EDITORS' CORNER
The SAT turned 100 on Tuesday, a milestone that’s especially significant during this time of reckoning for higher education.
Although the test has gone through several changes and its use has waned, many of America’s top universities are now re-embracing it or being urged by their faculty to do so.
The resurrection is the result of many of today’s college students struggling to read whole books or solve basic math equations – products of the COVID lockdowns and campus administrators’ DEI efforts.
One hundred years ago, the SAT came about during another change in the higher education landscape.
In the 1920s, more Americans began attending college and institutions began looking outside the confines of their local communities for prospective students, according to a recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine.
These cultural changes demonstrated a need for a standardized national assessment.
It began on June 23, 1926, when “more than 8,000 high school students” took the first version of the SAT, adapted from a military IQ assessment, the Smithsonian reports.
The initial test included “315 questions about word definitions, analogies, math and more” and took about 1.5 hours, according to the report:
Pop quiz!
Here is a sampling of some of the questions that appeared on the very first SAT. Since the College Board cannot locate the answer key, we used Microsoft Copilot to confirm the solutions, which you can find at the end of the story. We’re aware that it’s ironic we used A.I. to solve these.
Question 1: A man spent one-eighth of his spare change for a package of cigarettes, three times as much for a meal, and then had eighty cents left. How much did he have at first? …
Question 3: Three of these are related to each other in some definite way. Indicate which three are thus most closely related.
Priestley, Dalton, Bach, DeSoto, Galileo, Mendelieff [Mendeleev]
Harvard was one of the first adopters, and “all the eventual Ivy League institutions administered the test by the end of the 1930s. After the G.I. Bill was passed, in 1944, the test grew in popularity because of an influx of veterans who wanted to attend college via the legislation,” the magazine reports.
The University of California system followed in the 1960s, and over the next 20 years, nearly every higher education institution in the U.S. began requiring the test or a similar assessment such as the ACT, according to the report.
Then, a different shift began in the late 2010s. With the rise of DEI, the test began drawing increased scrutiny from leftist academics and administrators. Some labeled it discriminatory, unfair, or racist.
What with the criticism and the COVID pandemic, many institutions changed their admissions policies to test optional. Columbia University, for example, cited “equity concerns” in its decision to stop requiring the SAT in 2020, according to a Union-Bulletin article.
Now, Columbia and others are realizing that was a mistake.
“Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success,” Columbia University stated in its June announcement about reinstating the SAT.
When Yale reversed course in 2024, Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions, explained the reason similarly: “Simply put, students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.”
In May, a faculty-led letter to the University of California offered specific examples about the consequences of removing the test requirement.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields,” UC STEM professors wrote.
The letter, which calls for reinstatement of the SAT for STEM majors, now has more than 2,300 signatures.
Last week, UC social science professors published a similar letter calling for an even more broad re-adoption of the test, The College Fix reported.
The current iteration of the SAT is not without concerns, and the Classic Learning Test is a rapidly expanding alternative.
But the test’s endurance over the past 100 years serves as a reminder that the necessity of academic merit will stand the test of time. And woke ideas won’t.
