Home › Historical IQ Tests › American Council on Education Psychological Examination

Public Domain · 1925

American Council on Education Psychological Examination: Ancestor of the SAT

The first national college-admissions intelligence test in the United States, developed by Louis and Thelma Thurstone for the American Council on Education. Administered annually to incoming college freshmen from 1925 through 1957. The ACE was the direct ancestor of the SAT, the GRE, and the modern college admissions test ecosystem.

Take the TestRead About the Test

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

#1
Arithmetic Word problems and computational items.
Interactive
#2
Completion Sentence-completion in the Trabue/Ebbinghaus tradition.
Interactive
#3
Same-Opposite Synonyms and antonyms.
Interactive
#4
Verbal Analogies A:B :: C:?
Interactive
#5
Number Series Continue the sequence.
Interactive
#6
Word Knowledge Vocabulary: what does this word mean?
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

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

No data leaves your browser.

About these items: These American Council on Education Psychological Examination items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1925 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice.

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.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

Looking for a contemporary IQ test?

The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.