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 1.97 million students in the graduating high school class of 2024.
Origins and overview
+Mean SAT scores of college-bound seniors All Male FemaleClassyear Reading/VerbalScoreMath Score Reading/VerbalScoreMath Score Reading/VerbalScoreMath Score1972 530 509 531 527 529 4891973 523 506 523 525 521 3891974 521 505 524 524 520 4881975 512 498 515 518 509 4791976 509 497 511 520 508 4751977 507 496 509 520 505 4741978 507 494 511 517 503 4741979 505 493 509 516 501 4731980 502 492 506 515 498 4731981 502 492 508 516 496 4731982 504 493 509 516 499 4731983 503 494 508 515 498 4741984 504 497 511 518 598 4781985 509 500 514 522 503 4801986 509 500 515 523 504 4791987 507 501 512 523 502 4811988 505 501 512 521 499 4831989 504 502 510 523 498 4821990 500 501 505 521 496 4831991 499 500 503 520 495 4821992 500 501 504 521 496 4841993 500 503 504 524 497 4841994 499 504 501 523 497 4871995 504 506 505 525 502 4901996 505 508 507 527 503 4921997 505 511 507 530 503 4941998 505 512 509 531 502 4961999 505 511 509 531 502 4952000 505 514 507 533 504 4982001 506 514 509 533 502 4982002 504 516 507 534 502 5002003 507 519 512 537 503 5032004 508 518 512 537 504 5012005 508 520 513 538 505 5042006 503 518 505 536 502 5022007 501 514 503 532 500 4992008 500 514 502 532 499 4992009 499 514 502 533 497 4982010 500 515 502 533 498 4992011 497 514 500 531 495 5002012 496 514 498 532 493 4992013 496 514 499 531 494 4992014 497 513 499 530 495 4992015 495 511 497 527 493 4962016 494 508 496 524 493 4942017 533 527 532 538 534 5162018 536 531 534 542 539 5222019 531 528 529 537 534 5192020 528 523 523 531 532 5162021 533 528 530 537 535 5192022 529 521 526 530 531 5122023 520 508 517 515 523 5002024 519 505 516 514 522 4962025 521 508 520 515 522 500
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. The subjects that were tested, and what topics were required of the student applicant within each subject, could vary from one college to another. This panoply of requirements was seen as unreasonable both by leaders of private high school academies as well as an increasing number of public high school principals. 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. The commission, headed by Carl Brigham, argued that the test predicted success in higher education by identifying candidates primarily on the basis of intellectual promise rather than on specific accomplishment in high school subjects, with the specific aim to exclude Black students:
By 1930, however, Brigham would repudiate his own conclusions, writing that "comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests" and that SAT scores could not reflect some innate, genetically-based ability, but instead would be "a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else, relevant and irrelevant." In 1934, James Conant and Henry Chauncey used the SAT as a means to identify recipients for scholarships to Harvard University. Specifically, Conant wanted to find students, other than those from the traditional northeastern private schools, that could do well at Harvard. The success of the scholarship program and the advent of World War II led to the end of the College Board essay exams and to the SAT being used as the only admissions test for College Board member colleges.
The SAT rose in prominence after World War II due to several factors. Machine-based scoring of multiple-choice tests taken by pencil had made it possible to rapidly process the exams. At the time, elite colleges were admitting mainly students from elite private schools and wanted to take in students from other backgrounds. The G.I. Bill produced an influx of millions of veterans into higher education. The formation of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) also played a significant role in the expansion of the SAT beyond the roughly fifty colleges that made up the College Board at the time. The ETS was formed in 1947 by the College Board, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the American Council on Education, to consolidate respectively the operations of the SAT, the GRE, and the achievement tests developed by Ben Wood for use with Conant's scholarship exams. The new organization was to be philosophically grounded in the concepts of open-minded, scientific research in testing with no doctrine to sell and with an eye toward public service. The ETS was chartered after the death of Brigham, who had opposed the creation of such an entity. Brigham felt that the interests of a consolidated testing agency would be more aligned with sales or marketing than with research into the science of testing. It has been argued that the interest of the ETS in expanding the SAT in order to support its operations aligned with the desire of public college and university faculties to have smaller, diversified, and more academic student bodies as a means to increase research activities. In 1951, about 80,000 SATs were taken; in 1961, about 800,000; and by 1971, about 1.5 million SATs were being taken each year. As more and more students from all over the U.S. tried to enter college, the SAT became more of a high-stakes exam; colleges needed something they could trust to fairly assess a prospective student's scholastic aptitude.
