Colleges that dropped the exam as unfair are now bringing it back. Why has it endured?
What’s the goal of the SAT?
A dreaded rite of passage for generations of high school students, the SAT—formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test—aims to gauge a student’s ability to handle collegelevel material. Last year, more than 2 million juniors and seniors took the exam, a two-and-a-half hour ordeal consisting of 44 questions in the math section and 54 in the reading-and-writing section. A high score on the scale of 400 to 1600 won’t by itself guarantee acceptance to a selective university, but it’s often a prerequisite. Yet over the 100 years that the test has been administered, its value has been fiercely debated, with critics saying it merely reinforces race and income inequality. Those allegations were a main reason more than 1,200 colleges and universities stopped requiring SAT scores in 2020 and 2021, instead basing admission on factors like GPA, essays, and extracurriculars. Since then, though, dozens of those schools have reinstated the requirement. “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” said Brown University president Christina Paxson. In an era of grade inflation, they “reveal useful information.”
How was the test created?
Before the SAT, elite universities mainly admitted students from a handful of prep schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire or Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. In the early 1900s, when intelligence tests were becoming all the rage, institutions began considering general entrance exams. Princeton University psychologist Carl Brigham created what would become the SAT in 1922, when he modified a version of the Army’s IQ test and administered it to Princeton freshmen. Yet bias was built in from the start: One of his goals, Brigham wrote in his book A Study of American Intelligence, was to prove the superiority of “the Nordic race.” By June 1926, the College Board—an association of dozens of universities and colleges— had adopted the test as a general entrance exam. The first time it was administered, 8,040 students were given 97 minutes to race through 315 questions covering foreign languages, logic skills, vocabulary, and arithmetic. Word problems reflected the culture of the day, with one math problem asking: “If a package containing 20 cigarettes costs 15 cents, how many cigarettes can be bought for 90 cents?”
How did it get so popular?
Mainly because of the G.I. Bill. In the aftermath of World War II, some 2.5 million veterans poured into colleges, and universities turned to the SAT to help them evaluate the applicants. By 1960, more than 500,000 students were taking the test each year, and 350 colleges had made it a requirement. To meet this growing need, the College Board employs teams of teachers, professors, and testing experts to write the questions. For decades, though, that committee consisted almost entirely of white, well-off, highly educated men from the Northeast, and the test reflected their experiences—with word problems and reading passages referring to upperclass activities like sailing or riding. More recently, test makers have tried to eliminate cultural and socioeconomic bias.
Does bias in questions harm students?
While that can’t be proved, there are certainly disparities in scores among different races and economic classes. In 2024, the average combined score was 1228 for Asian students and 1083 for white students, compared with 939 for Hispanics and 907 for Black students. A 2023 study found that over 33% of children of the top 1% in income scored a 1300 or higher, versus only 2.4% of children from the poorest 20% of households. Wealthy families, of course, can more easily pay the $68 test fee multiple times, and many can drop thousands on special SAT prep courses. Such issues were cited in a 2019 lawsuit demanding the University of California system abolish its SAT requirement. In 2020, it did, as did hundreds of other universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the entire Ivy League.
What was the result?
Top schools received a larger, more diverse set of applications. But before long, professors complained that incoming freshmen lacked even rudimentary math skills. “I realized that for students to follow me,” said UC Berkeley string theorist Mina Aganagic, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” A 2024 Harvard study found that GPA alone “does a poor job of predicting academic success in college” in the absence of standardized test scores. Dozens of colleges, including every Ivy League university, have now reinstated a standardized-test mandate, and 1,400 instructors in the University of California system have signed an open letter urging the state to do likewise. “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers,” it states. “It moves them into the classroom.”
Are there alternatives?
There’s the ACT, developed in 1959 specifically to rival the SAT; most schools accept it in lieu of the SAT, and last year 1.4 million students took it. The Classical Learning Test, created in 2015 by conservative Jeremy Tate to focus on works in the Western canon, was taken by over 180,000 students last year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all U.S. military academies to accept it in place of SAT scores. But are these tests fairer or more accurate than the SAT? It’s impossible to know, and some academics believe that’s the wrong question. Harvard economist David Deming says any test is bound to reflect the shortcomings and disparities embedded in the American education system. “The problem isn’t the test,” he says. “The problem is everything that happens before the test.”
