Stanley H. Kaplan, standardized-testing advocate and author of the humbly—and accurately—titled Test Pilot: How I Broke Testing Barriers for Millions of Students and Caused a Sonic Boom in the Business of Education.

He said he performed well in school because he “strove to please” his mother, a perfectionist who directed his kindergarten class in a Mozart minuet, complete with powdered wigs, velvet coats with tails and long gowns.

Although he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and second in his class at City College in 1939, he was unable to get into medical school. “I was Jewish, and I attended a public college,” he wrote. “I had a double whammy against me.”

That experience made him a champion of standardized tests when others attacked them. If there had been a medical school admissions test, he said, he could have shown the medical schools that he was the equal of students from private universities.

He is survived by the controversy.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

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