The SAT's 100-year grip on higher ed

For generations, the SAT has loomed large in the lives of teenagers. The quest for a perfect or near-perfect score has filled many test takers with dread. In this episode, a listener's question makes us wonder... who decided the SAT was the best and brightest way to filter students? And how did it become the pathway to higher education in America? Guests: Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test and Higher Admissions Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:26Speaker 01

  Um, out of curiosity, do you remember your SAT score?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  I do, yes. And I have chosen not to say in public what they were.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Why don't you like sharing what you got on the CT?

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I don't want to, you know, contribute to the culture of making it a super important thing about you.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I bet it freed you out a little when I asked that question. Don't worry, you don't have to share your score either. I'm not sharing mine.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I used to live in Texas and somebody told me once, never ask a rancher how many acres his ranch is. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, it's like asking somebody to tell you that how much money they have. In, in certain parts of American culture, asking for SAT scores is a little bit like that.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  That's Nicholas Lemon. He's written two books about the SAT, and he'll answer any question you have about it, except a score, even more than 50 years after taking it.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  It's kind of weird how clearly I still remember the drives to and from my SAT prep class, probably because I was so nervous that I was going to end up bombing on the exam. The stakes felt really high, and my first go at it hadn't gone great. Embarrassing fun fact, to calm my nerves, I would blast Rihanna's "Disturbia" in the car on the way to the class, singing at the top of my lungs.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  And you know how sometimes people will reassure you when you're nervous and say, don't worry about it, it's not that big of a deal. It's not like your whole future will depend on this thing. Well, no one could really say that to me with a straight face, because for sure, it didn't entirely depend on this one exam, but it could make some difference. And in hindsight, I recognize how lucky I was to be able to take that prep class, to be able to afford to take the SAT twice to try to get a better score, and the fact that college was just assumed as a given in my house growing up. But what I never really thought about at the time was why I had to take the SAT in the first place. Like, who decided this was the best way to filter students for higher education?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  I'm Rande Abdelfatah, and this is Throughline from NPR. For the last few months, we've asked you, our listeners, to write or call in with questions or topics you can't stop thinking about. And today's episode was inspired by Jory Baker, a computer science teacher in Colorado, asking about the College Board, you know, that nonprofit testing company that drives the educational assessment of America's students. Jory asked, how did we get here? So we drilled down on the one big test the College Board is most famous for, the SAT, which it turns out was first administered 100 years ago on June 23, 1926. We'll get into that history after a short break.

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• 4:55Speaker 08

  A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of a distance, and an equally great number toils with little return.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  1933, America reaches the absolute bottom of the Great Depression. The stock market crash has sent millions across the nation into unemployment and poverty.

• 5:16Speaker 08

  Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities at the moment.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  But the ultra wealthy, the old-moneyed class cushioned by their generations of wealth, remain largely unaffected. In 1933, they retain power through the strength of their connections. Some, or many of those connections, solidified in the nation's elite colleges. This whole system doesn't sit right with the new president of Harvard University.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  So 1933, a man named James Conan became president of Harvard. He came from, by Harvard president's standards, a modest background.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Middle class, the son of a small business owner. And as he looks over the student body from his wire-rimmed glasses, he doesn't like what he sees.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  He had this very strong feeling that the wrong kind of people were going to Harvard, and that that had to change.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  America's elite universities, particularly the private ones, were completely dominated by preppies. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant tended to be from the big cities, especially of the East Coast, and they were sort of culturally dominant in these schools. He was very worried about this sort of preppy aristocracy that wasn't very competent running America. He thought the urgent situation of the Depression demanded a sort of better class of leaders.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And he thought this was a real sort of crisis.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Conan's whole idea about lifting people up based on merit is an idea he borrows from Thomas Jefferson, something Jefferson dubbed "the natural aristocracy."

