The College Board

The College Board, not-for-profit association of over 6,000 universities, colleges, schools, and other educational institutions, best known for its college entrance examination, the SAT (formerly called the Scholastic Assessment Test and, before that, the Scholastic Aptitude Test). The College Board was founded as the College Entrance Examination Board in 1900 to bring order to the process of college admissions, which in the 19th century had been chaotic and inefficient owing to the wide curricular independence enjoyed by public schools across the United States and the variety of admissions practices and standards used by colleges and universities. Its headquarters are in New York City.

At its founding, the College Board had 12 institutional and charter members, all located in the northeastern United States. As a voluntary association composed of university- and secondary-level educators, it saw itself as having two major functions: (1) to provide a forum for the discussion of issues related to college admissions and access to college and (2) to design and administer a common entrance examination, 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 in nine content areas: English, history, Latin, Greek, French, German, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1916 that original design gave way to a system of comprehensive examinations that placed a greater emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking while still testing students on subject-area knowledge. The examinations were read and scored by college and high-school teachers. Participation in the College Board’s testing program was confined mainly to 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. Most Midwestern and Southern colleges relied on certifications from public high schools stating that an applicant was prepared for college or university study.

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During World War I, the military began to use new “psychological” or “intelligence” tests, administering more than two million tests to soldiers and sailors. After the war, university admissions officials began to explore how intelligence testing could be used in the admission process. In 1924, Carl Campbell Brigham, a psychologist who had been involved in developing the military tests, was invited to chair a College Board commission on psychological testing, with the result being the adoption of the College Board’s first psychological examination, called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, in 1926. The test comprised two sections: the first measured verbal or linguistic aptitude, and the second measured mathematical and scientific aptitude. Essays were part of the examinations until 1941, when travel restrictions curtailed exam readers’ movement. (Essays were reinstated in 2005.) “Achievement” examinations (later called the SAT II: Subject Tests and, subsequently, the SAT Subject Tests), designed to test applicants’ content knowledge, were often administered in test locations after the SAT examination. During World War II, the College Board also designed and supervised examinations for the U.S. military to test high-school seniors’ aptitude and potential to serve as officers, as engineers, and in other skilled technical positions.

By 1944, only 15 percent of American colleges were using the SAT as an admissions tool, but the 1950s and 1960s would be decades of unprecedented growth for the College Board as the SAT became the standard examination for college admission. Regional offices were opened around the United States and abroad. It also continued its mission as a voluntary association providing a forum for deliberation, discussion, research, and implementation of policies and programs relating to secondary and higher education. In 1954 the College Board set up the College Scholarship Service, which developed forms and guidelines for determining students’ need for financial aid.

Although early educational psychometricians at the College Board claimed that test takers would not be able to improve their performance on the SAT, in 1959 it introduced the Practice SAT exam (PSAT). The National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, connected to the PSAT, was introduced in 1970.

After receipt of a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education in support of research into the possibility of admitting high-achieving high-school graduates into college with advanced academic standing, the College Board established the Advanced Placement (AP) program in 1955 so as to enable students, via AP exams, to receive advanced placement in colleges (at the sole discretion of each institution) that range from college credit to the waiving of required courses.

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Criticism of the College Board began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s; opponents of the SAT’s central role in college admissions charged that standardized tests were biased against minority students and students from underprivileged backgrounds. Several states in the first decade of the 21st century reduced their reliance on the SAT and chose instead to guarantee admission to students finishing in a set percentage at or near the top of their high-school graduating class.