O for a beaker full of the warm South …
-John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819
On the Sunday in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a group of College Board officials happened to be having lunch together in Princeton … talking, as they often did, about how nice it would be to abolish the old College Board essay examinations and use the SAT for all applicants, not just scholarship students. In the middle of this the telephone rang with news of the raid. Within two weeks, the essay exams had been suspended
