As James Elwick maps out in Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing, large, increasingly standardized examinations proliferated across Britain and much of its empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Examinations became part of the process for entry to and graduation from universities, earning a job in the East India Company or the civil service, attending a state school, and much more. The stakes of these exams were often high: educational and professional prospects hinged on exam results. Exam results also had a direct impact each year on many teachers’ salaries. The drive to do well on exams was not entirely economic, though. At least some of the candidates at the Oxford Local Examinations (and the many exams that emulated them) seem to have been interested in proving their knowledge as an important end unto itself, even though there were other, much more practical reasons for taking the exams. Similarly, while it might also help one's career prospects, topping the lists of the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos was a point of pride. In the case of Philippa Fawcett, the first woman to earn the top score on the exam and deserve in the public mind the honorific of senior wrangler, it was also a way to demonstrate that women and men should be given equal rights.

Examinations came to bear such weight and to be so widespread because they supposedly revealed the existence of classic Victorian values. In other words, while doing well on an exam required subject matter expertise, it also required something more—something that could not be tested for directly. Examinations became a way to test for industriousness, self-discipline, and the right kind of competitiveness, among other qualities. William Gladstone even saw the Indian Civil Service exams as a way to test for gentlemanliness. Examinations were also a way of evaluating teachers, whose work in the classroom was regarded as otherwise nearly impossible to know. Effective pedagogy was seen as both a skill and as a reflection of values—both on the part of teachers and the students whom they taught. A strong performance on an examination supposedly meant that teachers embodied and purveyed the right values in addition to knowledge and skills.

The rise of standardized examinations, then, is part of the story of how the state and educational institutions sought to create a culture of meritocracy at a moment of rapid change in modern Britain. Amid the movement of people and the creation of educational institutions on a new scale, the idea of personal testimonials written by far-off individuals or certificates and degrees based on idiosyncratic curriculums and exams came to be seen as increasingly problematic. How could the value of a certificate or even a degree from two institutions be compared unless the person evaluating them was somehow intimately familiar with the curriculum and exam system at both? How could testimonials from unknown persons be weighed properly? Large, standardized examinations conducted in as identical conditions as possible offered a new way for candidates to demonstrate their accomplishments and for institutions to discern candidates’ skills and values. As Elwick shows, the drive for standardization led to a host of new practices for designing, administering, and evaluating examinations. Taken individually, each innovation was incremental. Taken collectively, though, they reflected new ways of knowing people and measuring their “talent” (9–11).

Clear-cut as this all was in theory, in practice the administration and use of examinations on this scale and for such high stakes led to ongoing challenges and problems. Examinees, along with their teachers and tutors, worked to maximize their success. They utilized such tactics as studying past exams, learning the kinds of answers a particular examiner was looking for, and answering first the questions that yielded the most points per minute. Entire institutions dedicated to quickly and efficiently preparing students or others for high-stakes examinations emerged. Outright cheating was also an issue. Examiners tried to discourage not only cheating, but also attempts to game examinations. What emerged was an “arms race” which saw the evolution of exam formats, contents, and testing procedures, on the one hand, and teaching, studying, and exam-taking tactics, on the other (143–60). This reflected a reality of examinations: for all that discussions about them invoked highfalutin ideals, creating, taking, and preparing others to take them was a practical affair.

Elwick offers a lively history of standardized examinations that captures both the theory and practice of exams, the experiences of examiners and examinees, and the way that exams liberated and constrained—often simultaneously. Elwick is perhaps more interested in drawing out underlying similarities across a wide range of exams than he is in teasing out the differences between exams. Though there are a few moments when more attention to those differences and the larger reasons behind them might have been welcome, for the most part this approach works well. Indeed, Elwick makes a case for the emergence over time of similar dynamics in exams designed to serve quite different institutions and to attract very different types of examinees. Further attention to the imperial and racial dynamics at work would have been welcome, both as an important topic in its own right, and for the additional light it would shed on the culture and practice of examinations in Britain. In sum, though, Making a Grade brings the history of education into conversation with the history of the state, technology, gender, and class by using the history of examinations to explore the emergence of—but also challenges to—a culture of meritocracy in nineteenth-century Britain.