"The SAT Is Not Fair" -- The New York Times Magazine, March 9, 2014

My high school class (1957) must have been among the last lot of graduates to matriculate in college or university without being subjected to the now much-criticized SAT. We simply applied to the institutions of our various choices, and most of us were accepted by them. We were off to such academic destinations the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Dartmouth, Michigan Tech, Central Michigan and Albion College. 

Despite the sometimes exceptional instruction we enjoyed in our younger years from teachers who meant business, we were not exactly on the A-list of recruits for the Harvards and Princetons of the nation's academic stratosphere. We hailed from a small northern Michigan village and its "rural agricultural high school."

How and why I was taken in and awarded a modest scholarship by Albion College is apparently unknown now to any living person. I sat for no entrance examination, composed no personal essay -- as is now a mandated rite of passage into the realm of higher education -- and with a No. 2 pencil filled in no bubbles next the legend "NONE OF THE ABOVE."

It was fortunate that, thanks to my father, I had developed the habit of reading at an early age, sometimes omnivorously when it was either too hot or too cold to go out and play. Neither snow nor rain was a trouble. By the time of my 15th birthday, I had read the Twain canon,  "The Adventures of Robin Hood," some of the "Little Dorrit" series, a battery of Poe short stories, part of "The Last of the Mohicans" and a junior-grade biography of Abraham Lincoln.

After father's wont, I read the daily newspaper pretty much front to back, followed the 1952 GOP standoff between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft, and, once Eisenhower had been anointed, kept close track of the first of his triumphs over Adlai Stevenson. I was then 13. My mother's untimely death a year later drove me further into bookwormdom as a means of escape. (See above.) Nina Gaylord, the town librarian, was quietly kind in allowing me to check out books beyond the usual limit of three.

Being fortunate in the seventh and eighth grades of grammar school to have had the late Leonard C. Bailey as my teacher and, later, a great man by the name of John C. Young for high school literature classes -- and in between a couple of years of Latin under the exacting tutelage of Muriel McFarland Neeland -- I was as ready as I would ever be to dip my toe into the faster moving waters of collegiate studies.

Was I ready for such a college as Albion was in September 1957? Probably not by today's standards. In truth, I was in many ways as innocent as a dove and far from acquiring the serpent's wiles.

My first freshman English essay baffled Associate Professor Elsie Munro. All the words were English. Every sentence had its subject and predicate. The piece featured no glaring grammatical flaws. Yet she could not figure out what I was saying because I had not figured it out myself before the nib of my Esterbrook was put to the page. With her kind ministrations, I soon became more fluent in composition, and thus was loosed a logorrhea that has yet to be stanched. You are even now having a sample of it.

If, in 1957, Albion College had demanded as the price of admission a passing score on something like the SAT, I think I would not have been welcome there.

The question is this: Is there a better way to forecast how well a high schooler will fare in the big-time of college than requiring his or her submission to the dreaded SAT or another such instrument?

Having served a couple of terms on the alumni board of my alma mater and having heard the complaints of faculty about how awful it is to have to teach students unprepared for the undergraduate regimen, I get why it is that the SAT is considered important. As one younger member of the faculty put it, "It helps winnow out the chaff."

I've taught at the university level -- once as an adjunct instructor in philosophy, later in journalism and English composition. My experience, taking one class with another, was not always brilliant. Especially near the end of my teaching years, students were generally uninspired and uninspiring. Mostly I taught neither journalism nor writing of any kind. Apropos of my long ago encounter with Miss Munro, I saw that I had to teach students first how to think.

That endeavor was the most frustrating of all, because our American educational systems are a combination of filling stations and how-to sessions. We attempt to force-feed our children and young people with information that may or may not be relevant to anything but what this test or that may require in the moment. Then we arm them with techniques. We do not teach them to think critically, neither to analyze propositions nor to figure out what is important and what is not.

The most revealing test to which I ever had to submit was the oral comprehensive examination for my graduate degree, which involved a defense of a thesis I had written on a certain Hebrew word. In a two-and-half hour grilling, I found myself synthesizing much that I had absorbed during those all-important years, occasionally in almost collegial disputation with my betters.

Virtually undone by the end, I waited almost beside myself outside the room in which my examiners were deciding my fate. In due course, the door was opened and I was bidden to enter. After some shuffling of papers, one of the professors smiled broadly and said, "Well, Cook, we gave you Distinction," which was the highest attainable grade.