A succinct new work, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing (Princeton, $22.95), puts the SAT and ACT and their use in a different perspective. The most obvious problem in American higher education today is…its failure to produce a more widely successful experience for most students. Yes, potentially, if it were testing of a different kind from what we have become accustomed to over all these years. And these…would have to go along with larger structural changes: a much greater emphasis on teaching and advising in higher education, and a strengthening of the curriculum in high school. This ought to be a national project on the scale of the project that brought us the current higher education admissions system, or on an even grander scale.