Annie Abrams. Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 230pp. Hardcover $24.95.
Big testing is having a big comeback. After years of Covid-era test-optional policies, many elite colleges and universities have reinstated standardized testing scores as part of their application requirements. Pundits are all too eager to champion the SAT and ACT as truer predictors of academic success than high school grades.1 Even some of the tests themselves have received a facelift: the SAT is now a computer-based adaptive test. Tempting as it may have been to consider widespread public discontent as fuel for their decline, college admissions exams and high-stakes standardized testing are seeming to emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
But how did American higher education get stuck in the mud again? Perhaps the mistake is in forgetting that controversy and reinvention have long fueled business–and most standardized testing is no less a business than automobiles or fast food. At the same time, our understanding of standardized testing cannot be reduced to a single spate of tests college hopefuls take at the end of junior year. Standardized testing is a defining feature of American education, one that both magnifies and reinforces existing socioeconomic inequalities. Annie Abrams understands both points well. Abrams’s 2023 book, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, builds from the premise that any discussion of standardized testing–and about the endangered status of American liberal arts college education–also must attempt to understand how the businesses who created these exams have shaped secondary schooling. Abrams’s book succeeds at considering both the decay of certain standardized testing ideals and the way that rot has long infected educators’ ability to cultivate intellectual curiosity.
In Shortchanged, Abrams investigates the decline of the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program, from its initial Cold War aim promoting American ideals to a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education. AP testing allows high school students the ability to earn college credit early based upon their performance on year-end exams. But, as Abrams demonstrates, the College Board’s unabashed embrace of profits has had a deleterious effect on how AP classes are even taught. Abrams muses that her book stemmed from “an effort to understand [her] new job and [her] own resistance to doing it ‘well.’”2 As a scholar of American literature, her pedagogical approach to helping students hone their thoughts and craft essays remains at odds with how AP testing actually rewards students. Abrams argues that the College Board “is running on bankrupt authority” as it further entwines its AP products into state and federal policy.3
The first half of Shortchanged amounts to an intellectual history of the AP program. Oxymoronic as that seems–what is a standardized test if not the death of insight and nuance?–Abrams ably shows the philosophical traditions and geopolitical conditions that shaped the earliest versions of these tests. Given the spate of nongovernmental organizations, working committees, and elite institution leaders behind the eventual creation of the AP program in the 1950s, all three chapters are needed to show the interplay of elitism and anti-communism. Abrams shines a spotlight on James Conant, president of Harvard during the Cold War and an instrumental figure in bringing the AP program into being. “Calm, meticulous, and self-possessed,” Conant believed that American education had to balance enabling class fluidity while preserving social order.4 Too much control over the life paths of students and the differences between American and Soviet education would seem trivial; too much leeway and anarchy would reign. Conant cut through this logical knot by embracing meritocracy, the idea that a naturally emerging elite of superior intellects were most deserving of being social leaders. Standardized testing allowed the cultivation of talent to seem rational and scientific rather than a way to reinforce existing biases.
Conant and other proponents of meritocracy wove together several American ideological and philosophical mainstays, some of which stood in direct contradiction with one another. As Abrams illustrates, the longstanding influence of educational reformer John Dewey on American education was already on the wane by the Second World War, and Conant was not alone in his distrust of progressive approaches. Although Conant found progressive education disorderly and wayward, he appreciated that Dewey also believed education had the power to generate democratic ideals and enable class mobility.5 Conant found greater inspiration in Thomas Jefferson–or, rather, a cherry-picked and carefully curated idea of Jeffersonian educational ideals that supported “Conant’s own belief in the necessity of an intellectual, social hierarchy.”6 Never mind that the idea of a natural aristocracy relied on the musings of an elitist enslaver. The idealized image of Jefferson that became popular during the early twentieth century–whitewashing in more ways than one–gave Conant enough evidence, however phony, to pursue policies he already believed.
Between the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War, standardized testing in the United States consolidated under the behemoth Educational Testing Service (ETS). ETS would take over testing operations for the College Board, soon adding multiple acronyms to its testing repertory. One challenge remained, however: forging a shared belief that a liberal arts college education was vital for the health of the United States. College education had to thwart both the internal threat of communism by promoting individual achievement and the external threat of communism by creating superior young talent. Brainpower was a national resource, one that could be spoiled without proper cultivation in secondary school.
