Henry Chauncey

Henry Chauncey (February 9, 1905 – December 3, 2002) was a founder and the first president of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). As a Harvard University administrator, he helped popularize the use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test in college admissions.

Early life and education Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, New York to the Reverend Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and Edith Lockwood Taft Chauncey. Although Chauncey's father was an Episcopalian, he came from a long Puritan lineage; his ancestors on his father's side included Charles Chauncy, president of Harvard College from 1654 to 1671. The Chaunceys originally descended from Norman nobility that participated in William the Conqueror's 1066 conquest of England.

In 1913, the Chaunceys moved to Columbus, Ohio when Egisto became the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. By this time the family had lost much of its old wealth.

Chauncey returned to the East Coast when he won a scholarship to Groton School, his father's old boarding school. Groton had recently begun offering scholarships by competitive examination, but its exams bore little resemblance to modern standardized tests. Sample questions from the 1921 exam included "Name month and year when United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany", "Name three animals that hibernate", and "How is vinegar made?"

Since his parents could not afford to send him to Harvard, Chauncey returned to Columbus after high school and spent his freshman year at Ohio State University, where he studied psychology under Herbert Toops, an early proponent of standardized testing. He transferred to Harvard after Groton's headmaster arranged for Wall Street financier Clarence Dillon to subsidize his Harvard tuition. An excellent athlete, Chauncey lettered in football and baseball at Harvard (he declined an offer to turn professional with the Boston Braves) and was elected class president. Toops hoped that the exam would be predictive of freshman grades, which (at least for Chauncey) it was. For Chauncey, this ignited a lifelong interest in "the application of objective tests to college admission." After transferring to Harvard, Chauncey continued studying the emerging science of testing under Philip Rulon. He was particularly fascinated by a Carnegie Foundation study that found that standardized testing was only weakly correlated with a student's real-life level of education, suggesting that "students' educational achievement could be scientifically measured across a long range of schools." he soon realized that his reforms had drastically increased the number of Jewish students at Harvard and began looking for ways to limit Jewish enrollment (see Jewish quota). He implemented subjective policies such as applicant interviews, teacher recommendations, and character references, which gave Harvard's admissions office discretion to choose well-born gentile students over academically superior Jewish students.

Introduction of the SAT Lowell died in 1933 and was succeeded by James Bryant Conant, who was more interested than Lowell in improving the academic quality of the undergraduate student body. He led the organization until his retirement in 1970. In 1940, Harvard accepted 76 out of 77 applicants from the St. Grottlesex schools.

During Chauncey's years at ETS, the SAT evolved from an Ivy League scholarship examination into a national allocator of student talent. The postwar government expanded the pool of students who could afford college by backing student loans (Higher Education Act of 1965) and providing G.I. Bill funding for veterans. As such, many more college admissions offices were facing the same problem that Chauncey had faced at Harvard: how to evaluate students from around the country. University admissions became significantly more competitive, pressuring out many students from the Ivy League's traditional feeder schools: a 1969 study of 14 private feeder high schools found that while 52% of their alumni matriculated to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in 1953, the figure had more than halved to 25% by 1967. Educational historian Nicholas Lemann wrote that Chauncey "work[ed] ceaselessly to replace the elite he grew up in with a new elite that he probably wouldn't have been in."

Chauncey was not inflexible about the use of standardized testing. At ETS, Chauncey periodically considered supplementing the SAT with a wider battery of personality and psychological tests, which were not implemented. In addition, according to Chauncey's son Sam (who later became an admissions officer at Yale), Chauncey acknowledged that the SAT did not perfectly gauge intellectual promise since students from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds tended to perform better on the test. Chauncey also felt that in contrast to the 1930s and 1940s, improving data about individual high schools across the country made it easier for admissions offices to evaluate report cards from a diverse range of secondary schools without recourse to a standardized test.