Why I Hate the SAT: A Modern Look at a System of Racial and Socioeconomic Oppression from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

So I took an SAT over the weekend. And it reminded me how much I despise that test.

The SAT was first invented by a man named Carl Brigham, a psychologist from Princeton University, in the early 1920’s and first administered to high school students in 1926. At first, the SAT was used to test students for scholarships to attend Ivy League schools, like Harvard and Princeton, but, in the late 1940’s, it became a universal test that many colleges and universities required their prospective students to take. This institution is obviously still in effect now. Though the SAT was meant to create an educational establishment of equal opportunity, the exam has long been criticized for cultural and class bias, creating a system in which the rich and the white secure all the benefits and the poor and the nonwhite are suppressed still, the same system that victimizes Pecola and the rest of the African-American community in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

The SAT is clearly a very important test for high-schoolers around the country and therefore, a lot of time and effort is put into obtaining the highest score possible. However, it wasn’t initially supposed to be that way. John Bryant Conant, the man who started the SAT scholarship program in the 1930’s, had a vision for a classless and democratic society that would be run by those who were the most talented and intelligent, as determined by Brigham’s test. This “meritocracy” would be a “natural aristocracy,” a system which would allow anyone, whether they be a poor immigrant from the Midwest or a rich white kid from the East Coast, to rise up in the educational and therefore socioeconomic system of the United States. His idea was pretty much the epitome of the American Dream, shiny and hopeful like the ideal lifestyle Morrison uses to preface her own novel: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy” (1). These expectations of achieving the American Dream are instilled in children at a very young age as they are literally educated in societal norms by reading Dick & Jane readers, promising not only a standard of living, but happiness.

The white picket fence

Yale University

Unfortunately for Conant, his vision did not turn out that way he had hoped because nowadays, the SAT has become a sort of obsession for high-schoolers and their parents, dominating most of the students’ junior years in a way that’s anything but natural. Various SAT study books, group sessions, vocabulary flashcards, and private tutors and coaches have materialized in the past decade or so, with parents handing their money out and these companies raking in the dough. The race to get a perfect 2400 has become one the fiercest, most ridiculous, competitions in the entire country, with some kids taking the SAT 6,7, maybe even 10 times. People wholeheartedly believe that their SAT score is a ticket to the rest of their life. Somewhere along the way, the American Dream changed from the white picket fence to acing a standardized test. The idyllic, yet somewhat naïve idea of Conant’s has been warped and twisted into a system of nonsense, the way the that the Dick & Jane reader is when Morrison picks it apart by removing the grammar, revealing that the idea of the perfect American Dream is actually utter gibberish when it is not carefully planned out and constructed. But the people in this country are still under the influence of this system, especially since the most affluent colleges in the country, namely those of the Ivy League, require high test scores to even consider admittance. The Ivy’s themselves have a long history associated with wealth, whiteness, social elitism, and an administration that keeps the powerful in power. This is the same system Claudia tries to understand when she deconstructs her white doll, trying to figure out why adults say, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy,’ you may have it” (21). Just as the “whiteness” is meant to be desired in Claudia’s time, an Ivy League education is meant to be desired in ours.

There’s a famous question used specifically to criticize the SAT test itself for class bias. In the 90’s, there used to be analogy problems, comparisons between two objects or ideas, and the one in question asked which pair of words would best match the relationship between “runner” and “marathon.” It turns out the correct answer was “oarsman” and “regatta,” words that carry the same sort of connotation as say, the word “yacht.” Someone from an upper-class background who has experience with such ritzy sports would easily manage to answer the question, but a lower-class student would probably never have been exposed to a sporting event consisting of a series of boat races. In fact, it was later determined that while 53% of white students managed to answer the question correctly, only 22% black students could, highlighting a deeply disappointing disparity between opportunities for white and black students, even in the post-Civil Rights era. As Williams articulates in his poem “The Yachts,” the poor are “bodies thrown recklessly in the way…their cries rising/ in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.”

