History of the SAT
The SAT has since gone through numerous changes in content, duration, scoring, and name; the test was taken by more than 1.97 million students in the graduating high school class of 2024.
[2] In the late nineteenth century, elite colleges and universities had their own entrance exams and they required candidates to travel to the school to take the tests.
[10] In the same time period, Lewis Terman and others began to promote the use of tests such as Alfred Binet's in American schools.
The results of an IQ test could then be used to find an elite group of students who would be given the chance to finish high school and go on to college.
The commission, headed by eugenicist Carl Brigham, argued that the test predicted success in higher education by identifying candidates primarily on the basis of intellectual promise rather than on specific accomplishment in high school subjects, with the specific aim to exclude Black students:[12] [Brigham] created the test to uphold a racial caste system.
He advanced this theory of standardized testing as a means of upholding racial purity in his book A Study of American Intelligence.
'[13]By 1930, however, Brigham would repudiate his own conclusions, writing that "comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests"[14] and that SAT scores could not reflect some innate, genetically-based ability, but instead would be "a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else, relevant and irrelevant.
[17] The ETS was formed in 1947 by the College Board, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the American Council on Education, to consolidate respectively the operations of the SAT, the GRE, and the achievement tests developed by Ben Wood for use with Conant's scholarship exams.
[14] The new organization was to be philosophically grounded in the concepts of open-minded, scientific research in testing with no doctrine to sell and with an eye toward public service.
[14] It has been argued that the interest of the ETS in expanding the SAT in order to support its operations aligned with the desire of public college and university faculties to have smaller, diversified, and more academic student bodies as a means to increase research activities.
In the wake of Operation Varsity Blues, it came to light that some wealthy parents obtained extra time on the SATs from doctors willing to sign off on false reports for the students.
The test contained sections on English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, geography, political science, biology, mathematics, chemistry, and physics.
[26] The College Board exams, which required essay responses from students and took several days to administer, were graded on a scale with a maximum score of 100.
[27][28] This test, prepared by a committee headed by eugenicist and Princeton psychologist Carl Campbell Brigham, had sections of definitions, arithmetic, classification, artificial language, antonyms, number series, analogies, logical inference, and paragraph reading.
Like many intelligence tests of the time, the non-mathematical questions on the SAT put considerable weight on word definitions and usage.
[27] The verbal section of the 1930 test covered a more narrow range of content than its predecessors, examining only antonyms (with six possible answer choices), double definitions (filling in two blanks with provided words to best complete a sentence), and paragraph reading.
The changes for increased emphasis on analytical reading were made in response to a 1990 report issued by a commission established by the College Board.
The commission recommended that the SAT should, among other things, "approximate more closely the skills used in college and high school work".
[46] Certain educational organizations viewed the SAT recentering initiative as an attempt to stave off international embarrassment in regards to continuously declining test scores, even among top students.
[62] The class-action suit was settled in August 2007, when the College Board and Pearson Educational Measurement, the company that scored the SATs, announced they would pay $2.85 million into a settlement fund.
The changes were made in response to a series of cheating incidents, primarily at high schools in Long Island, New York, in which high-scoring test takers were using fake photo IDs to take the SAT for other students.
[73] On March 5, 2014, the College Board announced its plan to redesign the SAT in order to link the exam more closely to the work high school students encounter in the classroom.
[79] As the test no longer deducts points for wrong answers, the numerical scores and the percentiles appeared to have increased after the new SAT was unveiled in 2016.
[77] To combat the perceived advantage of costly test preparation courses, the College Board announced a new partnership with Khan Academy to offer free online practice problems and instructional videos.
[74] In May 2019, the College Board announced that it would calculate each SAT taker's "Adversity Score" using factors such as the proportion of students in a school district receiving free or subsidized lunch or the level of crime in that neighborhood.
[80] However, this triggered a backlash from the general public as people were skeptical of how complex information could be conveyed with a single number[80] and were concerned that it might be politically weaponized.
[80] In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made administering and taking the tests difficult, on January 19, 2021, the College Board announced plans to discontinue the optional SAT essay following the June 2021 administration.
[85] While some administrations of the SAT were canceled during the pandemic,[84] others continued with precautionary measures such as requirements of temperature checks, enhanced ventilation, higher ceilings, physical distancing, and face masks.
[86] The College Board also announced the immediate discontinuation of the SAT Subject Tests in the United States, and the same internationally after the June 2021 administration.
The College Board also announced that the SAT would be shortened to roughly two hours from three, with an onscreen calculator provided for the math section.
