Anyone who's even considered going to college has had to deal with the Education Testing Service (ETS) and its stress-inducing representative, the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Yet despite its familiarity to so many Americans, the SAT remains a mysterious and somewhat suspicious function of modern society. Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test, a vividly detailed, acronym-filled, and highly enjoyable account of the rise of the ETS, the SAT, and what he calls the "meritocracy," may change all that. The book illustrates the idealistic yet highly flawed reasoning that went into the creation of the SAT, and how standardized testing has changed American life. The book opens with two key figures, James Bryant Conant (a president of Harvard) and Henry Chauncey (the first head of the ETS), and their quest to dissolve what Lemann terms the "Episcopacy," the guaranteed social advancement of a white, male, WASP elite through the ranks of the nation's best private universities. With the advent of the IQ test in Europe, Chauncey was inspired to create a test that could somehow predict scholastic achievement. However, instead of offering the less prominent citizens of the South and Midwest an equal chance at higher education, Chauncey and later Conant decide that test results would be best applied to pick out America's best and brightest so they can be placed on a privileged fast track. Eventually, this dubious strategy was ignored, and the SAT became a way to break the wealthy boys-club homogeneity of schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Lemann's book reads like an alternate history of the United States in the 20th century, told not from the perspective of prominent success stories but those who determine just who will succeed. The Big Test is a virtual epic of social advancement, chronicling the advent and tentative application of achievement tests and continuing with anecdotal illustrations of how those tests offered blacks, Asians, Jews, and women a chance at success long denied them. But Lemann also writes of how this new meritocracy may be just another version of the old elite, and how the weight of the SATs may have corrupted its original intent. The debate still rages over how fair the tests are and how the meritocracy may merely be another means of class discrimination, and Lemann moves right up to the present in his illuminating view of the politics of American education.