When CSU dropped the SAT, I thought of a well-meaning man who pioneered test preparation

I’m 60, and anyone my age or so who was once college-bound probably recognizes the name Stanley H. Kaplan. He founded Kaplan Inc. to help students prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, known as the SAT.

I met Kaplan in the early 1980s, and he was a very charming guy who was trying to do the right thing with his company. Kaplan was the son of Jewish immigrants denied admission to many medical schools in the late 1930s because he was the son of Jewish immigrants.

Kaplan thought that if there were some objective metrics for students seeking college admission, the process would be less influenced by the ancestry or wealth of prospective students.

The SAT and other tests like it became essential for college admissions thereafter.

Personally, like so many of you, I have my own college entrance test stories. In order to enter the University of Minnesota, for example, we didn’t even have to take the SAT. Instead, we took the Preliminary SAT, called the PSAT.

In the late 1970s, a resident of the state could get into some campuses within the University of Minnesota system with a 2.0 GPA and a decent PSAT score, which I had. The purpose of the land grant college was to give everyone a chance.

But with all due respect to Kaplan, it was welcome news last week that the California State University system joined the University of California system in eliminating the SAT as a criterion for admission.

I vividly recall taking the PSAT, and it was extremely stressful, particularly the math section. Many of my friends went on to be National Merit Scholars, which means they got very high or perfect scores. I was not, in fact, perfect, except at breaking pencils mid-test and feeling like I needed to throw up.

My joke was that if you knew what “verdant” meant, you were going to do well on the SAT. Verdant (“lush green”, for the record) is a word that rarely comes up in conversation, except for people charitably describing New Jersey

As the decades dragged on, the SAT, along with Kaplan Inc., became the preserve of kids who went to solid public and private schools, and who also had wealthy, educated parents who could afford Kaplan’s steep prep course pricing.

I sent one of my kids to Kaplan, and I think it was close to $800 or so for the class. A lot of people can’t afford that. Now an “unlimited” Kaplan test prep class starts at $1,999.

Kaplan became a very lucrative operation. In 1984, Stanley Kaplan sold his business to the Washington Post Co. for $45 million. When Kaplan died at 90 in 2009, the New York Times reported that Kaplan Inc. was the Post’s largest business, generating $2.3 billion in revenue in 2008.

That’s a lot of verdancy.

Kaplan deserved accolades for his original intentions, which went terribly wrong. Poor kids like he was in 1938 are now better served, judged by more than just surviving a gut-wrenching testing process that doesn’t take the full measure of a student’s potential.

A biased testing metric just keeps people out, which is counter to the mission of a state university.

Now that you know what “verdant” means, I think you’re ready to go to one.