March 17, 2025

— a well-meaning person at the College Board

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The SAT

It started with a radical belief: brilliance wasn't reserved for bankers' sons or boarding school graduates. Potential could be hidden anywhere—in a Pennsylvania coal town, a Chicago tenement, a farm outside Des Moines.

If you could build a tool to find it, you could change everything.

That was the idea behind the SAT.

Before it became a battleground of privilege and policy, the SAT began as a tool of democratization. An attempt—flawed but sincere—to make access to elite education about something other than bloodline or zip code.

99 years ago today

It began on a warm June morning 99 years ago today—in forgettable classrooms, with students who had no idea they were making history.

No fanfare. No cameras. No headlines. Fewer than 8,000 students across the country arrived with sharpened pencils and little clue what to expect.

Most were bound for elite schools already. Some came from public high schools that had never sent a kid to Harvard. About 40% were girls. A few had never traveled beyond the train stop across town.

They sat. They waited. They were handed a booklet.

At exactly 9:00 a.m., the proctor gave the word.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test had begun.

The man behind the test

Its creator, Carl Brigham, was a psychologist who had helped design IQ tests for the U.S. Army during World War I. He believed standardized evaluation could do more than sort soldiers—it could open the doors of higher education based on merit rather than family connections.

"The test should measure pure thought," he said.

That wasn't entirely true, of course. Culture, class, and opportunity seep into every question. But in 1926, the dream felt bigger than the flaws.

The vision aligned with Harvard president James B. Conant's ambitions. Conant wanted to shake up the Ivy League—to break its stranglehold on wealthy children and find brilliant, overlooked students in places admissions offices had never looked.

In the early decades, it worked.

Public school kids from Montana and Michigan, Mississippi and Maine, started appearing in Ivy League classrooms. Not in overwhelming numbers, but enough to mark a shift. Enough to prove the test could surface something that transcripts and social clubs might miss.

The SAT wasn't just measuring intelligence. It was measuring possibility.

The promise at the start

The reality grew complicated as the test expanded from thousands to millions of students. It transformed from ladder to gate. Coaches emerged. Prep courses boomed. Wealthy families learned to game the system. The very institutions that had championed the SAT as a leveler began questioning what it really measured.

By the early 2000s, critics were everywhere. Was it measuring intelligence or privilege? Critical thinking or test-taking skill? Colleges began dropping it entirely.

But back in 1926, all of that was still to come.

There's something moving about those first test-takers. The boy in front whose parents couldn't afford college but who read voraciously and dreamed big. The girl two rows back who never spoke in class but saw patterns in numbers no one else did. The immigrant's son in a suit two sizes too big because he wanted to make a good impression.

They didn't know what this test would become.

They only knew someone was asking them to try. Not because of who their fathers were. Not because they could afford tuition. But because someone, somewhere, believed they might have something worth recognizing.

One College Board official said it plainly that day: "Let this test measure our youth."

It did. Imperfectly, controversially, for better and for worse—and for a while, at least, it did just that.

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