As Abrams documents, the Advanced Placement program finally developed in earnest from an attempt by the Ford Foundation and others at figuring out how to best steer the brightest at elite preparatory schools–that is, well-to-do white boys–into advanced studies without forcing specific ways for teaching courses. (Standardized testing: good for America; standardized instruction: bad for America.) Years of committee work helmed by Alan Blackmer, dean of the prestigious Phillips Academy, still only amounted to general guidelines. The Korean War accelerated concerns that an actual plan had to exist–not only for the sake of young men subject to the draft but as part of the larger plan to harness brainpower to fight communism. Through the efforts of Gordon Keith Chalmers, president of Kenyon College, the AP program eventually took shape but it required further ideological contortions to keep other elite colleges from balking at the plan. A conservative at heart, Chalmers believed that humanities education had to be valorized over vocational training in order to preserve a free society of thinkers. Whatever reservations Chalmers had about over-standardization, however, were soon rendered moot when the College Board overtook the actual design and implementation of AP programming.
Abrams fast-forwards several decades in the back half of Short Changed, focusing on the deeply malformed state of the contemporary Advanced Placement program. The author devotes each of these chapters to the shortcomings of three core AP subjects: US History (APUSH), English, and Government. Perhaps the most useful for historians is the section on APUSH’s digital learning components, “which threaten to transform the teaching of college-level American history […] into a perversely dehumanized transaction.”7 By turning APUSH curriculum into a series of bloodless, highly regimented learning modules, Abrams argues, the AP Classroom computer program rids teachers of the flexibility and depth that make a joy for history possible, all while stripping classrooms of any real ability to build community. The author spares no mercy for the AP English test either, lamenting that students’ free response essays are scored not for their actual quality but by sheer heft. The AP Government test, meanwhile, offers no genuine way to provide civics education. On the surface, these may not seem like novel complaints–books about U.S. education are almost always about schooling done wrong–but Abrams’s experience with a couple of these subjects anchors her criticism in a genuine pedagogical perspective. In other words: Abrams is still a working teacher, and rather than cast a journalistic gaze or pundit’s ire, her complaints stem from how these tests undermine her ability to do meaningful work.8
If Abrams portrays anyone as a villain in her book, it would be the current College Board CEO, David Coleman. A key force behind the deeply hated Common Core program, Coleman comes across as a fun-house Conant, the cynical head of a giant company profiting from American secondary curriculum being increasingly reliant on the types of assessments his company just so happens to sell. Getting schools hooked on additional digital instruction programs ultimately pads the College Board’s profits. As Abrams reveals, AP programming is not just the problem of overachieving teens angling for slots at a couple dozen prestigious universities. From Kentucky to Arkansas to Massachusetts, state governments have attempted to solve their budgetary shortfalls for K-12 and college education by hitching their wagons to AP testing. The consequences–from an educational, civic, or business perspective–are dire.
Most histories of standardized testing are dreadful internal affairs, the product of institutions celebrating their own achievements without any concern for compelling narrative or engaging details. The men helming these institutions were fuddy duddies, prone to turgid prose and stentorian proclamations. Those few genuinely historical works that reach the public–Nicolas Lemann’s work The Big Test standing far above the rest–are cited almost reflexively. Abrams builds from Lemann, Jerome Karabel, and a couple other staples without anything in Shortchanged feeling like a retread.
There are few things less enjoyable than reading someone’s list of what they would have done differently than an author or an artist, particularly in a review. That said, I wish Abrams did not title the first half “Validity” without explaining what that inside baseball term is.9 I wish Abrams did not use “contra” so frequently because it turned some points into a logic puzzle. I wish Abrams had cited me. Oh well. If there is any shortcoming with Shortchanged, it is one that Abrams readily admits: both the tests and policy stemming from these tests are bound to change on short notice.10 Standardized tests are products and institutions of higher education are businesses. It is in the College Board and colleges’ best interest to keep core products novel.
The political economy of higher education is also at play. Who can forget last year’s liberal embrace of Advanced Placement testing as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his copycats accused the AP Psych course of trafficking in gender indoctrination and AP African American studies of summoning the end-times for white people? In a moment where wannabe authoritarian governors are stripping university systems of tenure, pundits lambaste any secondary curricula that accurately depicts Black history, astroturf vigilantes swarm school boards in a fit of trans panic, and funders threaten closing up shop whenever genocide is accurately depicted as such, it should not be surprising that certain elite schools are once again embracing the use of standardized college entrance exams in their admissions. It is their version of “tough on crime” campaigning, a gambit to seem tough while a vocal minority of Americans believe colleges are turning young people into soft lefty queers. At a moment where a better future could not only be imagined but realized–where the material and social conditions for embarking on a utopian vision of education seemed more than possible–elite schools and liberal politicians alike closed ranks, afraid of the risk of profound social change. Whenever academics lament that journalists often reduce higher education into the court intrigue of the Ivy League, they might also want to recall that college admission testing has adjusted our focus that way for decades.
