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Fair Yardstick. The charge of bias on the S.A.T.s is an old one. Since they were instituted in 1926, educators have variously accused E.T.S. of loading them against girls, rural youths, and most of the country outside the Northeast; the Testing Service, in fact, spends about $500,000 a year on research to improve the exams. Although Negro students do less well on the S.A.T.s, College Board Official W. H. Manning argues that this merely "reveals the extent to which the disadvantaged person is cheated in his education." Any cultural bias in the exams, the testers add, reflects the fact that college instruction and grading are also biased in favor of students with a middleclass style of verbal ability. Sociologist David A. Goslin of the Russell Sage Foundation argues that reliance on vocabulary skills should not be considered an evil in itself. "If facility with the English language is necessary for success in our society," he says, "then a test of verbal ability in English is not an unfair yardstick."
Most U.S. colleges use the S.A.T.s with considerable sophistication and plead with both parents and students not to regard a low score as a guarantee that an application will be rejected. "If we get a boy out of a Harlem slum who scores 490," explains Harvard Admissions Dean Chase Peterson, "we know that compares to the 610 scored by a boy out of Newton." In general, colleges tend to rely much more heavily on high school records, recommendations of teachers and alumni associations, and personal interviews. Schools are far more interested in such traits as motivation, curiosity, self-discipline and creativity than in a student's ability to score well on S.A.T.s. So far, there is no test that can prove the possession of such intangible qualities—although E.T.S. is now trying to provide one.
PROFESSORS
The Man Who Invented Napalm Dr. Louis Fieser, 68, is one of the nation's most distinguished chemists. A professor emeritus at Harvard, he has won a number of national awards for his research into the chemical causes of cancer, and was a member of the U.S. Surgeon General's committee that issued the 1964 report linking cigarette smoke with the disease. Fieser was also a pioneer in developing laboratory production of vitamin K, the body's blood-clotting agent, and antimalarial drugs. Despite these impressive credentials of service to mankind, he has lately received a number of angry letters. Reason: back in 1943, Fieser invented napalm.
The discovery was something of a coup for Fieser. His research team at Harvard beat chemists from Du Pont and Standard Oil in a Government competition to develop napalm. In the course of his research, Fieser found a perfectly good civilian use for the product: it made a fine crabgrass killer, burning away its seeds while leaving good grass roots untouched. During and after World War II, he received several letters of thanks for his invention, which soldiers claimed saves thousands of American lives in battle. No one ever complained to him about the use of napalm until Viet Nam.