Written by Justin Lee
Edited by Lauren Huye
The SAT, among other high-stakes standardized exams, has become ubiquitous with college applications for millions of students in the United States. However, the history of this exam serves as a long-standing, sordid reminder of actions that negatively impact racial minorities. Though it sought to diversify recruitment to the Ivy League in its early forms, the SAT proved only to make such schools open to white students. For decades, the SAT became entrenched in schools around the nation while upholding the dictum of excluding people of color. The SAT’s earliest forms exemplified this perpetuation of systemic racism, which is still true in the test’s current forms.
The eugenics movements of the early 20th century spurred a mania that shaped national policy and held regard in the upper reaches of society. The SAT is one such contemporary remnant of eugenics – the theory that the white race and its undesirable traits would improve through selective breeding. Backed by professors throughout the Ivy League and various prestigious colleges, many scientists sought to use eugenics to enhance America’s college graduates. In 1917, psychologists at the American Psychological Association developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta exams. Though these tests were meant to evaluate whether potential army recruits were of “superior mental ability”, these tests instead reinforced white male cultural caricatures. These Army entrance exams were the precursor to standardized tests in the US.
Following World War I, social scientists, including Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, were increasingly concerned about the US’s absorption of millions of European immigrants. One such scientist, Carl Brigham, cited the use of an objective admissions test to quell the acceptance of African Americans and these immigrants into Princeton and the other schools in the Ivy League. Brigham, who helped write the Army Alpha exam, published A Study of American Intelligence in 1923. In his book, he used data from the Army exams to cite the superiority of the “Nordic race group,” writing of the “decline of the intelligence of European national groups” and that African Americans were on the low-end of a supposed racial hierarchy. Armed with his experience with the Princeton and army exams, Brigham was commissioned by the College Board to create another standardized exam. He restructured the Army Alpha exam and wrote the “Scholastic Aptitude Test”, or SAT, in 1926.
This creation of standardized tests was inexorably tied to systemic racism. While eugenics became a silent chapter of American history by 1930, the SAT and the College Board still used the SAT to sift through thousands of college applicants across hundreds of schools. Questions on the original SATs were meant to test applicants on their aptitude. The test evaluated an applicant’s knowledge under the guise of a “white man’s perspective” — knowledge that ultimately used the education experiences of white men as a baseline measure for all students. Backed by the pseudoscience of the time, as well as the institutions of elite colleges, the SAT construed a mission of targeting the underprivileged. James Conant, the president of Harvard University in 1933, initially used the SAT to determine students for scholarships. But over time, Conant and others grew more convinced that the SAT could be used to shift the status quo of American education. Writing for The Atlantic in 1940, Conant cited the SAT as instrumental towards “Education for a classless society”, noting that the kinds of people who excelled on the tests would be more hardworking and better “public servants.”
This view of a more meritocratic admissions process echoed across schools, with hundreds of schools requiring SAT scores by 1950 and nearly all schools by the 1990s. However, while school officials such as Conant turned a blind eye toward test-takers’ backgrounds, countless studies still showed how African Americans and other students from minority groups were outperformed by their white and wealthier peers. The original rationale — that the SAT could identify performance regardless of background — had been discredited and destroyed. By 1993, the College Board conceded the notion of the SAT as an aptitude test, dropping the “Aptitude Test” from its name (but still keeping the abbreviation of the SAT).
Today, the SAT is an emblem of the barriers that higher institutions exacerbate against racial minorities. For instance, prep programs for the SAT often exceed $1,000 per course — they are more available for wealthy families. Studies have also shown that by age 10, many African American students internalize negative racial academic stereotypes that can paralyze fear of underperformance in stressful testing environments. On top of this racial inequality, the exam is written to assume a near-perfect fluency of English, undermining immigrants or other students that don’t have English as a first language. Though the pandemic has diversified the options that schools use for admissions — such as using a holistic application or removing the exam for admissions — the racial biases associated with the SAT have detrimental and far-reaching consequences for countless students and families.
Almost a century later, standardized testing has become commonplace in our educational system. Though the SAT has outlasted its eugenic past, it has become intertwined with classism, systemic racism, and white supremacy. Despite some good intentions and increasing efforts to forget the SAT's past, this contemptuous truth won't change. As long as the SAT is a norm in our education system, it will forever hold that high-stakes standardized tests will never be neutral or fair to everyone.
Sources
Brigham. “A Study of American Intelligence (1923 Edition).” Open Library, University Press, 1 Jan. 1970, openlibrary.org/books/OL7054323M/A_study_of_American_intelligence.
Conant, James Bryant. “Education for a Classless Society.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 1 May 1940, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1940/05/education-for-a-classless-society/305254/
Kaplan, Sarah. “The Rise and Demise of the Much-Loathed SAT.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 25 Oct. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/28/how-the-sat-came-to-rule-college-admissions/.
Rampell, Catherine. “SAT Scores and Family Income.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 27 Aug. 2009, archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/.
“Where Did The Test Come From? - Americans Instrumental In Establishing Standardized Tests | Secrets Of The Sat | FRONTLINE.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/three.html.
Www.facebook.com/mcgilltribune. “Standardized Testing Is a Perpetuation of White Supremacy.” The McGill Tribune, 15 Feb. 2022, www.mcgilltribune.com/opinion/standardized-testing-is-a-perpetuation-of-white-supremacy-02152022/.
Zwick, Rebecca. Rethinking the SAT The Future of Standardized Testing in University Admissions. Taylor and Francis, 2013.
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