Evolution of SAT

The word ‘test’ has a long history of more than a thousand years…

The first country that used a nation-wise standardized test was ancient china…

This test reached the United States just 100 years before….

History of SAT

Before the 1900s, these tests were conducted as Army IQ tests, nowadays known as SAT.

At the beginning of the 1900s, countries top universities and colleges started to adopt these test patterns for admissions.

In the 1900s, the SAT was considered an intelligence test that was mostly tested on non-white immigrants.

This test concentrated on the immigrants’ smartness to estimate their thought processes and understanding of American culture.

Robert Yerkes, a top-notch member of the new IQ testing movement, was asked to recruit U.S.  Army to testify to the candidates based on their intelligence during the First World War.

In 1923, Princeton University published ‘A Study of American Intelligence, which talks about superiority and racism.

Slowly after the book’s publication, the college entrance examination boards, also known as college boards, developed a standardized test, later named SAT.

 This test was named ‘the Army Alpha test’; it was the first of its type to administer an IQ test on a huge mass.

Carl Brigham, a young psychologist and one of the Yerkes assistants, was a professor at Princeton.

Brigham adapted the Army Alpha test for the college admissions test by making it more difficult.

Initially, it was tested on the first few thousand college applicants as an experiment in 1926.

After the success of this adaptation of the test, many American universities and best colleges have started this test to be mandatory for freshmen during the late 1920s and named it as

Transformation to SAT

In the earliest days, the army used this test as an IQ test, but this process did not continue for long. The SAT, which we know, was first taken few academic students in 1926.

After World War II, the SAT became widely popular among universities.

In the year 1926, students did not have three subjects to write the SAT; they had nine. The topics included arithmetic, analogies, logical inference, number series paragraph reading, classification, antonyms, and artificial language. Students were asked to answer only basic arithmetic questions without a calculator. Anyhow, the calculators were not introduced until 1967.

During this time, the GI bill allowed the return of veterans to study at the colleges without even paying for tuition. This enabled to take up the service of the Educational Testing Service (ET) by College boards as only one of the great options for college admissions throughout the United States.

The SAT has had numerous redesigns many times. The first revamping was made in 1928, and the changes were made every now and then. These changes are like removing old sections and adding new ones to the SAT.

The recent adaptations were made in 2005 and 2016. These changes make sure the questions that are taken affect the students’ skills in high school and help them take SAT to comply with Common educational standards.

The College Board still develops, modifies, and publishes the SAT exam; this test is now administered and scored by the Educational Testing Service. Around 1.7 million students take the SAT every single year.

For over 90 years, college students were always worried about their SAT exams. Back in 1926, students knew the SAT as the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

The Timeline:

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