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Concept
History of the SAT
Summary
The SAT is a standardized test commonly used for the purpose of admission to colleges and universities in the United States. The test, owned by the College Board and originally developed by Carl Brigham, was first administered on June 23, 1926, to about 8,000 students. The test was introduced as a supplement to the College Board essay exams already in use for college admissions, but ease of administration of the SAT and other factors led to the discontinuation of the essay exams during World War II. The SAT has since gone through numerous changes in content, duration, scoring, and name; the test was taken by more than 1.7 million students in the graduating high school class of 2022.
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. To better organize matters, the College Board, a consortium of colleges in the northeastern United States, was formed in late 1899 to establish a nationally administered, uniform set of essay tests based on the curricula of the boarding schools that typically provided graduates to the colleges of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters, among others. The first College Board exam—covering mathematics, the physical sciences, history, languages, and other subjects—was administered in 1901 to fewer than 1,000 candidates.
In the same time period, Lewis Terman and others began to promote the use of tests such as Alfred Binet's in American schools. Terman in particular thought that such tests could identify an innate "intelligence quotient" (IQ) in a person. 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. By the mid-1920s, the increasing use of IQ tests, such as the Army Alpha test administered to recruits in World War I, led the College Board to commission the development of the SAT.
Official source
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