Copyright©1999
The Hanover Review, Inc.
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 Editorial:
Equality of Results
The
Diversity Test
by Steven Menashi
 Last May, the Education
Department's Office of Civil Rights circulated among
college officials a draft resource guide,
“Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing: An
Overview,” which warns that colleges could be
subject to legal prosecution or loss of federal funds if
they rely primarily on SAT or ACT
scores to make admissions or financial aid decisions. “The use of any educational
test which has a significant disparate impact on members
of any particular race, national origin, or sex is
discriminatory,” the guidelines read.
Striving
Backward
by Alexander Nazaryan
ETS recently unveiled its first
effort at explicitly manipulating SAT scores to achieve
desired social results: the Strivers score. To compensate
under the Strivers scoring system, ETS would simply raise
the scores of students whose race and economic class
suggests that their background has depressed their
results. For example, an African-American student from
the inner city who receives a base score of 1000 on the
SAT, the national average, would have his score increased
to 1200, his Strivers score. “A combined score of
1000 on the SAT is not always a 1000,” said ETS
Vice-President Anthony Carnevale.
Nicholas
Lemann's "Oligarchy of Brains"
by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Nicholas Lemann, who has just
written a book on the history of the SAT (The Big Test: The Secret History of the
American Meritocracy) wants to turn his history of American testing
into a story of the growing indispensability of the SAT and its development as a sort of uber-test,
where 10 points can radically alter the course of a
talented young man or woman's life.
Letters
to the Editor
McCain
on War, Tobacco, and Ricky Martin by Christian Hummel
On
the Fraternity Question
by Jeffrey Hart
Blasphemy,
Pornography, Dung: Sensation! by Andrew Grossman
by Gordon Haff
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“Far better it is to dare mighty
things, to win great triumphs, even though
checkered by failure, than to rank with those
poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer
much, because they live in the gray twilight that
knows neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore
Roosevelt
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