains with bright young men from the provinces. Some sort of national test of academic ability seemed essential to accomplish that end, and Conant enthusiastically backed the fledgling ETS in its attempts to develop one.

What was the point of a standardized national test of academic ability? Suppose you had one remaining spot in the freshman class and had to choose between a banker's son who attended Groton and a plumber's son from Kalamazoo High, both with 3.5 high-school GPAs. The blue-blood types who manned Ivy League admissions offices in those days would have taken the Groton man every time. But if a national test of scholastic aptitude ranked the student from Kalamazoo in the 99th percentile and the one from Groton in the 79th percentile, Conant believed that the plumber's son would be seen as obviously more promising. A valid test of academic ability would provide a common yardstick, a means of calibrating the records of students from schools of unknown quality.

Opening the door to such a promising young man would seem a clear step forward, and at times Lemann recognizes that. He devotes two chapters to Yale, tracing the changes wrought by the adoption of more meritocratic admissions standards in the 1960s. The consequences are epitomized in the story of one of his heroes, Bill Lann Lee. The son of a Chinese immigrant laundryman, Lee went from Bronx Science to Yale College to Yale Law School, a path nearly unimaginable in the days before grades and test scores were of decisive importance.

Lemann fails, though, to note the obvious implication of the Lee case: Meritocracy has allowed Asian-Americans to make spectacular gains in the nation's best schools. Though they are just 4 percent of the population, students of Asian ancestry are now a quarter or more of the undergraduates at Caltech, Columbia, MIT, and Stanford, and almost a fifth of those at Harvard and Yale. At Berkeley and UCLA, now that racial preferences have come to an end, the figure is 40 percent. If the SATs only reinforce the existing racial and class hierarchy, as Lemann maintains, why is it that Asian-American students are so disproportionately represented in elite colleges these days? James Bryant Conant certainly would have applauded this development, and seen it as proof of meritocracy.

Conant, indeed, had already lived through a very similar development that accompanied the shift to meritocratic admissions policies in Ivy League schools-the spectacular jump in Jewish enrollments. By the late 1950s, one estimate has it, 40 percent of Harvard's undergraduates were Jewish. It is curious and revealing that Lemann never mentions the Jewish success story, surely further proof that testing served to undermine, not to reinforce, the existing social hierarchy.

Part II of The Big Test wanders off in many directions, but the central story is the development of the University of California as the nation's largest and best public university in the 1950s and 1960s. We hear little about ETS and its SATs here. There is a somewhat tenuous link to Part I; UC president Clark Kerr believed that "the great university is necessarily elitist," an "aristocracy of intellect" based on "merit." He thought it impossible to bring all of the campuses in the UC system up to the same high level, and that a certain division of labor was necessary. Berkeley, the flagship school, would attract the most gifted students and have the most distinguished scholars on its faculty; UC-Davis and - Irvine, by contrast, would have students and teachers of good but somewhat lesser quality. And Kerr believed that SAT scores would assist admissions officers in determining which students belonged on which campuses.

Although Berkeley became arguably the nation's greatest university under Kerr's leadership, Lemann is repelled by his elitist vision. The aim of higher education in a democracy, Lemann writes, "should not be to sort out" students according to their ability, but to "teach as many people as possible as well as possible, equipping them both for work and citizenship."

If Lemann had his way, and Berkeley were to become indistinguishable from UC-Davis, many of the best students and teachers it once attracted would doubtless decide to accept admissions or job offers from schools like Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago. Unless all of the nation's private colleges and universities were similarly "unsorted," schools would continue to vary in the quality of their faculties and student bodies.

The SATs recede even deeper into the background in Part III, which sticks with California but jumps ahead to the battle over Proposition 209, the state constitutional amendment banning racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in all public institutions, approved by the voters in November 1996. Lemann's account of the struggle is intensely partisan. The leaders of the anti-209 forces are given long and loving portraits; those on the other side receive only the most minimal and grudging sketches. This, for example, is Lemann's sole characterization of Ward Connerly: He was a black "lobbyist and political fundraiser" in Sacramento and a tool of Gov. Pete Wilson. By contrast, we get dozens of pages chronicling the lives and times of Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel and attorney Molly Munger, both active in the campaign against 209.

