Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520310964

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TESTING TESTING

TESTING TESTING SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE EXAMINED LIFE

F. ALLAN HANSON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California First Paperback Printing 1994 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanson, F. Allan, 1 9 3 9 Testing testing : social consequenccs of the examined life / F. Allan Hanson, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08648-1 1. Self-perception—Social aspects—United States. 2. Examinations—United States—Psychological aspects. 3. Examinations—Social aspects—United States. 4. Examinations— History. 5. Social control. I. Title. BF697.5.S43H365 1993 150'.28'7—dc20 92-32639 CIP Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 8 4 . ©

To Louise

We are entering examination

the age of the

and of compulsory Michel Foucault,

Discipline

and Punish

infinite objectification.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 1

ix

Introduction: Infinite Examination

1

P A R T I: A U T H E N T I C I T Y T E S T S 2

Before S c i e n c e : T h e E a r l y H i s t o r y of A u t h e n t i c i t y T e s t i n g 23

3

Lie D e t e c t i o n

4

No Sanctuary

5

Testing a n d the W a r on Drugs

6

From D r u g Control to M i n d Control

53 92 121

P A R T II: Q U A L I F Y I N G T E S T S 7

T h e F o r e s t of P e n c i l s

8

Willing, Ready, a n d Able: Vocational Testing 222

9

"Artificial" Intelligence

10

185

249

Conclusion: M a n the Measured

284

Appendix: Drug Testing Tables

317

Notes

327

References Index

375

353

151

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For financial support connected with this project, I thank the University of Kansas for sabbatical leave, an intrauniversity visiting professorship, and grants from the General Research Fund. I am also grateful for a grant from the Spencer Foundation. I conducted research on testing in New York and Paris during the 1988-89 academic year, and I would like to thank Columbia University's Department of Anthropology and the UFR-CIS at the University of Paris-Val de Marne for extending every hospitality and courtesy to me. In various stages of its development, parts or all of the manuscript have been read and commented on by Robert Antonio, Daniel Batson, E. F. Corwin, Jr., Helen Dee, George Hanson, Katherine Hanson, Mary Catherine Keslar, Richard King, Fransje Knops, Harvey Molotch, Jane Olsen, Michelle Tullier, and Carol Warren. To all of them, I wish to express my gratitude for criticism and helpful suggestions. Louise Hanson has been at the heart of every project over the last three decades, sometimes as joint author and sometimes as silent partner. For this study, she carried out research in the folklore of testing, medieval judicial procedures, tests in popular magazines, and the history of the university. She read widely in the pertinent theory, and all aspects of the analysis have been regular topics of discussion between us for nearly five years. Her constant love, fierce loyalty, ebullient humor, and uncompromising criticism inform every facet of my life and thought. She also plays a mean game of tennis.

ix

1 INTRODUCTION: INFINITE

EXAMINATION

The unexamined

life is not worth

living.

Socrates

America is awash in tests. Some nursery schools require the toddlers who would attend them to pass an entrance examination. That is just the beginning of an endless torrent of tests that will probe every corner of their nature and behavior for the rest of their lives. A faculty member at Columbia University spoke of a friend who was planning to begin graduate studies after having been out of school for several years. The professor asked whether she was anxious about the Graduate Record Examination, a standardized test required for admission to graduate school. "Well," was the response, "I'm an American. I was born to be tested." This book is about how our addiction to testing influences both society and ourselves as socially defined persons. The analysis focuses on tests of people, particularly tests in schools, intelligence tests, vocational interest tests, lie detection, integrity tests, and drug tests. Diagnostic psychiatric tests and medical tests are included only tangentially.1 A good deal of the descriptive material will be familiar to readers from their personal experience as takers and/or givers of tests. But testing, as with much of ordinary life, has implications that we seldom pause to ponder and often do not even notice. My aim is to uncover in the everyday operation

