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Get Four
|  | JULY 7, 2004
By Mike Brewster Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester The SAT's inventor and founder of Educational Testing Service had a dream of a more meritocratic America, and he pursued it faithfully In the early 1930s, Harvard University's graduating classes were made up of young men and (a few) women who had spent their teen years reveling in the heady 1920s. It seemed to one young Harvard assistant dean, Henry Chauncey, that these sons and daughters of the elite were simply expecting that they would rightfully inherit top positions in business and society, as if the Great Depression couldn't touch the ruling class. Chauncey, a Harvard grad himself, was distressed to watch as class after left the august institution, and failed, in his view, to meet the titanic civic challenges of the times. Together with then-Harvard president James Bryant Conant, Chauncey initiated an experiment to bring Harvard a new type of student, based not on the connections they or their parents had, but solely on what the students knew and their potential for further learning. The eventual result of Chauncey's desire to make Harvard a meritocracy was the advent of standardized school testing, the founding of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the popularization of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). While still decried by some critics as unfair, the SAT today remains a primary barometer used by thousands of colleges and universities for admission purposes -- and one that hundreds of thousands of high school students fret about every spring. "NATURAL ARISTOCRACY." The son of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft, Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1905 to privilege, albeit the sort based more in erudition than wealth. Chauncey was also a gifted athlete, and his baseball exploits at Groton and Harvard attracted an offer to play professionally for the Boston Braves. Chauncey instead accepted an offer after graduation as an assistant Harvard dean and temporary Harvard baseball coach. There, becoming more and more interested in why Harvard was churning out such lackluster graduates, Chauncey found his patron in Conant, a Harvard president who had already caused controversy among alumni by articulating his vision of a student body primarily comprising students with superior academic achievement, regardless of wealth or social status. One of Conant's motivations was creating what Thomas Jefferson had coined a "natural aristocracy," a ruling elite self-selected by intelligence and ability, not lineage. Chauncey's observations of Harvard classes full of mundane underachievers and Conant's vision of a better America built by the nation's best thinkers perfectly coalesced. All they needed was the mechanism to bring their dream society about. POTENTIAL OFFICERS. In his research on standardized tests, Chauncey chanced upon the SAT, an obscure mutation of an IQ test that had been developed at Princeton University. Chauncey retooled it to focus primarily on verbal and math skills, and in 1934 he presented it to Conant as their new tool to find the best students in America and bring them to Harvard. By 1941, Harvard required the SAT for all applicants. World War II helped bring the test into the mainstream. Strapped for officer candidates and with no good way to identify and promote so many leaders so quickly, the Army and Navy contracted with Chauncey in 1943 to give a one-day SAT test to over 300,000 people across the country for help in officer selection. Chauncey's ability to pull off this logistical feat illustrated the potential for using the SAT to assess high school students nationwide. Chauncey left Harvard in 1945 to create ETS, a company to manage the test and bring it to a national audience. He stayed as the head of the organization until 1970, creating a broad range of testing programs designed for students ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. His pet project for many years was the "Census of Abilities," an idea for a twice-a-year test for every American high schooler to give them a good idea of their academic skills and which direction they should point their future careers. But the plan smacked too much of Soviet-style fatalism, and the test was left on the drawing board. GLOBAL LEGACY. In addition to that defeat, one could debate if standardized testing has produced professionals more dedicated to civic duty and national greatness than those Depression-era graduating classes. Regardless, Chauncey's legacy includes a company of more than 2,000 employees that administers 11 million tests of all kinds every year in 180 countries around the world. Shortly before his death at the age of 97 on December 3, 2002 at his home in Shelburne, Vt., Chauncey was asked if had ever taken the SAT. "No," he told a reporter. "I wasn't going to take a chance."  As part of its 75th anniversary celebration, BusinessWeek is presenting a series of weekly profiles for the greatest innovators of the past 75 years, from science to government. BusinessWeek Online is joining in by adding more online-only profiles of The Great Innovators. In late September, 2004, BusinessWeek will publish a special commemorative issue on Innovation Mike Brewster is New York-based writer
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