What does a battle over a state constitutional amendment mandating race- neutral policies in higher education have to do with standardized testing? Very little, actually. The link in Lemann's mind is that a ban on racial preferences would keep many deserving blacks out of the University of California because their SAT scores were too low, but he is wrong on two counts. Race-neutrality does not mandate greater reliance on SATs or any other standardized tests in admissions. Proposition 209 leaves the University of California completely free to give SAT scores whatever weight it wishes, or none. It could decide to admit only those applicants who run the mile fastest or who perform best in a spelling bee. All that compliance with 209 requires is that "race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" not be taken into account.

More important, Lemann is simply incorrect in his presumption that the allegedly biased SAT is keeping deserving black and Hispanic candidates out of the University of California now that racial preferences have been banned. He apparently does not know that in January 1998, the UC admissions office released a careful study estimating exactly how much the student body's racial composition would be altered if SAT scores were not a factor at all.

The results demolish one of Lemann's central assumptions. Dropping the SATs would require raising the GPA cutoff for eligibility at the University of California from 3.3 to 3.65, in order to avoid accepting many more students than it could accommodate. True, eliminating SAT scores from consideration would benefit Hispanics, though just a bit. Their numbers would increase by 5 percent. But for African-Americans- Lemann's central concern-the number admitted would actually drop by 16 percent. Asian-Americans would also lose out slightly, slipping by 3 percent. The big gainers would be non-Hispanic whites, whose admissions numbers would increase by 17 percent.

Taking SATs into account thus gives a small plus to Asian-Americans and a big plus to African-Americans; it depresses Latino enrollments slightly and white enrollments quite a lot. Even though blacks have much lower average SAT scores than other groups, the most promising African-American students in California have SATs that are better than their high-school records.

One might expect that the author of a 400-page volume deploring the effects of "The Big Test" on American society would find the space to provide the reader with a careful assessment of the literature on testing. For example, do SAT scores play the absolutely decisive role Lemann attributes to them in determining who gets into the most selective colleges? Not according to The Shape of the River, which Lemann cites approvingly. A good many whites and Asians with SATs in the 1500s are turned down by top schools, at the same time that substantial numbers of those scoring in the 1200s are admitted.

Even if SATs were as all-important as Lemann claims, is it really true that in later life it is "supremely important where you went to college"? Lemann is a graduate of Harvard and still seems afflicted with a trace of Ivyitis. People with degrees from Ivy League or comparably select institutions do not dominate any important arena of our national life, and it is questionable whether having attended a brand-name school confers great advantages over the long run. The latest study of this issue-by Alan Krueger of Princeton and Stacy Berg Dale of the Mellon Foundation-concludes that the prestige of the college attended by a large sample of 1976 freshmen had no effect whatever on their earnings 15 years after graduation. Research on the educational backgrounds of highly successful African-Americans turns up very few Ivy Leaguers and a great many graduates of colleges that admit almost all of their applicants. Lemann simply assumes that who gets into Harvard is an all-important question, and displays no interest in weighing the available data.

Lemann also "knows" that the SATs and similar tests are biased against blacks. But if SATs were designed to predict performance in college, the evidence shows that they are actually a bit biased in favor of African- Americans. In their college courses, black students perform about as well as whites and Asians with SATs 180 points lower-that is, substantially worse than their scores would predict.

