What Conant had in mind was full, four-year, nearly unconditional scholarships to be awarded solely on the basis of academic promise: if a rich boy won, he would be designated a Harvard National Scholar but would receive only a token grant. Another of Conant's motives was a desire to make Harvard a more national and less provincially northeastern institution. The Harvard National Scholarships were initially limited to students from six states in the upper Midwest, which in 1933 was still uncharted territory as far as elite higher education was concerned.

Henry Chauncey's job was to figure out a way to select the scholarship students. During the Depression college student bodies were substantially self-selected, mainly on the basis of ability to pay. It was assumed that most of the students at a place like Harvard had gone to well-known and trusted private schools, where a decent record was a reliable indicator of the ability to do college work. There were many years in which virtually the entire graduating class of Groton, Chauncey's boarding school, went to Harvard or Yale.

In 1900 the presidents of twelve leading northeastern universities had set up an organization called the College Entrance Examination Board, which administered admissions tests. These were lengthy essay examinations in specific subjects, which students took over a period of days and which were then shipped to the College Board office in New York and laboriously hand-graded by professional readers. The purpose for which the College Board had been invented was not really selection, which was almost a non-issue. It was to standardize the admissions process administratively and to force New England boarding schools to adopt a uniform curriculum -- they would have to fill their students with the information required to pass the exams -- so that undergraduates would arrive well prepared.

The College Boards were of little use to Henry Chauncey's new project. They weren't administered until June (too late to select students for scholarships), weren't administered at all in most of the Midwest, and most boys who hadn't studied the boarding-school curriculum couldn't pass them anyway. What Chauncey needed was a uniform means of comparing students from all across the highly localized American education system -- an academic equivalent of the standard gauge that the railroad industry had adopted after the Civil War. The United States had already become a national society in most ways, having generated, in addition to the standard gauge, a bureaucratized federal government, big corporations, and national communications media. But education -- an enormous field with importance beyond its size, because of its role as a handler of people -- remained a local matter.

Along with Wilbur J. Bender, a solid, plainspoken Hoosier who was also an assistant dean, Chauncey hit the road, aiming to find objective tests that could be used in the new scholarship program. It was Chauncey's fascination with testing that had gotten him the assignment in the first place; educational testing was still new enough that Chauncey and Bender could get to know most of its progenitors personally. Psychology as a discipline had emerged only a few decades previously; intelligence tests dated from just around the time Henry Chauncey was born. The first (in fact, at that point the only) mass administration of objective mental tests -- the Alpha and Beta tests, versions of the IQ test that were used to select officer candidates from the pool of Army recruits -- had occurred just fifteen years earlier, during the First World War, under primitive testing conditions. The two key figures Chauncey and Bender encountered, Ben D. Wood and Carl C. Brigham, had both helped to administer the Alpha and Beta and had been proteges of leading first-generation intelligence testers.