secrets of the sat
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derek bok

He is co-author of The Shape of the River and a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a former president of Harvard University and former dean of the Harvard Law School.

William G. Bowen

He is the co-author of The Shape of the River and President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is a former president of Princeton University.

Henry Chauncey

He was the first director of the Educational Testing Service and an assistant dean of admissions under Harvard president James Conant. Together, Conant and Chauncey were instrumental in the 30's and 40's in establishing the broad use of standardized testing in the U.S.

Jonathan Grayer

He is President and CEO of Kaplan Educational Centers, the country's largest test preparation business. The company claims to have helped 3 million students study for the SAT over the past 60 years.

Lani Guinier

She is a professor of law at Harvard University and has written about the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and its limitations in predicting success in law school and after. She is the author of Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice.

Christopher Jencks

He is professor of social policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap, a compilation of the most recent research on the gap between black students' and white students' performance on standardized tests.

John Katzman

He is President and founder of the Princeton Review which boasts helping 100,000 students each year prepare for the SAT. The company employs a how-to-beat-the-test approach to taking the SAT.

Bob Laird

He is Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nicholas Lemann

He is a journalist and author of The Big Test-The Secret History of the American Meritocracy which examines American meritocracy and how, after World War II, the SAT test became the ticket for entry into America's ruling class.

Lisa Muehle

She is a professional tutor and founder of the Laguna Beach-based Cambridge Academic Services. It offers an after-school SAT prep class that starts as early as the seventh grade.

Terence Pell

He is senior counsel at the Center for Individual Rights, the law firm which is suing the University of Michigan over its undergraduate affirmative action policies. CIR represented Cheryl Hopwood in the Hopwood v. Texas lawsuit, which in 1996 led the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to rule that the University of Texas law school could not take race into consideration in admitting students.

Bob Schaeffer

He is Public Education Director of FairTest, a standardized test watchdog group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Claude Steele

He is a professor of social psychology at Stanford University. Steele and his colleagues have described what they call "stereotype threat"--the idea that students who belong to groups that have been negatively stereotyped are likely to perform less well in situations such as standardized tests in which they feel they are being evaluated through the lens of that stereotype.

Robert Sternberg

He is a Yale University professor of psychology and education and a researcher of human intelligence. He is the author of Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life, in which he argues for broadening the definition of intelligence and creating new tools to measure it.

Abigail Thernstrom

She is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education . She is co-author of America in Black and White-One Nation Indivisible.

John Yoo

He is professor at Boalt Law School, University of California, Berkeley and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He favors a race neutral admissions policy.



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