Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing by James Elwick (review)

Reviewed by: Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing by James Elwick Peter Mandler (bio) Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing, by James Elwick; pp. xii + 287. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, $74.00, $74.00 ebook. About fifty years ago, John Roach published a book on Public Examinations in England 1850–1900 (1971), which covered similar ground to the book under review. Like many academic monographs of the time, it was empirically sound and thorough and based on an extensive array of primary sources. James Elwick's Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing thus offers a neat opportunity to see what the historiography of the intervening half century can contribute. Drawing on the insights of Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, James C. Scott, and the historian of statistics Ted Porter, among others, Elwick is better able to see competitive examination as a system. Keeping Foucault "at a little distance," as he nicely puts it, Elwick portrays a system that builds a new infrastructural network aimed at embedding a new distribution of power in Victorian government and society—in that resonant phrase, it is an engine, not a camera—but also like all human networks one subject to looping, in which not only the developers but also the users of the infrastructure affect its shape and function (194). Like Roach, Elwick observes a practice that originates in universities—notably in the Cambridge Senate House Examination, the forerunner of the Mathematical Tripos—but then concatenates throughout the upper echelons of government and society, affecting [End Page 490] schools, technical training, government offices, even (though Elwick does not go there) music and sport. Unlike Roach, who focused on secondary schools for the middle class, Elwick is most interested in the technical qualifications offered by the Department of Science and Art (DSA), which tested two million candidates in science between 1861 and 1900. But he also covers, as does Roach, the Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations (which led to the familiar school certificates of the later twentieth century, the O-level and A-level), University of London examinations used to certificate both admissions to and degrees from universities outside the United Kingdom, and more glancingly a much wider array of examinations with mostly educational purposes in mind. Elwick's systemic approach allows him to accommodate both the incredible pluralism of Victorian education and the growing homogeneity of its exam culture. Indeed, it allows him to show how the latter was a function of the former. France and Germany had their competitive examinations as well, but they could at least nominally teach and examine a centrally determined syllabus, whereas English exams themselves set a syllabus for a myriad of private, public, and freelance educational enterprises. They could also, therefore, certificate performance well beyond the reach of the UK government, in a manner suitable to a far-flung empire. It was a lot easier to import scripts (or even to export examiners) than to export pedagogues. Roach gives a better picture of the schools, but Elwick is focused more on the exams themselves as the linchpin of a system. Although only students of certificated teachers earned money for their teachers by performing on DSA exams, pretty much all comers could take them. As Elwick shows, they could accommodate great diversity of participation—girls and Muslim boys were given extra incentives to enter for DSA exams in Madras in the 1880s—and they also offered tremendous opportunities for grassroots efforts at gaming the system, whether by cramming, or cheating, or otherwise outwitting the examiners at their own game. He makes great play of a singular and well-documented case in 1878 of organized cheating on a DSA exam, which offers insights into regular as well as irregular exam conduct, not available to Roach. As Elwick shows, exams initially intended to assess (and therefore inculcate) a set of characterological virtues originally conceived as manly—not just intellect, but also "self-denial, emotional toughness, and physical striving"—could be appropriated by groups not immediately intended (notably women) and/or hijacked by strongly disapproved practices like cramming (10). While their statistical arrays offered irresistible opportunities...

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