The SAT is an exam taken by a majority of college-bound students in the United States and is an important criterion in college admission decisions. In the economics of education literature, individual SAT scores are a common measure of student academic quality, while SAT scores averaged across all students in a high school or college provide a parallel measure of the academic quality of an educational institution. This entry provides a brief overview of the SAT, explains its empirical and theoretical application in the academic literature, and outlines common criticisms of the use of the exam.