• 7:08Speaker 09

  There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trust, and government of society.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Conan and others loved quoting that passage.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  For a middle-class guy like Conan, now in a position of power and influence, he's obsessed with this idea of a natural aristocracy. And he's ready to reform, first at Harvard, then the Ivies, and then all universities. He thinks there must be this untapped talent in far-flung corners of America, and worries that at this very moment, there could be--

• 7:51Speaker 02

  People of extraordinary intelligence who would spend their life walking behind a mule and a plow, you know, instead of making great scientific breakthroughs and so on.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  But how to identify these natural talents, pluck them from behind the plow of America to come study at Harvard? How could you possibly identify the hidden gems lost in the education system? Conan calls his assistant dean to his house for lunch, a guy named Henry Chauncey, and he's like--

• 8:20Speaker 02

  I want you to go around the country and find a test that I can use to identify these new scholarship students that I want to bring to Harvard.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  I want something that is background-free and curriculum-free. That's, that's the test I'm looking for.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Conan's dream is to find more people like him, super smart white men who didn't come from East Coast generational wealth or a private school pedigree. And his dream collides with a new way of thinking that's sweeping through academic circles in the US. A new theory was taking hold in the early 20th century that things like intelligence, morality, social worth are fixed, determined at birth, and that society can be engineered by encouraging certain people, namely white, able-bodied people, to pass down their genes. It was called eugenics.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  The standard position of a member of the liberal establishment, a prominent academic in an Ivy university, was to be sympathetic to the eugenics movement. And remember, this is pre-Hitler, right? And you're a professor at Columbia, the university where I work. Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, it is unacceptable that women can't vote in this country and that the South has the Jim Crow system? We'd want them to think that. Almost none of them did think that.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Around this time, American psychologists were trying to figure out how to measure a person's lifelong potential. And the US military was super interested in the research.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  There was a whole bunch of IQ enthusiasts who, one of their big victories, was persuading the United States Army to administer an IQ test to all military inductees in the First World War.

• 10:25Speaker 10

  Let us organize our strength and keep the torch of liberty burning throughout the world. America has never lost a war for freedom. And with God's help, we shall not fail now.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  During World War I, they turned to the IQ, the intelligence quotient test. For the Army, it's an ideal way to quickly sort recruits, determine who had the aptitude for an officer role, the ability to tackle technical assignments from those who should be regular soldiers.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  One of the founders and administrators of this test was a man named Carl Brigham.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Carl Brigham is a 30-something psychology professor at Princeton. He's held a seat on the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society. And he's tasked with analyzing the raw data of those military IQ tests. And he concludes that they're pretty successful at identifying key traits of new soldiers. So he wants to continue this research. And he turns to another institution with large amounts of people available to sort: schools. And he hooks up with an association that's in charge of standardizing college admissions, a group made up of mostly elite East Coast universities, the College Board. And they hire him to develop a test to measure the aptitude of high school students.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  You know, it's the idea that you can have two, three hours with a person and understand their lifelong intellectual potential. Now, that's arguable, but just the thought that you could do that was very dramatic.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Brigham's IQ testing of high school students, mostly in the Northeast, is experimental, purely for research. But in late 1933, the stars align.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Remember that assistant dean, Henry Chauncey, that James Conan had sent out looking for the perfect test? Well, he comes across Brigham's research. And James Conan, who's looking for this aptitude test to make his dream of meritocracy a reality, he hears about what Brigham is pioneering, and he's excited to try it out. So he decides to find 10 scholarship students to enter Harvard in 1934.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  It was a multiple-choice test, as it is now. It didn't have any essays or writing component. But it was, you know, reading comprehension. There was a math component. It wouldn't be entirely unfamiliar to people who've taken the SAT now.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  The exam goes out to public high schools in the far corners of America. And to the East Coast college crowd, that means the Midwest.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  The way it was offered was to say to the high school, there's a chance to go to Harvard on scholarship. So it's not for the entire student body. It's for, you know, who you think might take advantage of that.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  With results in hand, 10 scholarship students are selected. All but two get elected into Harvard's Honor Society, Phi Beta Kappa. And with success on his side, Conan repeats the process. By 1937, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale are convinced to use the exam to identify their scholarship students. The irony: as the SAT is gaining momentum, the man who started it all is having second thoughts. In 1934, Carl Brigham, the creator of the test, writes in an unpublished manuscript.