- As these pundits’ reasoning often goes, SAT scores have a higher predictive validity than a high school record. In other words: the SAT can better point toward what a student’s college GPA will probably be. The SAT may also capture talented working-class, poor, and/or minority students often left out of elite student bodies. But it’s always the snake eating its own tail, or maybe the dog eating its own shit: what, exactly, is the meaningful life difference between a 3.4 and a 3.6 GPA? Why is the presence of a B on a college record suddenly worth a lot more than it is in high school? Have colleges magically avoided grade inflation? Why are elite schools off the hook for admitting so many legacy applicants, or wealthy students willing to pay a full price tag? Why is it important what the admissions offices at a dozen schools do when students have over 2,000 options for four-year degrees–plenty of which are at least halfway decent? If it isn’t a wealth test, despite decades of evidence saying it very much is, how can you summarily dismiss a correlation without suggesting the SAT actually measures innate skills? Or was that the goal all along?
- Annie Abrams, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), 5.
- Abrams, 11.
- Abrams, 20.
- “Progressive education” is a term that isn’t entirely self-evident, and it doesn’t help that its critics repeatedly turned it into a catch-all bogeyman for social ills. The term actually refers to a pedagogical approach that largely emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries–parallel to the Progressive Era and pragmatist philosophy but not entirely in lockstep with either. Dewey’s writings are at the helm of this movement, so sometimes invoking Dewey becomes useful shorthand for these educational practices. Building from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work on schooling and child-rearing, progressive education centered students and emphasized practical knowledge over universal truths. Rather than rote memorization and strict schoolmaster discipline, progressive education stressed the open encouragement of inquiry-driven learning anchored in a youth’s experiences with their surrounding environment. Schools were thus sites of social change–no small claim as public education became a nationwide standard for white children. Even as this emphasis on individualism and self-expression lost its earlier radical edges, progressive education’s many critics accused its adherents of creating anything from generations of leftists, weaklings, and dimwits. For an overview of what progressive education was–and, just as importantly, was not–check out: Lawrence A. Cremin, “John Dewey and the Progressive-Education Movement,” The School Review 67, no. 2 (Summer, 1959): 160-173; William J. Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): vi, 1-24; and Erin A. Hopkins, “John Dewey and Progressive Education,” Journal of Educational Thought 50, no. 1 (Winter, 2017): 59-68.
- Abrams, 30.
- Abrams, 105.
- This isn’t to shortchange Jonathan Kozol or Diane Ravitch, both of whom have been long-standing critics of many U.S. educational practices. But neither are K-12 teachers, so their sense of authority simply comes from a different place.
- So I don’t risk the same problem, “validity” refers to whether a standardized test actually measures what it is supposed to measure. A test is valid if there is a high correlation between test-takers’ performance and the skill at hand. For example, if a standardized biology test doesn’t seem to accurately measure test-takers’ scientific skills, it isn’t really valid. Predictive validity is something slightly different–and it’s usually cause for most of the commotion about testing. Predictive validity indicates whether a standardized test accurately gauges a future measurement. For the SAT, that would be a student’s first year GPA at college and, to a lesser degree, their retention to sophomore year. The debate has never really been “Does the SAT (or other college admission exams) predict early college success and, in turn, likelihood of graduation?” That would be strawman nonsense because, yes, someone scoring above 1400 is going to be much more likely to do well in college than someone scoring a 950. Rather, honest debate is over whether the SAT, AP tests, the ACT–whatever the testing prerequisite for college–are worthwhile predictors on their own and, if they aren’t, whether their added value to a student’s high school grades gives us any truly meaningful insights. This is also where you find psychologists getting into the nitty gritty of what, exactly, is the relationship between statistically significant findings and practically meaningful findings. See: The Center of Standards & Assessment Implementation, “CSAI Update: Valid and Reliable Assessments,” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED588476.pdf; and Paul A. Westrick, et al, “Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year Grades and Retention to the Second Year,” College Board (May, 2019).
- Even pop culture and, forgive me, “The Discourse” around testing can turn on a dime. Remember the college admissions and SAT cheating scandal Operation Varsity Blues? Convicted felon Lori Loughlin? “Ruh roh”? At the time, I had recently finished my PhD and had just made the decision to quit pursuing academic positions. I cannot tell you how disorienting it was to spend a few months desperately trying to put a decade of research behind me while seemingly every freelancer was chasing fifty or a hundred bucks rattling off variations of the same thinkpiece: “How Aunt Becky’s Mediocre Child Shows Us that the SAT Has Always Been a Wealth Test (and Why That Matters.”) Have you ever had people explain your own work to you–rather, at you, but rather poorly and missing the actual point? That was 2019 for me.
