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The Book of the Week is “Test Pilot, How I Broke Testing Barriers…” by Stanley H. Kaplan with Anne Farris, published in 2001.
Kaplan was born in 1919 in Brooklyn, NY. In the last several decades he parlayed his passion for teaching into a big-name corporate entity in America. Kaplan began a tutoring business in his hometown and added the service of preparing students for the New York State Regents exams. In 1946, he added the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” (SAT).
At that time, the SAT’s original purpose was to provide a criterion based on merit (rather than white male privilege) by which colleges would accept students. The test was supposed to be predictive of a student’s first six months of higher education. Supposedly, the SAT was not the kind of test one could study for. It tested aptitude– “developed abilities” acquired from life-experience.
In 1947, the College Board (a trade group that monitored higher education in the United States) created the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to administer the SAT and other tests. ETS is a nonprofit organization. More and more WWII veterans were taking the SAT in order to get accepted to the college of their choice, and have the GI Bill pay their tuition. More and more colleges were considering the SAT in their admissions process.
The hegemony of the College Board was such that it wouldn’t tell students (and their parents) their SAT scores. The scores were sent directly to the colleges to which students applied.
The author wrote that in the 1960’s, “I still supported the use of admissions tests along with grades as the best predictors of success because grade inflation was rampant.” That decade, Kaplan expanded his company’s service lines to include test-prep for the PSAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, DAT and MCAT. It also did test-prep for medical-school board exams, the passing of which was required prior to graduation.
In the early 1980’s, Kaplan’s business was allowed to take on a duty of the Immigration and Naturalization Service– a federal agency. At that time, there was a shortage of medical doctors in America, so Kaplan issued visas to foreign students to study medicine in this country. There were students from Vietnam, Syria, and Russia, among others. Fortunately, Kaplan also offered test-prep for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).
There were controversies through the decades. Kaplan wrote, “I realized that the SAT wasn’t biased; inferior education in America was biased… I saw firsthand at my own centers what a difference small classes, higher expectations, and individual attention made in students’ academic achievement.”
It appeared Kaplan did have bragging rights in that he built a billion-dollar business, and truly loved teaching. It is possible the test-prep trend he started, DID actually help reduce education inequality across the country by imparting basic skills to underprivileged students (with scholarships) whose under-resourced school districts failed them. In other words, his test-prep business was a stand-in for providing basic education for students who wanted to learn but couldn’t, at their poor-quality local schools.
However, it is impossible to prove whether or by how much, students can raise their standardized test scores by taking-prep classes, as the statistics on the students are trade secrets, and there has been propaganda from all the different stakeholders from the get-go, on all the standardized tests.
The reader might notice that the original name of Kaplan’s business was “Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center Ltd.” That “Ltd.” means it was incorporated NOT in the United States, but in the UK or some other offshore tax shelter, and a place that would minimize the company’s having to defend against lawsuits!
Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the author’s business history, and his philosophy.