• 13:45Speaker 11

  The test movement came to this country some 25 or 30 years ago, accompanied by one of the most glorious fallacies in the history of science, namely that the tests measured native intelligence purely and simply, without regard to training or schooling. I hope nobody believes this now.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  What Brigham wants people to understand is that the test measures a sort of mix: where they went to school, who their family is, even how well they speak English.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  So Brigham was not a believer in using the SAT widely as a college admissions test because of his conversion.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  But it's too late. Brigham's creation has been unleashed, and it's taken hold, thanks to its real believers, like Conan, in the ivory towers. To be clear, by all accounts, Conan is not himself a eugenicist. But he does believe in the power of the test to measure innate intelligence. As he sees it, it's like--

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Putting a dipstick into your brain and just getting the reading.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So he keeps trying to sell it to higher ed institutions across the country long after Brigham had abandoned it. The SAT needed to go national.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  All this was sort of building a civilization. You know, it was part of that.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  On a Sunday in December 1941, a group of College Board officials are enjoying lunch at Princeton, talking about how great it would be to get rid of the entrance exam essays, to use the SAT for all applicants, not just scholarship students. Right in the middle of this discussion, a telephone rings.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The Japanese military had attacked Pearl Harbor. Once again, the US military needs a way to sort new recruits. And on April 2, 1943, they figure out how to administer the SAT--

• 15:39Speaker 02

  to something like 300,000 people simultaneously on the same day, all over the country, and then securely score the tests.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  It's a huge feat. And it's at this point that the College Board sees the full potential of the test.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  The College Board dropped its old essay-based college boards and said, well, now we're just going to use the SAT. And that's how the SAT goes from, you know, 10,000 or something administrations before the war to over a million administrations in the 50s.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  So the press coverage of this was, oh, my God. You know, there's the polio vaccine, and then there's the SAT. It's at that level of just inarguable scientific breakthrough. It was covered in this very sort of gee-whiz way and did initially attract a sort of adoring obedience.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  By the 1950s and 60s, the demand for a college education explodes. And American students are now studying for it. Test prep becomes a thing. That's because a new reality emerges. A good score could mean admission to a top school, which is a ticket to a good job, to money, success, prestige, comfort. By the time the next generation goes to college in the 80s and 90s, nearly all four-year institutions require some form of standardized test scores. In the 90s, the SAT rebrands, drops aptitude and adds assessment. It's become a multi-billion-dollar industry. And all the while, the SAT, its format, the questions are tweaked and changed in response to waves of critiques,

• 17:25Speaker 01

  from racial bias to scoring to its very format. A debate about privilege and the test's equity and fairness whirls. The big question: why are we relying on it so much?

• 17:36Speaker 12

  I mean, the debate over the fairness of these tests, the SAT and ACT, it's really been heating up the last several years.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And when the pandemic hits in 2020, testing is paused. Initially, it's for logistical concerns. Students can't take the tests in person. But soon, that gives way to a longer-term effect. Colleges waive requirements and make testing optional, citing a push to bump up diversity. But that absence of the SAT, a first in 80 years for the Ivies, intensifies the public's curiosity about why we take it, what it actually measures, and why we even need it.

• 18:15Speaker 07

  Almost since the inception of the SAT, performance varies by wealth, race, gender, family income.

• 18:28Speaker 13

  If we don't use SAT scores that are standardized, then what do we use?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  For the 2027, 2028 admissions cycle, a majority of colleges will remain test optional. But Conan's old stomping grounds, the Ivy Leagues, all will require test scores. And more institutions could soon opt to restore the SAT, especially given the latest federal data showing American teenagers falling behind, lacking skills and readiness for first-year college courses. Plus, there's added recent research from Harvard pointing to correlations between strong scores and strong academic performance. How then are we supposed to suss out prospective students, given the test's historical baggage and all the questions that still surround it?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Will the SAT continue to be the best and brightest answer?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I think at this point, SAT replicates existing class structures more than it doesn't. But there's still a few diamonds in the rough.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And that's it for today's show. Join us Thursday for another new episode about a 700-page report published 60 years ago that transformed the fight over American public education.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and-- Molly Marcello. Jasmine Romero. Julia Redpath. Amy Padula. Sarah Wyman. Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Johannes Sturkey, Cheyenne Butler, and Tony Cavan. Thanks also to Ryland Barton and Nathan Thompson. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Fact checking was done by Greta Pitenger. And this episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. If you have a question you can't stop thinking about, write us at [email protected]. It might be featured in a future Tuesday episode.

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