Likewise, Lemann insists that a student's performance on the SATs is heavily dependent on access to the services of Stanley Kaplan, the Princeton Review, or some other test-prep outfit. But he ignores studies that have found, for example, that 100 hours of coaching and studying yields an average increase of a mere 24 points on the verbal and 39 points on the math SATs. Perhaps this ETS estimate is suspect, but Lemann doesn't even mention it. Instead, he handles the issue by assertion and anecdote. One of the people he profiles "took the SATs, made mediocre scores, crammed (though cramming, according to ETS, didn't work), took them again, and did much better," getting into Yale as a result. (In this instance, it should be noted, the student in question didn't even shell out money for a test-prep course; he just did some studying on his own, hardly proof that you need to come from an affluent home to do well.)

Lemann credits James Bryant Conant with good intentions, but in the end judges him "touchingly naive or willfully naive or just unpardonably naive" in believing that the SATs could contribute to the development of a "classless, perfectly mobile society." Perhaps- but this characterization applies equally well to Lemann himself. He seems to adhere to precisely the same ideal, and his plan for achieving it seems even less realistic than Conant's. His recommendations for change appear only in the Afterword, "A Real Meritocracy," and are sketched in the vaguest of terms. Lemann would have the federal government guarantee every citizen "decent schooling" as "a matter of right," and ensure that every high school teach "a nationally agreed-upon curriculum," which would be the basis for any test used for college admissions. And he recommends that the gap "between the more and less selective colleges" somehow be closed.

Even if we leave aside all the practical objections that leap to mind, can anyone believe that the implementation of this program would move the nation notably closer to the ideal of a "classless, perfectly mobile society"? Even if the curriculum were as uniform across the United States as it is in France, and each school had identically qualified teachers and absolutely the same resources, it is difficult to believe that this would wipe out the advantages of growing up in a middle-class home, especially a middle-class white or Asian home.

A radical egalitarian who was serious about achieving a classless utopia would attack inequality at its point of origin-the nuclear family. Although Lemann's indictment of American society is radical in tone, his proposals for change are superficial, tossed off hastily without adequate reflection. If a "classless, perfectly mobile society" is defined as one in which family origins do not matter, it surely will be unattainable without removing all infants from the care of their parents and rearing them collectively on something like a kibbutz. Even then, family origins would still have an influence if there is any hereditary component at all in intelligence.

Fortunately, the world in which test scores determine precisely where you can go to school, and in which where you go to school determines your ultimate place in society, exists only in Lemann's imagination. America is a land of second chances-and third, fourth, and fifth chances as well. We have over 3,700 colleges and universities in this country, the vast majority of which have essentially open admissions. SATs and similar tests are one valuable tool in figuring out which students have the academic skills expected at selective institutions-nothing more. They don't measure ambition, discipline, common sense, personal sensitivity, or many other traits that matter in life. Our society is as fluid, as open to talent, as any in history. The efforts of James Bryant Conant and the Educational Testing Service have not made it less so. Quite the contrary. The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann (Farrar, Straus, 406 pp., $27)

Proponents of racial preferences in higher education are on the defensive these days, having suffered major defeats in the Hopwood case and in battles over ballot propositions in California and Washington. Most recently, fear of legal challenges has led both the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts to back away from the race- driven admissions policies they have pursued for decades. We are not yet at the beginning of the end. But we may at least have reached the end of the beginning.

For many years, advocates of preferences claimed that all they wanted was to give minority applicants just a bit of a break, a slight edge to compensate for the fact that the playing field was not yet level. Race, they always said, was "just one factor among many" in the admissions process. It has become harder to keep singing that tune, because so much evidence to the contrary has leaked out. Although William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's 1998 brief for preferences, The Shape of the River, offers the familiar "just one factor" argument, the authors' own statistics demonstrate beyond all doubt that black applicants admitted to elite schools in 1976-77 and 1989-90 (the two years studied) were given a huge boost because of their race.

A huge boost, that is, if you think that objective measures of academic qualifications like SAT scores are meaningful. But admitting black students with scores 300 points lower than those of their white and Asian classmates is not giving an unfair preference, if you maintain that the SATs are so riddled with racial and class bias that they tell us nothing useful about the cognitive skills and intellectual potential of applicants.

