Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT): Most consequential US standardized test

About the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)

Carl Brigham had served on the Army Alpha committee during WWI alongside Robert Yerkes, Lewis Terman, Edward Thorndike, and others. After the war he took a position at Princeton, where he became interested in adapting Alpha-style group cognitive testing for college admissions. In 1925-26 he developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for the College Entrance Examination Board.

The first SAT was administered to 8,040 students in June 1926. It had nine subtests (Definitions, Arithmetic Problems, Classification, Artificial Language, Antonyms, Number Series, Analogies, Logical Inference, Paragraph Reading) - all directly derived from Army Alpha methodology. Testing time was 90 minutes. Scores were reported on a single composite scale.

The SAT went through major revisions in 1942 (essay test dropped, multiple-choice consolidated), 1959 (verbal-quantitative split formalized), 1995 (recentering of norms), 2005 (writing section added), 2016 (writing section made optional, scoring rescaled), and 2024 (digital administration). The 1959 verbal+quantitative split is the format people remember as 'the SAT'; the 2016 changes brought it back closer to that format with updated content.

The SAT has had enormous social consequences. From 1933 (when Harvard adopted it) onward, the SAT became the dominant US college admissions instrument, eventually administered to essentially every college-bound American student. It has been the subject of decades of controversy about cultural fairness, predictive validity for college performance, and the social mobility implications of standardized testing. The SAT is the most-discussed and most-studied standardized test in the world.

The 2 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

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