I HAVE BEEN at this a long time.
In 1966 (I realize I am dating myself!) I wrote the following letter to the College Board about what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test:
Gentlemen:
In regard to the December 3, 1966, SAT, two of the questions asked were rather ambiguous. I am referring to two questions on the Math Section which were part of the series of Data-Sufficiency Questions. Since this type of problem is an attempt to determine a student’s power of logical analysis, information is given to answer the question without giving the student taking the test an opportunity to give the reasons for one’s decision. I don’t think that anyone who recognized implications in the questions should be penalized.
The two questions are as follows:
How many questions are there on a test?
a. Mary answered 15 questions correctly and received a mark of 30%.
b. John answered 35 questions correctly and received a mark of 70%.
Who has more US coins?
a. Pete has 24 cents and Ed has 26 cents.
b. One of Ed’s coins is a quarter.
Superficial examination of these two questions leads one to the conclusion that sufficient information is given to answer the question. Closer analysis, however, leads one to the dilemma that re: ques. 1—we are assuming that each question is worth an equal number of points and we have not been given any evidence on which to base such an assumption and re: ques. 2—since we have been asked who has more US coins we do not have any information on whether any or all of Pete’s coins are US coins or perhaps Canadian coins. A student can therefore come to the conclusion that there is insufficient data in both A and B of ques. 1 & 2 to answer the questions.
It is my humble opinion that to be fair to a student who is directed to focus on “sufficiency of data” two things should occur. . .
That was me as a sixteen-year-old. Look out world! I would like to point out that I had the restraint to wait two days after taking the SAT to write and mail the above letter. I don’t think I ever got a response, but writing the letter was cathartic because it was annoying to have these questions that didn’t make any sense.
When I got to Radcliffe College at Harvard University, the SAT followed me there. During one of our first conversations in our dorm room, my freshman-year roommate immediately explained that she was worried she would never get married because she would never find a man as smart as she was—after all she had perfect scores on the SAT! Even then the conflation of self-worth, or other-worth (in terms of who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with), with test scores struck me as odd.
Instinctively I sought out my posse of black women at Radcliffe. This was the 1960s, so there was a lot going on, not only in terms of the Vietnam War but also the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while I was in college. It was a very sad time, but it was also a very exciting time because students felt empowered to raise issues publicly without being considered dangerous. My posse wanted to express our concern that there were very few black women being admitted to Radcliffe. We sat in in the corridor leading up to the dean’s office. We were told to be very “ladylike”; I remember well. This was our ladylike approach, but I think we got their attention. They certainly started admitting more students of color.
I graduated from college and then from law school, and early in my career I took a job as assistant counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, first in Washington, DC, when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was amended and extended, and later in the New York City office, as head of the LDF Voting Rights group. That was my first experience in collaborating with coworkers in a way that the whole really was greater than the sum of its parts. We were a group of people who were committed to helping make a sustainable change, not just for blacks but also for Latinos and for poor people.
When I introduce my students to this environment now, I’m not trying to get them to support the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. What I want them to feel is what it is like to work with somebody else to change the status quo. You have to be very creative. You may get a sense of pride that you are actually making a change, but you aren’t making it yourself; you are part of a group of people—some of whom are similarly situated, and some of whom are differentially situated, but all of whom have a common goal.
That’s one of the reasons that I give students in my Law and the Political Process class the option of writing an exam in a group of two or three. People might say, well, that’s ridiculous; that’s just cheating. Those people most likely have never practiced law, because that’s not my experience, for example, of how you write a brief. You don’t just write it by yourself. Sometimes you do, but if you have someone with a slightly different perspective, it’s very helpful. And it’s not only the intellect that matters but also one’s ability to implement ideas and commit to communicating one’s perspective. That was one thing I loved about the women and men in the Legal Defense Fund. Whether they were black or white, they had been litigating cases for years, and when I joined them, they didn’t hesitate to push me into the rotation with everybody else. We weren’t going to specialize and inhabit our own individual silos—which would have been tempting for me as a black woman in the post Jim Crow–era when we worked in the South, in Arkansas, North Carolina, Alabama, or Louisiana. “Nope, Lani,” they would tell me. “It’s your turn to cross-examine the governor tomorrow. . . .”
When you actually practice as a lawyer, it isn’t as if each member of a team is given one witness to prepare and questions him or her on the stand, and then that’s the end of the conversation. Everybody works together. When we don’t encourage collaboration and the whole host of complementary skills relevant to greater understanding, we lose out. Instead, we choose people who excel at the same, limited things; admit them to the best schools; and send them off to do their own individual work in their own individual careers. Testocratic, not democratic, merit. When you look closely, it’s everywhere.
Yet there are visionaries out there, shifting our educational models from ones that favor testocratic merit to those that favor democratic merit; visionaries who approach the problem from many different vantage points. Some of them have transformed the classroom, where professors like Eric Mazur and Uri Treisman have created a culture of collaboration rather than competition. Some transformations have occurred on the campus, where The Posse Foundation has reimagined what a collective college admissions process could look like and identified students for their future leadership potential rather than their static, pre-existing test scores. Some transformations have occurred within the community, such as the University Park Campus School’s commitment to training students who can give back to the neighborhood and to society at large. The arenas of transformation may differ, but one common, forward-looking vision emerges: success is measured by the skills and contributions of its graduates, not its admitted students.
These examples of democratic merit are helping us rewrite how we view achievements at commencement. More graduates are now applauded for the growth they showed in college, both in terms of their academics and their leadership abilities. They are being celebrated for their commitment to solving today’s most looming challenges across an array of sectors. We can continue seeking democratic merit by measuring these students’ future contributions to the public at large, rather than by simply keeping a financial scorecard. And we can apply these forward-looking criteria of democratic merit in education to cultivate more collaborative practices in society at large: from political halls, to workplaces, to service systems.
A culture shift can happen. It is happening. And we need to work together to make it happen.