Denying the validity of standardized tests has become the fallback position for preference advocates, and it is the central argument advanced by Nicholas Lemann in The Big Test. Lemann claims, extravagantly, that standardized tests are nothing less than "the organized way we have of deciding who ends up where in American society." A high score, he asserts, guarantees you not only a spot in a top school, but success later in life. A low score dooms you to a mediocre college at best, and blights your career prospects. And that is scandalously unfair, in Lemann's view, because the SAT, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, and all the rest mainly measure your social-class background. Since the tests determine who wins and who loses in life, in his view, they serve to perpetuate the existing racial and class hierarchy. To make our educational system and, indeed, our entire society more egalitarian and democratic, the tests must go.

Part I of The Big Test provides a short history of the origins and development of the Educational Testing Service. The prime mover behind it was James Bryant Conant, who in 1933 assumed the presidency of Harvard University determined to transform its student body, replacing those more distinguished for their breeding than their brains with bright young men from the provinces. Some sort of national test of academic ability seemed essential to accomplish that end, and Conant enthusiastically backed the fledgling ETS in its attempts to develop one.

What was the point of a standardized national test of academic ability? Suppose you had one remaining spot in the freshman class and had to choose between a banker's son who attended Groton and a plumber's son from Kalamazoo High, both with 3.5 high-school GPAs. The blue-blood types who manned Ivy League admissions offices in those days would have taken the Groton man every time. But if a national test of scholastic aptitude ranked the student from Kalamazoo in the 99th percentile and the one from Groton in the 79th percentile, Conant believed that the plumber's son would be seen as obviously more promising. A valid test of academic ability would provide a common yardstick, a means of calibrating the records of students from schools of unknown quality.

Opening the door to such a promising young man would seem a clear step forward, and at times Lemann recognizes that. He devotes two chapters to Yale, tracing the changes wrought by the adoption of more meritocratic admissions standards in the 1960s. The consequences are epitomized in the story of one of his heroes, Bill Lann Lee. The son of a Chinese immigrant laundryman, Lee went from Bronx Science to Yale College to Yale Law School, a path nearly unimaginable in the days before grades and test scores were of decisive importance.

Lemann fails, though, to note the obvious implication of the Lee case: Meritocracy has allowed Asian-Americans to make spectacular gains in the nation's best schools. Though they are just 4 percent of the population, students of Asian ancestry are now a quarter or more of the undergraduates at Caltech, Columbia, MIT, and Stanford, and almost a fifth of those at Harvard and Yale. At Berkeley and UCLA, now that racial preferences have come to an end, the figure is 40 percent. If the SATs only reinforce the existing racial and class hierarchy, as Lemann maintains, why is it that Asian-American students are so disproportionately represented in elite colleges these days? James Bryant Conant certainly would have applauded this development, and seen it as proof of meritocracy.

Conant, indeed, had already lived through a very similar development that accompanied the shift to meritocratic admissions policies in Ivy League schools-the spectacular jump in Jewish enrollments. By the late 1950s, one estimate has it, 40 percent of Harvard's undergraduates were Jewish. It is curious and revealing that Lemann never mentions the Jewish success story, surely further proof that testing served to undermine, not to reinforce, the existing social hierarchy.

Part II of The Big Test wanders off in many directions, but the central story is the development of the University of California as the nation's largest and best public university in the 1950s and 1960s. We hear little about ETS and its SATs here. There is a somewhat tenuous link to Part I; UC president Clark Kerr believed that "the great university is necessarily elitist," an "aristocracy of intellect" based on "merit." He thought it impossible to bring all of the campuses in the UC system up to the same high level, and that a certain division of labor was necessary. Berkeley, the flagship school, would attract the most gifted students and have the most distinguished scholars on its faculty; UC-Davis and - Irvine, by contrast, would have students and teachers of good but somewhat lesser quality. And Kerr believed that SAT scores would assist admissions officers in determining which students belonged on which campuses.

