College Board

Historical Background

The origins of the College Board are the work of the National Education Association's (NEA's) Committee of Ten, formed in 1892 and chaired by Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard University. This committee recommended a series of secondary school content area “studies” appropriate for student admission to college. In 1895, the NEA created the Committee on College Entrance Requirements, or the Committee of Twelve. As American public schools have historically enjoyed a wide curricular independence, and as colleges and universities each had their own admission standards, this committee's 1899 report sought to bring order to what appeared to be a chaotic and inefficient system. In the 1880s and 1890s, regional collaborative professional associations of college officials and secondary school principals and headmasters—such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland—were formed. It was through this latter agency that the College Board was set up in November 1900 with 12 institutional and charter members, all located in northeastern United States. A voluntary association composed of college and secondary educators, the Board saw itself having two major functions. The first was to create and maintain a forum for discussion of college access between college and secondary school educators, while at the same time it was charged with designing and administering a series of common entrance examinations, the results of which would be reported to the colleges and universities to interpret as they chose.

Between 1900 and 1915, the entrance examinations administered by the College Board were tests of knowledge of nine content areas. In 1916, that original design gave way to a system of comprehensive examinations that still tested students on subject area knowledge. The examinations were read and scored by college and high school teachers. The work of the Board was confined mainly to older, [Page 181]well-established private colleges in the northeast and middle Atlantic states, including several important women's colleges. Many of the colleges that were members of the College Board continued to administer their own admissions tests in addition to the College Board examination until the end of World War I. In the meantime, most midwestern and southern colleges relied on certifications from public high schools stating that an applicant was prepared for college or university study.

During World War I, the military began to use “psychological” or “intelligence” tests, influenced by Edward Thorndike of Columbia and designed by Professor Robert Yerkes of Harvard, who was assisted by Carl Campbell Brigham of Princeton. More than 2 million tests were administered to soldiers and sailors during the war. After the war, university admissions officials began to explore how intelligence testing could be used in the admission process. By this time, decades of immigration had greatly diversified the ethnic composition of American high schools, and the children of immigrants, particularly Jewish children, were earning grades in public schools that were allowing them admittance to exclusive universities like Columbia at numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population. The comprehensive College Board test, with its emphasis on content knowledge, favored those students willing to commit long hours to study and review, rather than those who might possess the greatest aptitude for advanced work. Intelligence exams, on the other hand, were designed to test ability rather than accomplishment. In 1924, Brigham was invited to chair a College Board commission on psychological testing, with the result being the adoption of the Board's first psychological examination, called the Scholastic Aptitude Test (renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test in 1992 and currently known simply as the SAT) in 1926. A predictive examination, the SAT was comprised of two sections: The first measured verbal or linguistic aptitude, and the second portion measured mathematical and scientific qualities. Essays were part of the examinations until 1941, when travel restrictions during World War II made it impractical for exam readers to move about the country. (Essays were reinstated to the SAT in 2005.) “Achievement” examinations (later called the SAT II: Subject Tests; now the SAT Subject Tests), designed to test applicants' content knowledge were often administered in test locations on the afternoon after the SAT examination. By 1930, Brigham disavowed the connection between psychological testing and ethnicity, which made the SAT all the more popular. Nonetheless, by 1944 only 15% of American colleges were using the SAT as an admissions tool.

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