A (Mostly) Brief History Of The SAT And ACT Tests
| late 1800s | By the end of the 19th century, tests for admission to U.S. colleges are specific to each school. (The arithmetic portion of Harvard's 1869 entrance exam can be seen here. The corresponding portion of MIT's 1869 exam can be seen here. These portions of the two tests are quite different in difficulty.) The content of the tests varies widely and can be highly dependent on the interests of the faculty conducting the exams. It is not unusual for a college to administer exams on campus a week or two before classes begin. As an alternative to testing, many colleges, especially in the midwestern U.S., use "admission by certificate": a high school would be certified by inspectors from the colleges to have an appropriately preparatory curriculum for college work, and students graduated from such a high school would be considered to be adequate without testing. By 1900, however, inspections are infrequent and college faculty are often not present. |
| 1899 | The College Entrance Examination Board (or "College Board") is founded in December, consisting of a non-profit membership of twelve colleges and universities. The membership is comprised mostly of elite institutions in the northeastern U.S., including Columbia, Cornell, Vassar, Barnard, and New York University. The founders are worried that the lack of uniform admissions testing and the certificate system places too much control of college admissions with the high schools. Also, the certificate system is thought to be conducing students away from the northeastern colleges. The purpose of the Board is primarily to administer annual examinations in a variety of subjects thought to be important for college-level work. The members of the Board could then use the test scores however they chose. The fee for the test is expected to be $5 (about $136 in 2012 dollars). At this time, roughly 4% of high school graduates go on to college. |
| 1901 | The "College Boards" are administered in June for the first time to fewer than 1000 students. Roughly 75% of these students are applicants to Columbia University or Barnard College, hence the practical effect of these tests is to distinguish excellent students from elite students. The essay tests, which require five days to complete, are curriculum-based achievement exams, designed to assess a student's mastery of nine subjects, including Greek, Latin, and physics. For the price of ten cents, an examinee could find out from the College Board, before taking the test, the area of knowledge that each subject test would focus on. (For example, the student could learn that this year's Greek test would cover the first three books of Homer's Iliad.) Scoring is done by hand and consists of five ratings for each subject, from "Excellent" to "Very Poor", with "Doubtful" in the middle. |
| 1917 | An intelligence test developed by Robert Yerkes and other psychologists is administered to more than 1.5 million U.S. Army recruits. The test, called the Army "Alpha" exam, uses multiple-choice questions (invented two years prior) and is designed to help the Army make rapid placement decisions for prospective soldiers entering World War I. |
| 1919 | Columbia University begins allowing prospective students to substitute the results of an intelligence test (the Thorndike test for "Mental Alertness") for its regular entrance exams. |
| 1925 | By this time, about 20,000 prospective freshmen take the College Board's exams each year. However, this figure represents only about 10 percent of the number of students entering college in the U.S. Most colleges continue either to admit by certificate or use their own entrance exams. In April, the College Board appoints a commission, headed by Carl Brigham, to develop a new test designed to measure general intelligence. |
| 1926 | The first Scholastic Aptitude Test (or "SAT") is administered on June 23 to 8,040 students, 40% of whom are women. (About 85% of these students are taking the traditional boards as well.) Carl Brigham, a psychologist who helped to develop aptitude tests for the U.S. Army during World War I, is influential in the development of the CONTINUE READING: A (Mostly) Brief History Of The SAT And ACT Tests |