Although Berkeley became arguably the nation's greatest university under Kerr's leadership, Lemann is repelled by his elitist vision. The aim of higher education in a democracy, Lemann writes, "should not be to sort out" students according to their ability, but to "teach as many people as possible as well as possible, equipping them both for work and citizenship."

If Lemann had his way, and Berkeley were to become indistinguishable from UC-Davis, many of the best students and teachers it once attracted would doubtless decide to accept admissions or job offers from schools like Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago. Unless all of the nation's private colleges and universities were similarly "unsorted," schools would continue to vary in the quality of their faculties and student bodies.

The SATs recede even deeper into the background in Part III, which sticks with California but jumps ahead to the battle over Proposition 209, the state constitutional amendment banning racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in all public institutions, approved by the voters in November 1996. Lemann's account of the struggle is intensely partisan. The leaders of the anti-209 forces are given long and loving portraits; those on the other side receive only the most minimal and grudging sketches. This, for example, is Lemann's sole characterization of Ward Connerly: He was a black "lobbyist and political fundraiser" in Sacramento and a tool of Gov. Pete Wilson. By contrast, we get dozens of pages chronicling the lives and times of Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel and attorney Molly Munger, both active in the campaign against 209.

What does a battle over a state constitutional amendment mandating race- neutral policies in higher education have to do with standardized testing? Very little, actually. The link in Lemann's mind is that a ban on racial preferences would keep many deserving blacks out of the University of California because their SAT scores were too low, but he is wrong on two counts. Race-neutrality does not mandate greater reliance on SATs or any other standardized tests in admissions. Proposition 209 leaves the University of California completely free to give SAT scores whatever weight it wishes, or none. It could decide to admit only those applicants who run the mile fastest or who perform best in a spelling bee. All that compliance with 209 requires is that "race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" not be taken into account.

More important, Lemann is simply incorrect in his presumption that the allegedly biased SAT is keeping deserving black and Hispanic candidates out of the University of California now that racial preferences have been banned. He apparently does not know that in January 1998, the UC admissions office released a careful study estimating exactly how much the student body's racial composition would be altered if SAT scores were not a factor at all.

The results demolish one of Lemann's central assumptions. Dropping the SATs would require raising the GPA cutoff for eligibility at the University of California from 3.3 to 3.65, in order to avoid accepting many more students than it could accommodate. True, eliminating SAT scores from consideration would benefit Hispanics, though just a bit. Their numbers would increase by 5 percent. But for African-Americans- Lemann's central concern-the number admitted would actually drop by 16 percent. Asian-Americans would also lose out slightly, slipping by 3 percent. The big gainers would be non-Hispanic whites, whose admissions numbers would increase by 17 percent.

Taking SATs into account thus gives a small plus to Asian-Americans and a big plus to African-Americans; it depresses Latino enrollments slightly and white enrollments quite a lot. Even though blacks have much lower average SAT scores than other groups, the most promising African-American students in California have SATs that are better than their high-school records.

One might expect that the author of a 400-page volume deploring the effects of "The Big Test" on American society would find the space to provide the reader with a careful assessment of the literature on testing. For example, do SAT scores play the absolutely decisive role Lemann attributes to them in determining who gets into the most selective colleges? Not according to The Shape of the River, which Lemann cites approvingly. A good many whites and Asians with SATs in the 1500s are turned down by top schools, at the same time that substantial numbers of those scoring in the 1200s are admitted.