INTRODUCTION

of testing a series of well-concealed and mostly unintended consequences that exercise far deeper and more pervasive influence in social life than is commonly recognized. This is an anthropological study, and it proceeds by the method that I term "institutional analysis." In this method, social institutions—the ways of organizing people into networks, relationships, and groups and the modes of behaving, thinking, and believing that are shared and customary in a society—are viewed as things in their own right. They may be analyzed in terms of their own histories, patterns of development, structures, and meanings. Although social institutions exist only in what the people who make up a society think and do, those people are often unable to say what the institutions are, how they are organized, how they work, or what consequences they have. They know them by using them and living them, not by discoursing on them. This is anything but surprising, for people no more ponder the peculiar implications of the social institutions they participate in as they go about the business of daily living than they reflect on the grammatical structure of their language as they engage in ordinary conversation, and that applies with special force to the vast numbers who have little awareness of cultures (or languages) other than their own. The anthropologist or sociologist, however, seeks to achieve some distance on social institutions, viewing them analytically and comparatively as constituting one way of life among many. That perspective enables the scholar to recognize and evaluate the far-reaching consequences of particular social institutions on the people whose lives are organized by them.2 Traditionally, anthropologists have focused their attention on small, tribal societies in faraway places. But these propositions about social institutions apply equally to all societies. We are no less products of our social institutions, and no more aware of their structure and consequences, than are the Nuer or the Maori of theirs. In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly joined sociologists in the investigation of how social institutions work at home. The analysis of one's own society is particularly interesting because it reveals extensive (and occasionally disturbing) consequences of behaviors that one had previously taken for

INFINITE EXAMINATION

granted as the "natural" way of doing things. This study explores the place of testing in the structure of contemporary American social institutions and its consequences for us as persons who live in terms of them. Production and Domination The two most important consequences of tests, I will argue, is that they are mechanisms for defining or producing the concept of the person in contemporary society and that they maintain the person under surveillance and domination. In Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, Harold Brodkey writes of his childhood: "But I did well in school and seemed to be peculiarly able to learn what the teacher said—I never mastered a subject, though—and there was the idiotic testimony of those peculiar witnesses, IQ tests: those scores invented me. Those scores were a decisive piece of destiny in that they affected the way people treated you and regarded you; they determined your authority; and if you spoke oddly, they argued in favor of your sanity" (my emphasis). 3 Even more than Brodkey, Victor Serbriakoff was invented by intelligence tests. Told by a teacher at age fifteen that he was a moron, he quit school and worked for years as an unskilled laborer. At age thirty-two he happened to take an intelligence test, which indicated that his IQ (intelligence quotient) was a towering 161. His life changed totally. He tried his hand at inventing and received patents, he wrote books on his favorite topic (not surprisingly, intelligence), and he became chairman of the International Mensa Society, an organization with membership restricted to individuals with IQs over 140.4 The other side of the coin is less publicized, but surely the humiliation and sickening sense of inadequacy brought on by poor performance on tests is a painful memory that millions carry for years. Virtually everyone recalls good or bad experiences with tests—standardized or classroom tests in school or aptitude, lie detector, or drug tests in the armed forces or in connection with a job—and can trace the effect of those experiences on their lives. In a very real sense, tests have invented all of us. They play an 3

INTRODUCTION

important role in determining what opportunities are offered to or withheld from us, they mold the expectations and evaluations that others form of us (and we form of them), and they heavily influence our assessments of our own abilities and worth. Therefore, although testing is usually considered to be a means of measuring qualities that are already present in a person, one of my two central theses is that tests to a significant degree produce the personal characteristics they purport to measure. The social person in contemporary society is not so much described or evaluated by tests as constructed by them. In addition to constructing social persons, tests (and this is my second major thesis) function to control and dominate them. There was a time when people in the West considered themselves to be cradled in the hand of a caring God. Divine love and grace were believed to be such that people could count on forgiveness when they contritely acknowledged, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults.

Today those things which we have done and have not done are monitored by human rather than divine agencies. Information about them is no longer offered in voluntary confessions but is extracted from us "miserable offenders" by tests: tests to determine if we have done our homework, if we can drive an automobile competently, if we have taken drugs, if we have lied, if we were at the scene of a crime, if we have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, and so on ad infinitum. If the conviction of living under God's ever-present gaze served to temper people's behavior previously, we are more perfectly controlled and dominated now because the human agencies that administer the tests are less forgiving than God. They offer or withhold rewards, opportunities, and punishments on the basis of test results. And this pertains not only to offenses we may have committed but even more 4

