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Stanley Kaplan graduated No. 2 in his class at City College, and won the school’s Award for Excellence in Natural Sciences. He wanted to be a doctor, and he applied to five medical schools, confident that he would be accepted. To his shock, he was rejected by every single one. Medical schools did not take public colleges like City College seriously. More important, in the forties there was a limit to how many Jews they were willing to accept. “The term meritocracy—or success based on merit rather than heritage, wealth, or social status?wasn?t even coined yet,” Kaplan writes, “and the methods of selecting students based on talent, not privilege, were still evolving.”
That’s why Stanley Kaplan was always pained by those who thought that what went on in his basement was somehow subversive. He loved the S.A.T. He thought that the test gave people like him the best chance of overcoming discrimination. As he saw it, he was simply giving the middle-class students of Brooklyn the same shot at a bright future that their counterparts in the private schools of Manhattan had. In 1983, after years of hostility, the College Board invited him to speak at its annual convention. It was one of the highlights of Kaplan’s life. “Never, in my wildest dreams,” he began, “did I ever think I’d be speaking to you here today.”
The truth is, however, that Stanley Kaplan was wrong. What he did in his basement was subversive. The S.A.T. was designed as an abstract intellectual tool. It never occurred to its makers that aptitude was a social matter: that what people were capable of was affected by what they knew, and what they knew was affected by what they were taught, and what they were taught was affected by the industry of their teachers and parents. And if what the S.A.T. was measuring, in no small part, was the industry of teachers and parents, then what did it mean? Stanley Kaplan may have loved the S.A.T. But when he stood up and recited “boo, boo, boo, square root of two,” he killed it.
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