Even if SATs were as all-important as Lemann claims, is it really true that in later life it is "supremely important where you went to college"? Lemann is a graduate of Harvard and still seems afflicted with a trace of Ivyitis. People with degrees from Ivy League or comparably select institutions do not dominate any important arena of our national life, and it is questionable whether having attended a brand-name school confers great advantages over the long run. The latest study of this issue-by Alan Krueger of Princeton and Stacy Berg Dale of the Mellon Foundation-concludes that the prestige of the college attended by a large sample of 1976 freshmen had no effect whatever on their earnings 15 years after graduation. Research on the educational backgrounds of highly successful African-Americans turns up very few Ivy Leaguers and a great many graduates of colleges that admit almost all of their applicants. Lemann simply assumes that who gets into Harvard is an all-important question, and displays no interest in weighing the available data.

Lemann also "knows" that the SATs and similar tests are biased against blacks. But if SATs were designed to predict performance in college, the evidence shows that they are actually a bit biased in favor of African- Americans. In their college courses, black students perform about as well as whites and Asians with SATs 180 points lower-that is, substantially worse than their scores would predict.

Likewise, Lemann insists that a student's performance on the SATs is heavily dependent on access to the services of Stanley Kaplan, the Princeton Review, or some other test-prep outfit. But he ignores studies that have found, for example, that 100 hours of coaching and studying yields an average increase of a mere 24 points on the verbal and 39 points on the math SATs. Perhaps this ETS estimate is suspect, but Lemann doesn't even mention it. Instead, he handles the issue by assertion and anecdote. One of the people he profiles "took the SATs, made mediocre scores, crammed (though cramming, according to ETS, didn't work), took them again, and did much better," getting into Yale as a result. (In this instance, it should be noted, the student in question didn't even shell out money for a test-prep course; he just did some studying on his own, hardly proof that you need to come from an affluent home to do well.)

Lemann credits James Bryant Conant with good intentions, but in the end judges him "touchingly naive or willfully naive or just unpardonably naive" in believing that the SATs could contribute to the development of a "classless, perfectly mobile society." Perhaps- but this characterization applies equally well to Lemann himself. He seems to adhere to precisely the same ideal, and his plan for achieving it seems even less realistic than Conant's. His recommendations for change appear only in the Afterword, "A Real Meritocracy," and are sketched in the vaguest of terms. Lemann would have the federal government guarantee every citizen "decent schooling" as "a matter of right," and ensure that every high school teach "a nationally agreed-upon curriculum," which would be the basis for any test used for college admissions. And he recommends that the gap "between the more and less selective colleges" somehow be closed.

Even if we leave aside all the practical objections that leap to mind, can anyone believe that the implementation of this program would move the nation notably closer to the ideal of a "classless, perfectly mobile society"? Even if the curriculum were as uniform across the United States as it is in France, and each school had identically qualified teachers and absolutely the same resources, it is difficult to believe that this would wipe out the advantages of growing up in a middle-class home, especially a middle-class white or Asian home.

A radical egalitarian who was serious about achieving a classless utopia would attack inequality at its point of origin-the nuclear family. Although Lemann's indictment of American society is radical in tone, his proposals for change are superficial, tossed off hastily without adequate reflection. If a "classless, perfectly mobile society" is defined as one in which family origins do not matter, it surely will be unattainable without removing all infants from the care of their parents and rearing them collectively on something like a kibbutz. Even then, family origins would still have an influence if there is any hereditary component at all in intelligence.

Fortunately, the world in which test scores determine precisely where you can go to school, and in which where you go to school determines your ultimate place in society, exists only in Lemann's imagination. America is a land of second chances-and third, fourth, and fifth chances as well. We have over 3,700 colleges and universities in this country, the vast majority of which have essentially open admissions. SATs and similar tests are one valuable tool in figuring out which students have the academic skills expected at selective institutions-nothing more. They don't measure ambition, discipline, common sense, personal sensitivity, or many other traits that matter in life. Our society is as fluid, as open to talent, as any in history. The efforts of James Bryant Conant and the Educational Testing Service have not made it less so. Quite the contrary.

Mr. Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University. His critique, written with Abigail Thernstrom, of William C. Bowen and Derek Bok's The Shape of the River was published in the June 1999 UCLA Law Review and is available at www.nationalreview.com.