A New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell tells the fascinating tale of a working-class kid from Brooklyn who turned the world of college admissions testing upside down. As you read the article, it's hard not to root for Stanley H. Kaplan, the precocious child of Eastern European immigrants and a whiz in class who was devoted to helping struggling students succeed. After graduating second at City College, Kaplan continued to tutor and coach students at the "Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center" he opened in his parents' basement, and one day he was asked to prepare a student for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The S.A.T. was said to be designed to measure innate ability rather than acquired knowledge, and it stated clearly in the instructions that cramming was pointless. Unwilling to believe that preparation was futile, Kaplan developed a set of drills and tools that were so effective that they essentially proved that, whatever the S.A.T. was measuring, it was "eminently coachable," and thus not a true aptitude test at all. The impact of showing working-class kids how to ace the S.A.T. was to undermine that test's use as a means of social engineering by elite colleges, which relied on S.A.T. scores to separate naturally gifted students (whose success was effortless and who often had good manners) from the "grinds," lower middle class (and usually Jewish) students who were thought to excel less by intelligence than by sheer determination and who were less desirable on Ivy campuses. Kaplan showed that success on a test like the S.A.T. depends less on innate ability than on how hard a student works (as well as how much help he gets from parents and teachers). If that's so, however, why not replace the S.A.T. with achievement tests aligned with clear curricular guidelines, an alternative that's been proposed by University of California president Richard Atkinson, among others. "Examined Life: What Stanley H. Kaplan Taught Us About the S.A.T." by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, December 12, 2001.
