SAT Father, Harvard Advisor Dies at 97

Henry Chauncey ’28, an early advocate for standardized testing in American education who founded the Educational Testing Service (ETS) but never took the SAT, died Wednesday at his home in Shelburne, Vt. He was 97.

As an advisor to Harvard’s president in the 1930s, he urged the University to adopt the SAT as its standard for judging applicants more on their merit and less on their family connections.

He was a man of old money and privilege—directly descended from Harvard’s second president, Charles Chauncey—and seemed an unlikely ally in the fight to equalize admissions. But he believed in the power of testing to make higher education available to as many talented students as possible.

“The idea was always that the ETS would have a broader purpose than testing,” Chauncey said in a 1994 interview with The Trentonian newspaper in New Jersey. “Our interest was bringing out the full development of the individual.”

When Chauncey set up ETS in 1947 and became its president, only about 20,000 people took the SAT every year. By the time he retired 23 years later, that number had increased to 1.5 million.

“He was a pioneer who helped Harvard University and other institutions make gigantic strides to democratizing access to Ivies and similar institutions,” said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67.

Chauncey was born Feb. 9, 1905, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the first child of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft Chauncey.

He attended the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts, where he excelled at both sports and academics and served as a senior prefect.

Chauncey went on to play both baseball and football at Harvard. He was involved in many organizations during his time as an undergraduate, including Phillips Brooks House, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and the Varsity Club, the pep club for that generation. Elected class president his senior year, Chauncey served later as class secretary until his death.

“He loved Harvard,” said Eleanor Horne, vice president and corporate secretary of ETS, who knew Chauncey intimately. “A critical part of [ETS’] founding was the educational values Harvard stood for.”

In 1927, Chauncey twice turned down an offer to play baseball professionally with the Boston Braves in favor of teaching.

After graduating with a bachelor’s in psychology in 1928, Chauncey returned to Harvard the next year to serve as assistant dean of the Faculty and chair of the scholarship committee. He also coached the varsity football and baseball teams until the mid-1930s.

Unhappy with the exclusive nature of the College’s student body, University President James Bryant Conant appointed Chauncey to find a way to fairly assess the abilities of scholarship applicants. Chauncey suggested the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which had been developed five years earlier by a Princeton professor.

The SAT became a requirement for scholarship applicants to the College in 1934, and a requirement for all applicants in 1941. Throughout the 1930s, Chauncey successfully persuaded other Ivy League schools to use multiple choice tests in choosing scholarship students.

“The goal was to find the most extraordinary talented young people in America and make education at elite institutions available to them,” said Nicholas Lemann ’76, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

In 1946, the Carnegie Committee on Testing recommended that several educational councils be combined into one organization—which the next year became the Educational Testing Service, with Chauncey as president.

Under his leadership, ETS focused on research projects identifying different ways students think and measuring them on cognitive scales.

“Henry wanted ETS to push the envelope and research what testing could measure beyond verbal and mathematical skills,” Horne said. “Henry had a notion that you could begin testing a person who was quite young and use testing to help him make informed decisions about his life, not just college admissions.”

In the 1950s, ETS created the LSAT, the GRE and several military exams. When the firm outgrew its small offices in Princeton, N.J., ETS moved to a 360-acre campus in nearby Lawrence Township.

Ironically, though the pool of annual test-takers increased by 75 times during his tenure, Chauncey said in interviews that he never took the SAT.

After retiring from ETS, Chauncey served on several educational boards and was named president emeritus of ETS in 1988.

Although Conant and Chauncey intended to use the SAT as a tool to further democratize American education, the test has been criticized for being racially biased and a poor predictor of college performance. The advent of expensive SAT tutors and preparation courses has led many educators to question whether success on the test is reserved for the wealthy.

Chauncey routinely defended the test in interviews, pointing out that it was constantly reviewed for bias. But later in life he grew wary of the direction of standardized testing in America.

“The system Henry did so much to set up poses inherent problems and leads to results he didn’t believe in,” said Lemann. “He was a lifelong liberal and was very upset at the way the use of the SAT became a conservative cause.”

Chauncey kept in close contact with ETS up until his death, suggesting new research ideas and e-mailing interesting articles to ETS employees, Horne said.

“He was more than a businessperson, more than a person who made testing his goal,” she said. “He was an incredible person because he always acted from a strong moral standpoint.”

Married three times, Chauncey is survived by his first wife, Elizabeth Phalen; his third wife, Janet; eight children; 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.