Journal of Writing Assessment

If you want to read a history of writing assessment as it developed during the 20th century within the narrow and specialized confines of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), you can't do better than Norbert Elliot's On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America (2005). If your curiosity about ETS is not satisfied by that enormously careful and detailed history, and if you want to gain a close-up, intimate understanding of the person one author called ETS's "first president and abiding institutional deity" (Owen, 1985, p. 1), then you can't do better than Elliot's new biography, Henry Chauncey: An American Life.

Later in this review, I will re-visit those last two "ifs"