I’ve been preparing for the SAT. My emotions range from an intense dislike to a reluctant acknowledgement of its importance. A single test can’t truly represent someone’s intelligence even though colleges say that we have to “Regurgitate everything you’ve learned in the last three years onto a scantron so we can practically compose your future from a score out of 1600!” So here’s a brief history of the importance of the SAT.
Around the late 19th century the college admission process was more of a mess than it already is. Generally, colleges would run their own tests and each would range in difficulty. Some would just accept kids coming from certified high schools. The result of this disarray caused for the formation of the “College Acceptance Examination Board”. They wanted the process of college and acceptance to become more uniform and accessible. Through this, they came to the conclusion of standardized tests, mostly because it would be an unbiased way to measure one’s ability. Through the years they went through a number of different iterations but the one that stuck was the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1929 by Carl Brigham. It was designed to measure the “natural intelligence” of an individual. The only pitfall was that Brigham was a strong believer in eugenics, or in the belief that there is a superior group of people and only they should breed while leaving out everyone else, which was believed to make the human race “better”. Another fan of this was Nazis.
This really didn’t give the college board a good look, so in effort to change this they ended up with the Scholastic Assessment Test. This test was modeled after general high school curriculum, compared to the Scholastic Aptitude Test that was just stuff people should know. According to the college board, the SAT measures “knowledge at the heart of education” and I don’t even know what that means considering how vague it is. The SAT has been proven to be an empty resemblance of knowledge gained from hours of studying to only be applied to the SAT.
So why do we still use it? Well as many of us have now realized is that colleges can often be a represented as an economy. For example, Harvard has an acceptance rate of 5.6%, 42,742 students applied for the year of 2022 and roughly 2,565 students were accepted. But there is no way they were able to really get to truly know each individual applicant, so instead of taking the time to really be conscious of each applicant they just measure what they’ve achieved and their test score.
In other words, the reason we still use the SAT and ACT as a way to measure our success is because in reality, it’s just a shortcut to find out if we were dedicated enough to get good grades and show for it.
Around the late 19th century the college admission process was more of a mess than it already is. Generally, colleges would run their own tests and each would range in difficulty. Some would just accept kids coming from certified high schools. The result of this disarray caused for the formation of the “College Acceptance Examination Board”. They wanted the process of college and acceptance to become more uniform and accessible. Through this, they came to the conclusion of standardized tests, mostly because it would be an unbiased way to measure one’s ability. Through the years they went through a number of different iterations but the one that stuck was the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1929 by Carl Brigham. It was designed to measure the “natural intelligence” of an individual. The only pitfall was that Brigham was a strong believer in eugenics, or in the belief that there is a superior group of people and only they should breed while leaving out everyone else, which was believed to make the human race “better”. Another fan of this was Nazis.
This really didn’t give the college board a good look, so in effort to change this they ended up with the Scholastic Assessment Test. This test was modeled after general high school curriculum, compared to the Scholastic Aptitude Test that was just stuff people should know. According to the college board, the SAT measures “knowledge at the heart of education” and I don’t even know what that means considering how vague it is. The SAT has been proven to be an empty resemblance of knowledge gained from hours of studying to only be applied to the SAT.
So why do we still use it? Well as many of us have now realized is that colleges can often be a represented as an economy. For example, Harvard has an acceptance rate of 5.6%, 42,742 students applied for the year of 2022 and roughly 2,565 students were accepted. But there is no way they were able to really get to truly know each individual applicant, so instead of taking the time to really be conscious of each applicant they just measure what they’ve achieved and their test score.
In other words, the reason we still use the SAT and ACT as a way to measure our success is because in reality, it’s just a shortcut to find out if we were dedicated enough to get good grades and show for it.