Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester looks at the man who transformed Harvard — and our entire university system — by introducing the SAT:
The son of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft, Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1905 to privilege, albeit the sort based more in erudition than wealth. Chauncey was also a gifted athlete, and his baseball exploits at Groton and Harvard attracted an offer to play professionally for the Boston Braves.Chauncey instead accepted an offer after graduation as an assistant Harvard dean and temporary Harvard baseball coach. There, becoming more and more interested in why Harvard was churning out such lackluster graduates, Chauncey found his patron in Conant, a Harvard president who had already caused controversy among alumni by articulating his vision of a student body primarily comprising students with superior academic achievement, regardless of wealth or social status.
One of Conant’s motivations was creating what Thomas Jefferson had coined a “natural aristocracy,” a ruling elite self-selected by intelligence and ability, not lineage. Chauncey’s observations of Harvard classes full of mundane underachievers and Conant’s vision of a better America built by the nation’s best thinkers perfectly coalesced. All they needed was the mechanism to bring their dream society about.
In his research on standardized tests, Chauncey chanced upon the SAT, an obscure mutation of an IQ test that had been developed at Princeton University. Chauncey retooled it to focus primarily on verbal and math skills, and in 1934 he presented it to Conant as their new tool to find the best students in America and bring them to Harvard. By 1941, Harvard required the SAT for all applicants.
World War II helped bring the test into the mainstream. Strapped for officer candidates and with no good way to identify and promote so many leaders so quickly, the Army and Navy contracted with Chauncey in 1943 to give a one-day SAT test to over 300,000 people across the country for help in officer selection. Chauncey’s ability to pull off this logistical feat illustrated the potential for using the SAT to assess high school students nationwide.
Chauncey left Harvard in 1945 to create ETS, a company to manage the test and bring it to a national audience.