INFINITE EXAMINATION

important, to educational and other accomplishments that we may have achieved or wish to achieve. This is the basis for a remarkable advance made by testing in the field of social control: it enlists people as willing accomplices in their own surveillance and domination. The system is set up in such a way that if people hope to reach their goals, they must actively strive to comply with expectations embedded in tests regarding what they should and should not do. It is not news that persons are defined, conditioned, and controlled by social institutions. This happens in all societies and is routinely accomplished everywhere by child-rearing practices and various techniques of education and behavior regulation. All societies also have techniques for generating knowledge about people. The conduct of social life necessitates that people know something of each other, if for no other reason than to know who can be trusted with confidences and who cannot, or whom to charge with specialized tasks of healing, religion, political leadership, or defense. What is unique about testing is that it has brought knowledge, control, and the social definition of the person to a new level of perfection and totality. Never before has any society deployed such a rich and ingenious panoply of dedicated techniques to scan, weigh, peruse, probe, and record the minutiae of its members' personal traits and life experiences. Never before has science, with all the power and prestige that have come to be associated with it, been brought so fully to bear on the problem of generating, storing, and retrieving precise knowledge about so many facets of the human individual. As a result of so much testing, it is certainly fair to say that more knowledge has been accumulated about individuals in contemporary society than at any previous time in history. This knowledge is used to control the behavior of individuals and also to characterize them in terms of their achievements and talents, their physical and mental characteristics, their normalities and abnormalities as measured along innumerable dimensions, many of which were not even recognized a century ago. And, as concrete individuals have been characterized in new and enriched ways, the general definition of what a person is—the social concept of the person—has likewise been transformed.

INTRODUCTION

Most tests are intended to contribute to social ends that are generally reckoned as beneficial, such as equal opportunity, honesty, law-abiding behavior, acquisition of knowledge and skills, identification and development of individual interests and talents, and optimal vocational placement on the basis of such interests, talents, knowledge, and skills for the mutual benefit of the individual and society. But tests do not always serve the purposes for which they were designed. Often they have other, less desirable consequences. For example, serious doubts have been raised about the ability of lie detector and written integrity tests to measure honesty accurately. If these doubts are justified (and I think they are), the use of such tests results in the misclassification of many individuals, with severe damage to their reputations and opportunities to secure employment. Drug tests are only partially effective at identifying drug abusers, but many of the circumstances in which they are used assault the privacy and dignity of those who are forced to undergo them. Intelligence tests are designed in part to promote equal opportunity, but it happens that test scores are perfectly correlated with mean family income: those who score highest on tests have the highest average family income, and those who score lowest come from families with the lowest average income.5 Thus instruments that aim to promote equal opportunity in fact systematically favor the advantaged to the detriment of the disadvantaged. In addition, intelligence tests feed a temptation to assess self-worth by comparing one's performance with that of others. This produces an unhealthy sense of inadequacy among those who do not do well on tests and an equally unhealthy exultation at the expense of others among those who excel. The reason tests often have detrimental consequences for human beings is that they furnish a field where a fundamental contradiction among institutions and values in contemporary society is played out. On the one hand, social institutions have a logical structure and dynamic of their own, and much of history can be read as the development of more perfect manipulation and subordination of human beings and human activities to their (the institutions') ends. This general point of view has been richly developed in social theory by Marxist, structuralist, and post-

INFINITE EXAMINATION

structuralist thinkers—most notably, for the purposes of this study, Michel Foucault. On the other hand, the liberal, democratic ideals of individual autonomy, dignity, and the opportunity for self-actualization rank high among the values of contemporary society. Quite frequently, I will argue, tests are instruments of the evolving system of dominating institutions that act to curtail individual freedom and dignity. Therefore, it is almost inevitable for a study that seeks to explore the human consequences of testing to include a critique and some proposals for how its more destructive effects might be restrained. The most important contribution that a book such as this one can make to that cause is to analyze just what the deleterious aspects of testing are and how they operate. After all, it will scarcely be possible to regulate testing effectively unless its workings and consequences are well understood. In addition to such analysis, at various points in the discussion, more practical short- and long-range solutions will be suggested which might be effective in harnessing some of the more harmful elements of testing. In some cases, testing should simply be stopped. Trial by ordeal, a legal test that required an accused individual to undergo an excruciatingly painful experience such as holding or walking on red-hot iron or plunging an arm into boiling water, had its heyday and was ended. Some contemporary tests are no less destructive than ordeals in the anxiety and suffering (now psychological rather than physical) that they provoke. It is high time to bring this to an end. A significant step in this direction was taken in 1988, when lie detector tests by polygraph and other mechanical devices were outlawed in the private sector. I will argue that similar action can and should be taken against additional kinds of testing, including most drug tests, integrity tests, and intelligence tests. Other uses of testing—for example, for assessment in the schools and for vocational placement—also have their detrimental consequences, but they are so inextricably woven into the fabric of society as currently organized that no simple prohibition of them is feasible. The solutions that I will suggest in these cases require long-range adjustments in a variety of social institutions as well as in testing practices.

