American Council on Education Psychological Examination: Ancestor of the SAT

About the American Council on Education Psychological Examination

By the early 1920s, US colleges were facing growing applicant pools and needed an objective screening tool. Several universities had been administering local tests since 1900, but there was no national standard. In 1923-25 Louis Thurstone (then at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, later at Chicago) developed a college-level intelligence test for the American Council on Education. It was first administered nationally in fall 1925.

The ACE consisted of six subtests: Arithmetic, Completion (a Trabue-style sentence completion), Same-Opposite (synonyms/antonyms), Verbal Analogies, Number Series, and Word Knowledge. Total testing time was about 60 minutes. Scores were reported as Q (quantitative) and L (linguistic) subscale scores plus a total, with norms based on the entire national pool of incoming freshmen each year.

The ACE was administered annually to all incoming freshmen at most US colleges from 1925 to 1957. Over those 32 years, the ACE accumulated normative data on more than 2 million college students - one of the largest cognitive test datasets ever assembled. It was discontinued in 1957 when the SAT (which had been growing in coverage since 1926) became dominant. The ACE methodology directly shaped the SAT's design.

The 6 subtests

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Sample items at the original ACE Psychological Examination college-freshman difficulty.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Thurstone, L. L. & Thurstone, T. G. (1925-1957). American Council on Education Psychological Examination for College Freshmen. Washington, DC: ACE.

Early editions are public domain (pre-1929); later editions are also widely available without active copyright restrictions for research/educational use.