During the 2010s, there was concern over the continued decline of SAT scores, which might be due to the expansion of the test-taking population. (See graph below.)
In the wake of Operation Varsity Blues, it came to light that some wealthy parents obtained extra time on the SATs from doctors willing to sign off on false reports for the students. Already in the 2000s, concerns over parents obtaining fraudulent mental diagnoses to give their children an unfair advantage had been raised.
Timeline
A timeline of notable events in the history of the SAT follows.
1901: College Board begins administering exams
On June 17, 1901, the first exams of the College Board were administered to 973 students across 67 locations in the United States, and two in Europe. Although those taking the test came from a variety of backgrounds, approximately one third were from New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. The majority of those taking the test were from private schools, academies, or endowed schools. About 60% of those taking the test applied to Columbia University. The test contained sections on English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, geography, political science, biology, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The College Board exams, which required essay responses from students and took several days to administer, were graded on a scale with a maximum score of 100. Until 1910, the grades were accompanied by verbal designations: "Excellent" (90-100), "Good" (75-89), "Doubtful" (60-74), "Poor" (40-49) or "Very Poor" (below 40).
1926: First SAT administration
The first administration of the SAT occurred on June 23, 1926, when it was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. This test, prepared by a committee headed by Princeton psychologist Carl Campbell Brigham, had sections of definitions, arithmetic, classification, artificial language, antonyms, number series, analogies, logical inference, and paragraph reading. Several sections of the SAT were minor revisions of those appearing in a test that Brigham had given to incoming freshman to Princeton University in 1925. For example, sub-test three (analogies) of the Princeton test was used verbatim (except for the ordering of the questions) as the SAT analogies sub-test. The Princeton test was itself derived from material taken from intelligence tests administered to recruits to the United States Army during World War I. Like many intelligence tests of the time, the non-mathematical questions on the SAT put considerable weight on word definitions and usage. The SAT was administered to 8,040 students (60% of them men) at over 300 test centers. The majority of men were applying to Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, or Princeton University, and the majority of women were applying to Smith College, Wellesley College, or Vassar College. The test was paced rather quickly: test-takers were given 97 minutes to answer 315 questions. The raw score of each participating student was converted to a score scale with a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. This scale was effectively equivalent to a 200 to 800 scale, although students could score more than 800 and less than 200.
19281929: Math removal and more changes In 1928, the number of sections on the SAT was reduced to seven, and the time limit was increased to slightly under two hours. In 1929, the number of sections was again reduced, this time to six. These changes were designed in part to give test-takers more time per question. For these two years, all of the sections tested verbal ability: math was eliminated from the SAT. The test developers, using test score data from 1926 and 1927 to calculate correlations between the various SAT sub-tests, felt that the mathematics sections were measuring a different component of intelligence than the verbal sections, and should be removed to be re-developed later as sub-tests with a score separate from that of the verbal sections.
1930s: Continuous changes In 1930 the SAT was first split into the verbal and math sections, a structure that would continue until 2005 when a new writing section would be added. The verbal section of the 1930 test covered a more narrow range of content than its predecessors, examining only antonyms (with six possible answer choices), double definitions (filling in two blanks with provided words to best complete a sentence), and paragraph reading. In 1936, analogies were re-added. Between 1936 and 1946, students had between 80 and 115 minutes to answer 250 verbal questions (over a third of which were on antonyms). The mathematics test introduced in 1930 contained 100 free response questions to be answered in 80 minutes and focused primarily on speed. From 1936 to 1941, like the 1928 and 1929 tests, the mathematics section was eliminated. When the mathematics portion of the test was re-added in 1942, it consisted of multiple-choice questions.