"7

INTRODUCTION

Testing in America To say that tests are with us from the cradle to the grave conveys a sense of their ubiquity, but it is an understatement. Prenatal tests such as amniocentesis are used to ascertain some of a person's characteristics (gender, the presence of various defects) prior to birth, and, before that, pregnancy tests are used to determine if somebody is there in the first place. (The chain can be traced back even farther: fertility tests indicate the possibility that somebody might be there in the future.) At the other end, the testing persists beyond death. Autopsies include tests to answer questions such as cause of death, and cadavers are used for a variety of anatomical tests. Human remains are subject to testing almost eternally: archaeologists and their allies test bone, teeth, stomach contents, and anything else they can scrape up in their quest for information about human beings and our evolutionary predecessors from hundreds to literally millions of years after they died. Tests tell us who we are when we are not quite sure. A few months before their nine-year-old daughter Arlena died of congenital heart disease, Ernest and Regina Twigg ordered genetic tests, which proved that she could not be their biological offspring. Suspecting a switch of infants, they requested that similar tests be conducted on Kimberly Mays, the only other white female who was delivered in the same period in 1978 in the rural Florida hospital where Arlena was born. The tests indicated that the infants had indeed been switched, and Kimberly's father, whose wife died in 1981, was left with the problem of how to inform his daughter of her true identity.6 We test when we already know what the test is designed to tell us, and if the test results differ from what we already know, we believe the test. Robert Sternberg tells the story of a young woman who was admitted to a college on the basis of other credentials even though her score on the Miller Analogies Test, an intelligence test used to predict the likelihood that applicants will succeed in college, was below the cutoff point. She went through the program with distinction, but when it came time to graduate, the college withheld her diploma until she retook and achieved an

a

INFINITE

EXAMINATION

acceptable score on the admissions intelligence test.7 Again, at major international athletic competitions between 1968 and 1991, several women have been disqualified because, contrary to the appearance of their genitals and their lifelong perceptions of themselves, a genetic test of cells taken from the mouth indicated that they are actually male.8 Like God or opportunity, tests descend when and where they are least expected. In a replay of "The Rape of the Lock" suited to the conditions of contemporary society, Ninni Burgel's estranged husband fished strands of her hair from the drains of a sink and bathtub she had used and had them tested for drugs. The results indicated "high, off-scale readings of cocaine or cocaine-related substances." Burgel submitted this evidence of drug abuse to support his claim for child custody in their divorce case. Not enough hair was retrieved from the drains for confirming tests, however. Two further samples, each the diameter of a pencil, would be required. A court order prevented Mrs. Burgel from cutting or chemically treating her hair while an appeals court deliberated whether she should be constrained to provide the additional material for testing. Eventually the court decreed, in a 3-2 decision, that she must allow a physician to cut the samples.9 "But the locks were never shorn: three days later, Mrs. Burgel settled out of court."10 As Mrs. Burgel discovered to her dismay, one may be confronted with a test almost anywhere, any time. The elaboration of testing in America at the end of the twentieth century, both in terms of the number of tests and the variety of issues that they measure, is simply staggering. One effort to enumerate mental tests currently in use—Richard Sweetland and David Keysets Tests: A Comprehensive Reference for Assessment in Psychology, Education, and Business—contains over 3,000 entries.11 In addition to the well-known personality and aptitude tests, these include instruments such as the Seeking of Noetic Goals Test (SONG, a test that measures the strength of motivation to find meaning in life), the Thanometer (which measures awareness and acceptance of death; another test by the same author is called Coitometer), the Bank Personnel Selection Inventory, and the awesome Megatest (which measures very high levels of intelligence in adults when

