(FORTUNE Magazine) – On Saturday, November 5, your correspondent left the house at dawn, commandeered a taxi, and visibly startled the hackperson -- who doubtless took him for a judge or investment banker -- by announcing that his destination was a high school on New York's East Side. He then compounded the confusion by cheerily mentioning the purpose of the trip: taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Although not exactly needing admission to college (we got in during the Roosevelt Administration), we resolved a while back to take the SAT, for several reasons. First, because it's there, like Mount Everest, and open to anybody willing to pay a modest fee. Second, because we have long defended the test against critics who say it's unfair, and it seemed a good idea to get a little personal experience, if only for rebuttal purposes. Third, because of a much publicized 1985 book called None of the Above, by David Owen, which assails the test on umpteen different grounds. The book starts off with a gripping anecdote about numerous ''cultural lions'' -- Owen's list includes Irving Kristol and George Plimpton -- who were said to be paralyzed by fear at the thought of submitting themselves to the SAT and refused to undertake any such experiment. So taking the test could well imply that we were gutsier than Irving or George, something we have long been meaning to prove. The test room was a gloomy, cavernous space, possibly used as a gymnasium on other occasions. Aside from yours truly, it was filled on this particular day by 300 or so scruffy testees -- it seems you do not dress up for SATs -- every one of whom looked to be 17. In other words, Irving and George were still cutting class. The appearance of a graybeard in a tweed Brooks Brothers jacket resulted in a certain amount of wary eyeballing by the tyros, but no audible comments. We somehow had the sense that they would have reacted about the same to a two-headed calf. The test, which is broken down into math and verbal questions, takes three hours out of your life. All questions are of the multiple-choice variety, and all answers must be given with a No. 2 pencil. A lot of effort goes into cheating-prevention and into carefully identifying every party in the room. You are sternly warned against having review materials or calculators on your person. We had a momentary spasm of panic upon reaching into the jacket's breast pocket for a handkerchief and finding that it contained a Radio Shack calculator we had forgotten about. Luckily, the authorities conducted no strip searches. Critics of the SAT have assailed the multiple-choice format and questioned its usefulness, but at bottom the attack on the test is ideological. The SAT has come to symbolize the idea of ''merit'' -- i.e., the idea that it is both fair and economic to reward people for their mental ability. Egalitarians dislike this arrangement, since mental ability is (a) substantially heritable and (b) positively correlated with income. Numerous overheated passages in None of the Above testify to the passions roused by the fact that well-to-do kids score above average. Says David Owen: ''Tests like the SAT convert the tainted advantages of birth and wealth into the neutral currency of merit, enabling the fortunate to believe they have earned what they have merely been given.'' The literature sent along to prospective testees by the College Board faces * up to these problems somewhat nervously. Says the brochure: ''The correlation of SAT scores and student-reported family income for two recent years was found to be about .23 and .29.'' (With correlations running from -1 to +1, those numbers imply a modest but statistically significant positive relationship.) The passage prudently mentions only one possible reason for the superiority of the high-income students: their ''educational advantages.'' Which is misleading: The main advantage of the high-income students is not their superior schools -- although these help, of course -- but their superior intelligence, which mainly reflects their genetic heritage. As we generate this copy, we still have not got back our own test scores. Basic impression: The verbal sections were a breeze, as they ought to be for anybody who spent decades as a FORTUNE editor, but the math was tougher. We plan not to disclose the scores, possibly out of modesty.