Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

Appendix B. Testing Bureaus and Projects Related to the Aikin Commission

237 Appendix B Testing Bureaus and Projects Related to the Aikin Commission The College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) The College Board, founded in 1900 and closely connected to the curricular recommendations of the 1893 Committee of Ten, prepared entrance exams in various traditional subject areas. Due to the very focused high school curriculum from which the examinations were drawn, the CEEB’s essay-like answers were more objective than the interpretive responses we have come to assume from essay questions today. The Board exams, then as now, assumed a uniform curriculum, one not always well received by schoolteachers and administrators. One headmaster exclaimed, “I’ll be damned if any Board down in New York City, with a college professor at its head, is going to tell me and my faculty what or how to teach!”1 Quickly, however, school heads recognized that these subjectarea , content-specific essay exams were the easiest way for their students to gain admission to elite East Coast colleges. The Board began experimenting in 1916 with a new type of psychological test, the “New Plan,” by which a series of examinations was designed to assess intellectual traits rather than subject matter knowledge. Developed by Carl Brigham, the New Plan evolved into the Scholastic Aptitude Test, first administered in 1926, which grew in popularity through the late 1920s and early 1930s with nearly 9,000 candidates taking the exam in 1931. The College Board’s New Plan was mentioned regularly in early Aikin Commission discussions about college admissions as an example of innovative and promising work in the area of standardized test construction.2 The Cooperative Test Service of the American Council on Education (ACE) The ACE’s Cooperative Test Service (CTS), formed in 1930, became “a factory for the continuous manufacture, year after year, of the particular 238 Stories of the Eight-Year Study kind of scientific measuring instrument known as the standardized objective achievement test.”3 This research bureau, directed by Ben Wood and housed at Columbia University, provided high school and college tests for the Pennsylvania Study and by 1932 had organized a Carnegie Foundation-sponsored College Sophomore Testing Program with 140 participating postsecondary institutions throughout the United States. Similar in intent to the College Board’s New Plan, leaders of the CTS saw themselves as liberating high school students from the grip of the Carnegie unit. Wood believed that by administering standard intelligence tests with achievement tests, school faculties could assist individual students in becoming more aware of their interests and capabilities as part of the process of helping them plan their futures. Educational Records Bureau (ERB) The Educational Records Bureau, founded in 1927, was another agency seeking to determine an appropriate role for standardized testing in public education. During the early days of the testing era, the Bureau served as a forum to discuss issues concerning the use of intelligence, aptitude, and achievement tests. Bureau conferences addressed “the danger of a dogmatic faith in the dependability and significance of test results far beyond what is warranted” and warned that “any testing program inevitably becomes itself the goal of instruction and hence dominates, standardizes, stifles, and devitalizes the whole of the teaching process subject to it.”4 Founded by Eugene Smith and overseen by Herbert Hawkes and Wood, the ERB sold and popularized standardized tests as a service to member schools. Perhaps its greatest legacy, however, was the development of the Cumulative Record Card, an administrative solution for recording student progress and a means “to enable teachers to visualize both the continuity and the complexity and variability of the growing pupil.”5 Although the ERB questioned whether or not “confidential information [should] be recorded and made accessible to all teachers,” this card offered a way of recording important student information that could be used by teachers and then passed on to others for use in student guidance.6 Similarities exist between the PEA, ideologically invested yet willing to debate the uses of progressive education, and the ERB, strongly committed to testing yet serving as a forum for debate and criticism. A surprising outcome of our research was the discovery of the parallel work of the Bureau’s Committee on School and College Relations . While the ERB promoted the use of cumulative records, the Committee’s three reports presented detailed information of specific colleges’ and universities’ adherence to the Carnegie unit and other 239 Appendix B...