INTRODUCTION

"ordinary intelligence tests lack sufficient ceilings")- Testing has imploded as well as exploded. Turning inward on itself like Lewis Carroll's smiling Cheshire cat, the testing enterprise includes tests that measure how people react to taking tests, such as the Swinn Test Anxiety Behavior Scale. 12 In addition to mental tests, more than 3,000 laboratory tests are available for medical diagnosis. Any effort to reach a grand total of ways in which human beings are tested would require enumerating, in addition to what has been mentioned already, vision tests, hearing tests, radiological tests, and tests of competency to operate various kinds of machinery. And certainly the end of the list is still not in sight. Tests are found everywhere in the process of education. They punctuate progress through the grades, with quizzes, hourly tests, midterms, and final examinations serving as the staple measures for certifying that courses have been successfully completed (or not) and at what level. Recent legislation requiring that all students be given education appropriate to their ability has ignited an explosion of testing to identify those students who require special education, of either a remedial or enriched variety. Then there are the standardized tests that measure students' psychological profiles, interests, and intelligence levels. These are given in enormous quantities: from 100 million to 200 million of them are administered in the American school system each year, an average of from two and a half to five standardized tests per pupil per year.13 These tests are used to evaluate the schools as well as the students. By comparing the profiles of scores attained on standardized intelligence tests, judgments are made as to the quality of education offered in different school districts, cities, or regions of the country. The trend is gathering momentum for states to require further standardized tests to determine if students have attained the minimum competency necessary to be promoted at certain grade levels and to receive a high school diploma. The system of higher education pours out its own alphabet soup of further standardized tests: PSAT, SAT, and ACT for college admissions and scholarship competitions; GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and numerous others for admission to graduate or professional schools. 10

INFINITE EXAMINATION

One does not escape testing on leaving school. Certain professions have certification tests required of all who would practice them, such as the bar examination for lawyers, medical boards for physicians, and licensing examinations for accountants, engineers, real estate agents, and many others. The National Teachers Examination is part of the certification process for teachers in many states. Many public and private employers require vocational preference and aptitude tests as part of their application procedures, plus more specific tests tailored to particular jobs: manual dexterity tests and competency tests pertaining to various bodies of knowledge or the ability to operate certain kinds of machinery. Often these tests are given not only at the moment of application but also at regular intervals throughout employment with the company. Such is also the case with physical examinations, which many companies require of their employees. In recent years, the war on drugs has opened a front in the workplace, where drug tests by urinalysis are increasingly deployed in a variety of circumstances. Until prohibited by federal law in 1988, lie detector tests by polygraph and other mechanical devices were required of applicants and current employees in numerous private sector companies. They are still regularly required in various segments of the armed forces as well as in connection with employment by governmental agencies such as municipal and state police, the CIA, and the FBI. The vacuum left by the prohibition of polygraph tests in the private sector is rapidly being filled by paper-and-pencil integrity tests and even handwriting analysis to assess the honesty of applicants and employees. Several recent scandals—the most spectacular being the stripping of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson of an Olympic gold medal in 1988—have drawn attention to the use of steroids by athletes. Among efforts to control steroid use is an agreement between the United States and the (former) Soviet Union whereby each conducts spot tests for drug use by its athletes who engage in international competition and informs the other of the results. The agreement also authorizes officials of one country to visit the other and conduct unannounced drug tests of, in 1991, up to one hundred athletes. 14 11

INTRODUCTION

In the medical context, a recent cartoon depicting a physician telling a patient, "It looks like a simple paper cut, but let*s run a battery of tests to be sure" is only too true of what comes of visits to the doctor. Dr. Donald Young of the Mayo Clinic has called many diagnostic tests unjustified "fishing trips," 15 but in today's litigious climate, it is difficult to escape the impression that they are ordered as much to protect the physician from subsequent complaints and malpractice suits as they are to assist in the diagnosis and decisions for treatment. Testing has a long tradition in American medicine. In 1912, an American physician, reporting on a tour of hospitals in the United States after practicing in France for nearly three decades, stated, I was simply thunderstruck with the number o f . . . tests I saw being made;... tests seemed to me, like the Lord's rain, to descend from Heaven on the just and on the unjust in the most impartial fashion The final impression left on me by all this was that the diagnosis and treatment of a given patient depended more on the result of these various tests than on the symptoms present in the

Possibly, the prevalence of medical testing stems from patient expectations as well as from physicians' predilections. Laboratory tests seem more scientific, and therefore more reliable in American minds, than diagnoses that physicians make on the basis of their own experience, knowledge, and skill. The ethical and social implications of present and future biomedical tests are immense. As mapping of the human genome proceeds, new tests will be designed to determine genetic characteristics more precisely, and techniques will be developed to alter them by genetic engineering. Thus it is likely that the future holds the potential, through testing and other procedures, for society to intervene in the genetic makeup of its members. This is usually discussed in terms of how it will then be possible to eradicate genetic defects and diseases. Promising as that may sound, the prospects are not wholly auspicious. Already parents of children born with defects are filing wrongful birth suits against physicians who, it is claimed, should have identified the