Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Origins

The psychometric educational testing movement had its origins in the work of Alfred Binet and then Edward L. Thorndike in the 1920s, but it gained the support of powerful men in higher education in the 1930s. The College Entrance Examination Board (College Board), which had been administering standardized college admissions examinations since 1900, had been offering the psychological SAT exam as a predictive indicator of college performance since 1926. In the meantime, the Iowa Every–Pupil Testing Program was a series of achievement tests that virtually every high school student in the Midwest had taken by the mid-1930s, and the American Council on Education administered the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) through its Cooperative Test Service.

In 1933, James Bryant Conant, then president of Harvard University, started a new scholarship program with which he wished to provide access to Harvard based not on pedigree or income but on academic ability. He assigned the development of the program to Henry Chauncey, who was an assistant dean at the university. After meeting with Carl Brigham, the associate secretary of the College Board and the designer of the original SAT, Chauncey recommended the use of the SAT exam to determine who should be awarded the scholarships. Conant liked the idea of the SAT because he believed that it measured “pure intelligence.” By 1938, Chauncey had convinced all of the College Board member colleges and universities to use the SAT for determination of scholarship awards. Conant believed a substantial research and testing program centered in one organization would be the optimal way to proceed with the implementation and advancement of intelligence testing for admissions. Carl Brigham opposed the idea and as a result the issue lay dormant until Brigham's death in 1943.

World War II provided opportunities for large–scale psychological testing. Chauncey came to the College Board in 1943 as assistant director in order to design and supervise tests for the U.S. military. These examinations were to test high school seniors' aptitude and potential to serve as officers, engineers, and in other skilled technical positions for which the military would train them. In 1943 and 1944, well over half a million young men were tested, and during and after the war the College Board found itself administering many testing programs that were unrelated to college admission.

The growing volume of diverse testing activity, competition between the College Board and other, smaller testing entities, and the need to assess and place the growing numbers of applicants for college admission after the war led the Board to initiate a study by its Committee on Testing on the future of its testing services. As chair, Conant again began to push for a combination of testing organizations in his report delivered in 1947. This led to the creation of the Educational Testing Service.

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