19261776 Club
College Board gives its new aptitude test to 8,040 students; Yale and Smith account for more than half
Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham modeled the 200–800-scale exam on Army IQ tests from the war, as elite colleges seek an alternative to prep-school pedigree.
By the early 1920s, America's elite colleges were wrestling with how to select students beyond the old-boy networks of northeastern prep schools. On June 23, 1926, the College Board administered its new Scholastic Aptitude Test to 8,040 students — 60 percent of them male — with Yale and Smith accounting for more than half the test-takers. Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham had modeled the exam on Army IQ tests used during World War I, scoring it on a 200–800 scale across verbal and math sections. The SAT would eventually reach 1.5 million annual test-takers by 1971, reshaping how American colleges decided who belonged…
