We have often had occasion to note how egalitarianism
turns out to be the enemy of genuine fairness. The latest example
is a new program developed by the Educational Testing
Service, the folks that bring us the Scholastic Aptitude Tests
(SATs). It is called “Strivers.” Comparing it to race-based
affirmative action, Amy Dockser Marcus, reporting on the program
recently in
The Wall Street Journal, noted that Strivers “is
designed to give colleges a tool for bringing social equity into
the admissions process.”

Ms. Marcus likened the idea behind Strivers to a golf handicap.
In light of the recent revelations about President Clinton’s
habit of retaking shots without penalty,
the analogy from golf seemed especially apt.
Here’s how it works.
The ETS has come up with a formula that will generate what it
calls an “expected” SAT score for every student by considering
fourteen extrinsic factors: factors such as family income, whether
English is the student’s first or second language, whether the
student’s high school is in a depressed inner-city neighborhood,
whether more than 50 percent of the students in the student’s school
receive a subsidized lunch, and—if requested—race and
ethnicity.

Following guidelines set by the new program, if a student scores 200 or more
points higher than the “expected” score generated by the ETS, he
or she would be considered a “Striver,” and thus eligible for
special treatment by college admissions. (Though students would
not necessarily be informed of their special status.)
One ETS official put it
this way: “A combined score of 1000 on the SATs is not always a
1000. When you look at a Striver who gets a 1000, you’re looking
at someone who really performs at a 1200.” Really? George Orwell put the
same point just a little differently: “All animals are equal,”
Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, “but some animals are more equal
than others.”

The ETS pretends that it can conjure an “expected” score based on
various sociological and ethnic variables. But we feel
constrained to ask: Expected by whom? Such statistical
legerdemain always discounts the most important variables of all:
individual talent and hard work. With an irony common in the
dizzy world of “affirmative-action” initiatives (how Orwell would
have savored that specimen example of Newspeak!), the Strivers
program penalizes especially those students who really do exert
themselves and strive to excel.

We are not the only ones to notice this. Indeed, The Wall
Street Journal’s scoop elicited a blizzard of criticism. The
ETS responded in time-honored fashion: with stout denial. In
an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Nicholas Lemann—who
acknowledges that he believes “the spirit behind the Strivers
program is the right one”
—reported
that, the day after the Journal article appeared,
the ETS issued talking points to all employees that said “There
is no product, no program, and no service based upon the Strivers
research.”

There has always been plenty to criticize about the
Educational Testing Service in general and the SATs in
particular. But once upon a time those tests, as their name
implies, did endeavor to provide some dispassionate measure of
scholastic aptitude. They
were known as “standardized tests” because everyone who took the
test was graded according to the same criteria. If you filled in
the third of five circles and that was the correct answer, you
scored a point. It did not matter whether you were white or
black, male or female, Christian or Jewish, rich or poor,
Democrat or Republican. The only thing that mattered was whether
you got the question right.

Unfortunately, such objective tests have never yielded the
results that egalitarians desire. Indeed, egalitarians have always
abominated the very idea of objectivity, and have striven
mightily to convince people either that there is no such thing as
an objective measure or—when that doesn’t work—that objective
measures are inherently unfair. When it comes to objective
measures of scholastic aptitude and accomplishment, they have
employed a battery of legal and rhetorical devices to undermine
the truth. Instead of treating individuals equally, egalitarians
have endeavored to induce the illusion of equality by the
skillful deployment of preferential treatment. Hence Mr. Lemann,
true to form, assures readers of the Times that the letters
SAT, though “originally an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude
Test, today literally don’t stand for anything.” Why, then, should
we employ such tests? Because they provide a convenient means of
seeming to be even-handed while actually tipping the scale.
Mr. Lemann is admirably explicit about this:
“The only way to produce a result that
looks fairer is to engage in explicit social engineering,
tinkering with test scores in a way that seems unfair to those
who have the high ones.” Seems, Lemann? Nay, it is. Still, it is
gratifying to have the liberal sophistry out in the open for once.

At a time when
legal challenges to “affirmative action” programs are on the rise
(California’s Proposition 209 is doubtless the best known),
successfully circumventing genuine fairness for the sake of
egalitarian ideology has required more and more ingenuity.
Liberal colleges and universities looking for a way of
sidestepping legal restrictions on preferential treatment are
sure to appreciate the opportunities for racial and ethnic
gerrymandering that the ETS has opened up with programs like
Strivers, even if, for the moment, common sense has stymied
ideology.

The fact is that the Strivers program is part
of a new, more
insidious breed of what Mr. Lemann correctly calls “social
engineering” initiatives. Designed to impose
quotas without using the politically unpopular word, they are part
of what the English essayist
G. K. Chesterton long ago referred
to as “the false theory of progress, which maintains that we
alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.” Programs like
Strivers—and notwithstanding the ETS’s temporary retreat, be
assured that we haven’t heard the end of it
—are unfair to
everyone. They are especially unfair to those students who apply
themselves and outdo the expectations foisted on them by
paternalistic sociologists from the ETS or liberal ideologues
like Nicholas Lemann. Students and parents should be on their
guard against this latest species of social engineering. Colleges
and universities not totally in thrall to egalitarian ideology
should boycott it.