Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac” reports that today the very first SAT was administered on a trial basis. It was created by Professor Carl C. Brigham of Princeton, one of the founding psychologists of the IQ test. Brigham wrote one of the most notoriously racist, anti-immigrant books of the 1920s. Brigham asserted that wide scale IQ testing demonstrated that whites from Northern Europe were superior to immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe and to American blacks. His book, “A Study of American Intelligence,” helped the movement to restrict immigration and reinforced virulent racism.
TWA noted the day:
It was on this day in 1926 that 8,040 college applicants, in 353 locations around the U.S., were administered an experimental college admissions test. The test was the brainchild of Carl Brigham, a professor of psychology at Princeton. Brigham had been an assistant during World War I for the U.S. Army’s IQ testing movement, the “Army Alpha,” which assessed the intelligence of new recruits. After the war, he tinkered with the test, mainly making it more difficult, but also looking for a measurement of pure intelligence, regardless of the test-taker’s educational background. Just 4 years later, however, Brigham came to believe that the test scores represented not “pure intelligence,” but rather “a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else, relevant and irrelevant.” The Scholastic Aptitude Test, now known as the SAT, was formally adopted in 1942. Today’s test takes three hours to complete.
The College Board decided to make the switch on December 7, 1941, because of the Japanese attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor. The college presidents were meeting at Princeton that day and realized the US would soon be at war. There would be no time for essay-based exams. In 1942, machine-scored, multiple-choice tests replaced the old College Boards, which had been created, written and scored by teams of teachers and professors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This experiment has caused a lot of damage to so many.
I am reading “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement,” (http://amzn.com/1524759759), and in Chapter 2, it goes into great detail about the hijacking of the French-created IQ test that was hijacked by an American (go figure) and also the eugenics backgrounds of many of the academics in the testing movement in the 1920s along with the SAT.
Robert,
Read the chapter in my book “Left Back” about the history of IQ testing, racism, and the SAT.
Eugenics! Let’s just call it what it really is.
and the separating of those who have from those who do not have
The Introduction of the SAT as a Means for Advancing the Racist Eugenics Movement
Here we are 100 years later, still fighting this garbage in its latest incarnation, the Scholastic Common Core Alt-right Tool, aka, the Sccat.
The Coring of the Test has made it even worse, of course. Everything Coleman touches. . . .
…turns to S___T! After the AP fiasco, I don’t think many people give a S–T what David Coleman thinks or feels.
Perhaps the widespread acceptance of intelligence and achievement testing is evidence of what happens to a society when they reject the idea of guilt. There was once an ethic that included the collective guilt of society for the ills that assailed it. European monarchs exploited this concept to gain power through the church. Thomas Hobbes codified it in his Social Contract (man is evil, so we give up liberty to gain security from each other).
Reacting against this, Locke and other revolutionaries of the 1600s began to see the individual as the measure of good and evil. Thus individualism was born into the enlightenment. In American thought this morphed into rugged individualism, the belief that the individual was completely responsible for his actions. Rugged individualism was supplemented by the religious concept of individual responsibility within a society. Thus the reform movements, especially abolitionism and her sister reforms that swept the Jacksonian era directed the individual to involve himself in the curing of societal problems or face the guilt assigned to those who did not act to do so.
A further reaction took place as the progressives of the Theodore Roosevelt era sought to institutionalize the concept of Lester Ward’s reform Darwinism (competition is good, but we need to all start out of the same place). This took place at a time when European domination of the world had reached its zenith, and the Europeans saw prima face evidence that the descendants of the various tribes that had wandered into the old Roman Empire were naturally smarter, more fit to rule. Thus a person could reconcile rugged individualism with genetic superiority constructs. How could you feel guilt for failure if you were just carrying out your God-given talent for developing natural resources and organizing society? No guilt here, beam us up. Instead, let us trust technology to produce some way to reward the smart people, even if they come from some colonial backwater. No wonder intelligence testing seemed to be a panacea to that generation.
Unfortunately, after a century, the cat is out of the bag, and the inadequacies of achievement and intelligence testing, especially the likes of which are economically possible in a system deliberately starved by powerful economic interests, are well known. Still, that does not keep political figures from using testing much as the European monarchs used guilt to maintain power. Time for a return to guilt?
Wow, so SAT was born out of wartime necessity, and this country never went back to the proper ways of evaluating kids. .