Perhaps most conspicuously, the whole “test prep” notion has become insane. Other than the multiple $30 test prep workbook that students are encouraged to buy and use (College Board’s Study Guide, The Princeton Review, Barron’s, Kaplan Review, just to name a few), there are online courses, and The Princeton Review holds SAT “small group instruction” starting at $1,500 and private tutoring starting at $2,700 - just ridiculously large amounts of money. There are very few free training opportunities, available online, so a student must have Internet access to retrieve them in the first place. And despite the College Board’s continued objection to the accusation that the SAT is “coachable” (SATmyths), wealthier families, the people who have access to these expensive service, have been shown to do better on the SAT year after year, and it’s not hard to conclude that the money has something to do with it. The SAT is now like a test that can be bought, obliterating the idea of meritocracy, and reinstating the aristocracy. And anyone who has the money or the opportunities will spend it on these amenities, trying to gain a sense of security, even if it means furthering the socioeconomic gap between the test scores of the poor and the rich. If Geraldine were living in this decade, she would definitely buy her son Junior all the test help he could get to further detach him from the racial stereotypes he would experience as a black boy taking the SAT. In The Bluest Eye, Geraldine represents the group of black girls with opportunity who go out of their way to change themselves in order to pass as white. Parallel to spending thousands of dollars on test prep, “they wash themselves with orange-colored Lifebuoy soap, dust themselves with cashmere bouquet talc, clean their teeth with salt on a piece of rag, soften their skin with Jergen’s lotion. They smell like wood, newspapers, and vanilla. They straighten their hair with Dixie Peach, and part it on the side. At night they curl it in paper from brown bags, tie a print scarf around their heads, and sleep with their hands folded across their stomachs” (82). Geraldine puts in a great deal of meticulous effort and money to gain security in a society where whiteness is safer than blackness. But Geraldine is not the villain here, because Morrison is critiquing a binary system of racial identification that victimizes these women into choosing on side or another. Although not taking advantage of the overpriced test preparation could show that one is taking a stand against the system, it is safer to take the advantage if it is available. 

So not only is the SAT inherently corrupt, but the resulting scores also often have harmful effects on the students who take them, because students tend to define their academic ability based on this single definition of what is “intelligent.”  Likewise, the members of the Breedlove family are convinced they are “aggressively ugly” due to the fact that their physical features do not coincide with the likes of Shirley Temple, who would apparently score a 2400 on the “scale of absolute beauty” in Morrison’s novel, in which a white face, blond hair, and blue eyes are the perfect score (122, 50). In their eyes, the “low irregular hairlines…keen but crooked noses, with insolent nostrils…high cheekbones, their ears turned forward” and “shapely lips,” when compared with the norms of beauty present in “every billboard, every movie, every glance,” are akin to scoring a 1277 (the average score for African-American SAT-takers in 2010) when a high-pressure society is telling students across the country that anything lower than a 1500 means that they aren’t good enough for college, that they are below average (39). 

It is from this “conviction,” in many senses, that elitism is propagated in direct contradiction with the egalitarian meritocracy that Conant imagined when he was working on integrating the SAT into education system of the United States. The conviction that a perfect SAT score is the ticket to the American Dream and the fact that this dream is far easier to achieve for those with resources help foster the idea that those people are inherently more intelligent than everyone else, especially when compared to the worst of the worst. In fact, when juxtaposed with Pecola, Claudia says, “we were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we has a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205). However, in regards to the SAT, this superiority came at a time when Civil Rights had asserted themselves, and many people had fought for the idea that “black is beautiful,” that blacks were just as qualified in all aspects of life. So the College Board went a step forward in asserting racial superiority, in a way that was much more subtle and indirect: affirmative action. This highly controversial idea was introduced to universities in the late 1970’s and the idea was basically to consider race as a factor in the admissions process in order to benefit a minority group by “saving them seats” in the universities, even if there were not enough highly qualified candidates to fill all those seats. Though there are practical benefits to this practice – giving minorities, specifically African-Americans and Hispanics, a better chance of gaining a higher education – the problem with this system is on a more ideological level. Affirmative action is basically telling minorities, ”You are ugly people” that need our help to get anywhere in life (39). And in response, “’Yes,’ they had said. ‘You are right.’ And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.” The racial self-loathing aided by affirmative action only strengthens the system of oppression that keeps minorities and the lower class in their place, as the wealthy and white ahead, with an ever-widening gap between them.

Now all that being said, it seems that we all still have to spend 5 hours on typically gorgeous Saturday mornings sitting in classrooms taking this assessment of our skills that will somewhat define us, whether we like it  or not. It doesn't matter if we completely disagree with the way this test gauges intelligence, we're still caught in the system. And as high schoolers in a society that judges merit based on college degrees that ironically are only obtainable by taking the SAT, there isn't much we can do about it. So for those of you that still have some SAT's or ACT's or AP's or any standardized tests to take, here's a funny video wishing you luck while cleverly pointing out the institution's flaws. (Notice how the Asian boy is wearing a Harvard sweatshirt while singing this - perpetrating stereotypes anyone?):