Nation & World

A century of the SAT

AP Photo/Butch Dill

Anna Lamb

Harvard Staff Writer

July 20, 2026

6 min read

How the test of college readiness has changed with trends in education policy

The SAT turned 100 this summer. The dreaded rite for high school students has changed several times since its debut in 1926, but Harvard was there from the start, trying to shape it into a reliable tool to gauge college applicants’ academic readiness.

The test is the best-known product of the College Board — a nonprofit organization formed in 1899 to standardize college admissions. Then-Harvard President Charles W. Eliot was a founding member.

The organization spent its first 2½ decades developing and administering exams on a range of subjects, but it wasn’t until June 23, 1926, that the first SAT — which at its inception stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test” — was administered to more than 8,000 candidates. The test was elevated to its position as the standard college admissions exam in the 1940s. Today more than 2 million students annually take the SAT.

“The 100th birthday … it’s a question of whether you measure it from when the seed was planted to when it sprouted to when it became the giant tree that it is today,” said Andrew Ho, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ho is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice.

“In 1926 it was just a little test,” he said. “To me, as someone who does work in testing, it’s always about who uses the test for what purpose, and that’s really where James Bryant Conant and Henry Chauncey come in.”

Conant, Harvard’s president from the early 1930s through the 1950s, and assistant dean and scholarship director Chauncy were early boosters of the test. In 1934, Chauncey pitched the SAT to Conant as a way to find qualified scholarship students. Harvard began using the test for scholarship students in 1934 and, in 1941, began requiring it for all applicants.

“James Bryant Conant saw this opportunity to take it nationwide beyond just the boys in the prep schools — to look for talent throughout the United States,” Ho said.

The first SAT consisted of a 97-minute exam, featuring nine sub-tests on topics from math and reading to logic and analogies — made up of 315 mostly multiple-choice questions. And for much of its history, it continued in a similar format.

The most significant change to structure and scoring prior to the 21st century was the 1995 score “recentering” during which the College Board shifted the tabulation of raw scores to make them more reflective of student averages as the test grew in scale. This was also the first year the test included open-ended math questions instead of multiple choice in an effort to promote problem-solving over guesswork.

“Questions followed the curriculum, and less so this idea of aptitude as a set of games and mental puzzles divorced from what kids learned in the classroom,” Ho said.

The most significant pivots, though, according to Ho, were changes in the design and the marketing of the test as a college and career readiness test in the 2010s.

“The test became much less a series of games and puzzles and vocabulary words, and more a reflection of what kids learned in high school, that would prepare them ostensibly for college and later careers,” Ho said.

Over the last few decades, the SAT has become much more accommodating of open-ended responses, he said, and technology, including scannable text, has made it easier and more efficient to ask new kinds of questions such as short answers, or essays.

What hasn’t changed, though, is the public debate surrounding the issue of using a single test to measure a student’s academic capabilities. Critics have pointed to disparities in scores across race and class. As early as 1938, test preparation became a booming business for elites — undermining the College Board’s claims that the exam is “un-coachable” and an objective measure of scholastic aptitude.

Data gathered by the Harvard-based nonprofit Opportunity Insights found that children of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans were 13 times likelier than the children of low-income families to score 1300 or higher on SAT or the alternative ACT tests, while the College Board’s publicly available data shows racial inequity.

In recent years, some schools became test-optional in their admissions practices. Harvard was test-optional throughout much of the COVID pandemic, reversing the decision in 2024. College administrators argued that the SAT is just one piece of the admissions puzzle, citing Opportunity Insights research that found, despite socioeconomic score disparities, the exam is a key tool for identifying promising students at less-resourced high schools.

“The data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases,” said Raj Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and director of Opportunity Insights. “Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

Ho agrees with this assessment.

“For the vast majority of high school students in the United States, these tests already exist,” Ho said. “Those test scores already exist. Asking not to see them creates more inequality than it eliminates. Covering your eyes or asking others to figure out whether they should close our eyes for us, that creates this unnecessary dilemma.”

Ho calls the set of criteria that admissions officers look at — GPA, extracurriculars, essays, and recommendations, in addition to the SAT or ACT test — the “five-legged stool.”

“If you take a leg of the five-legged stool away, it rests on these four other legs, and we should look at those four other legs critically, think about their fairness, the equality of access to those educational opportunities to write good essays, to find good letters of recommendation, to be connected to good extracurricular activities, and to have good high school grades,” he said. “Those are also often restricted along lines of class and race and gender in ways that we have to be critical of and try to remedy as well.”

The most important thing to remember on the SAT’s 100th birthday is that the test is not the be-all and end-all of a student’s capabilities, Ho said.

“People who are at selective institutions should do more to demystify, clarify, and explain how test scores function in our system as one of multiple measures,” he said. “It’s a reflection of educational opportunity at a given point in time. That’s all.”