The College Board introduces its first standardized test - June 17th, 1901

On this day in 1901, the newly-formed College Board administered its first standardized admissions exams, the precursor to the SAT.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that examines history one day at a time.
I'm Gabe Lousier, and today we're celebrating the summer season
by looking at the rise of standardized tests. Sure it's

(00:21):
not as much fun as a trip to the beach,
but you've got to start thinking about your future sometime.
The day was June one, the newly formed College Board
administered its first standardized admissions exams, the precursor to the

(00:45):
s A T. The examinations took the form of essay
questions that were meant to test to student's knowledge in
nine different subjects English, Latin, Greek, French, German, history, math matics, physics,
and chemistry. There were no multiple choice questions. For the

(01:06):
first half of the nineteenth century, educational testing in the
US had been limited mostly to oral exams. Students would
be questioned in person by the professors of whichever school
they hoped to attend. This system worked well enough when
the country was small and education was reserved primarily for
the wealthy elite, but by the eighteen seventies oral exams

(01:30):
had become much less efficient, prompting many colleges and universities
to switch to written admissions tests instead. This removed the
performance aspect of oral exams and save time, but it
didn't make preparing for the tests any easier. Because each
college now had its own separate exam, high schools weren't

(01:51):
sure what to teach since the different students would be
applying to different colleges. Harvard president Charles William Elliott was
among the first to envision a better way. In eighteen ninety,
he began to champion a common standard for entrance exams,
a written test that would be recognized and accepted by

(02:12):
higher education schools across the country. It took a decade
of convincing, but Elliott eventually got other schools on board
with the idea. In nineteen hundred, he and eleven other
college presidents banded together to form the College Entrance Examination Board,
which was later shortened to just the College Board. It's

(02:34):
worth noting that most of the original member institutions were
elite universities located in the northeastern US, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia,
and n y U, among others. Although class sizes had
gotten bigger since the days of oral exams. The vast
majority of students were still the product of wealth and privilege.

(02:56):
At the time, only about one in twenty five high
school graduate went on to attend college. They were the
select few who could afford it. The College Board spent
a year developing the admissions Exam of its Dreams, and
on June seventeenth, nineteen o one, it was ready to
be administered for the very first time. The exams were

(03:17):
held over the course of five days at sixty seven
locations across the US and at two in Europe. The
nine hundred and seventy three test takers represented a wide
range of schools, with thirty eight percent coming from private schools,
twenty seven percent from public high schools, two percent from
academies and endowed schools, and thirteen percent from various other institutions.

(03:43):
The College Board didn't go easy on its first crop
of students. One question required students to explain the rules
for five different Latin sentence constructions and then to illustrate
them by writing a Latin sentence for each one. Meanwhile,
in the physics portion of the exam, students were posed
the following problem. A balloon contains three hundred cubic meters

(04:07):
of hydrogen, each cubic meter of which weighs ninety grams.
The material of the balloon weighs two hundred and fifty krams.
Each cubic meter of the surrounding air weighs seven thousand,
two hundred and ninety grams. How many kilograms in addition
to its own weight will the balloon lift? If you

(04:28):
had a hard time keeping track of that question, well
now you understand why written tests were such a welcome
change from oral exams. When the nine one exams were finished,
the answer books were read and rated by experts in
each of the nine subjects. Each test was then assigned
a rating either excellent, Good, doubtful, poor, or very poor.

(04:53):
The inaugural batch of test takers went on to apply
to twenty three different colleges or universities, and many of
them the rating on their College Board exams was the
deciding factor for their application. The exams continued in much
the same way for the next twenty five years, but
in nineteen twenty six, the College Board began to administer

(05:15):
a drastically different kind of tests. The development of i
Q tests in nineteen o five and their subsequent use
in the military had piqued the interest of university officials.
They wanted to know if so called intelligence testing could
be used in the college admissions process, and to find out,
the Board hired Carl Campbell Brigham, one of the psychologists

(05:39):
who had helped develop intelligence tests for the military. With
his expertise, the College Board crafted and adopted a new
kind of exam, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or s a T.
For sure. It was administered for the first time on
June twenty three, ninety six, and with that the original

(06:00):
College Board exam was retired for good. The s a
T proved a worthy replacement, but it's come under heavy
criticism over the years. Many teachers, parents and schools now
question the long standing reliance on the s a T
and on standardized testing in general, and while the College

(06:20):
Board has made changes to help address some of these concerns,
the long term future of standardized test remains an open question.
One thing is for certain, though, most schools won't be
returning to oral exams either way. I'm gay, Bluesier, and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today

(06:42):
than you did yesterday. You can learn even more about
history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at
t d I HC Show, and if you have any
comments or suggestions, you can always send them my way
at this Day at I heart media Dot. Thanks to
Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks to you

(07:04):
for listening. I'll see you back here again soon for
another day in History class