100 Years Ago, Students Across the U.S. Took the First SAT. Today, Relatively Few Colleges Require the Test. Where Is It Headed?

The standardized exam has evolved over the past century, all in the name of testing for college readiness. Now, it has become a symbol of the American higher education system

McKenzie Prillaman | Assistant Digital Editor, Science & Innovation

June 23, 2026 12:16 p.m.

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On June 23, 1926, more than 8,000 high school students sat down to take the first version of what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the SAT. The teens spent roughly an hour and a half attempting to answer 315 questions about word definitions, analogies, math and more in the hopes that their score would help them gain admission to top colleges. In just a few years, Harvard even began to use the test to find talented students beyond those at prestigious boarding schools on the East Coast.

Now, a century later, around two million graduating high school students in the United States—more than half—take the SAT each year. The test has morphed several times over its history, as researchers, educators and the public have pushed for it to assess skills learned in school rather than inherent intelligence or rote memorization.

But higher education has been inching away from entrance exams. Less than 10 percent of U.S. institutions that grant bachelor’s degrees require a score from the SAT, or its fellow ACT test, for the fall 2026 admissions cycle. That’s largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic’s lingering effects. However, decades-long arguments over what the test scores truly reflect and whether they’re accurate predictors of college success have made people question their role in admissions.

“In the narrowest sense, the [SAT’s] role is simply to provide a measure of verbal and math skills needed in college,” says Rebecca Zwick, an education expert who retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“But, of course, its role has expanded to mean a lot more things. Some people view it as the embodiment of the meritocracy, and then others think it’s a tool for social stratification,” adds Zwick, who also worked for 25 years at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which was formerly responsible for the administration of the SAT. The test is owned by the nonprofit College Board.

As we enter a new SAT era, many people are wondering whether the test will make a triumphant return as a requirement for college admissions, and if, instead of just weeding out applicants, it could better help universities meet students where they are.

The birth of a standardized college entrance exam

Prior to the SAT, relatively few people in the United States went to college. Only 1 percent of the 17.1 million students of all ages in 1900 were enrolled in postsecondary education. (For comparison, that proportion is estimated to be about 26 percent in fall 2026.)

Collegegoers often attended institutions in or close to their hometowns, so many universities administered their own individualized entrance exams to prospective students.

However, “as colleges started to place some emphasis on wider geographic recruitment, it meant that it was less and less likely that they could attract promising applicants if students had to travel to that college” to take the test, says John Thelin, a historian of higher education who retired from the University of Kentucky.

The idea of a readily available standardized test that higher-education hopefuls could take anywhere in the country became increasingly attractive. At the same time, Thelin adds, some schools, such as members of the eventual Ivy League, were starting to align themselves academically, so they wanted to have comparable data about admissions trends.

Princeton psychologist and eugenicist Carl Brigham was also interested in the education system, and in 1923, he published a book in which he claimed that American intelligence was declining because of Black people and immigrants. His racist theory was derived from the results of an I.Q. test administered to U.S. military recruits during World War I. Dividing scores by test-taker race and country of origin, he argued, showed that certain groups were smarter than others.

Brigham’s ideas were immediately refuted by experts, including Horace Mann Bond, a key figure in African American education, who wrote a scathing review of the book and conducted his own small study, which found that I.Q. test scores were associated with school resources. In 1930, Brigham published a paper to retract his earlier statements on racial differences in intelligence.

Still, Brigham used insights from psychology experiments with Princeton students to adapt the military I.Q. test into the first SAT for the College Board. Harvard soon adopted the test to expand recruitment. In 1934, the university began to use it to screen for potential scholarship students, and not long after, it required all prospective students to take the exam.

“It was a way to try to initially break up a little bit of the old boys’ network in elite college education, and to allow for the admission of a certain percentage of smart Jews and Italians and Irish kids—working-class kids who weren’t going to prep schools,” says Harry Feder, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), a nonprofit that advocates against the SAT.

Other schools followed suit, and all the eventual Ivy League institutions administered the test by the end of the 1930s. After the G.I. Bill was passed, in 1944, the test grew in popularity because of an influx of veterans who wanted to attend college via the legislation.

The SAT really started to take off in the 1960s, Thelin says, largely because baby boomers were reaching their late teenage years and the federal government, higher-education institutions and employers were pushing for high schoolers to go to college. That’s when the University of California system added the SAT as an entrance requirement. By the late ’80s, only a few dozen colleges did not require standardized test scores.

The SAT’s role in modern times

College-bound students have long viewed the exam as a rite of passage. In recent years, it has moved away from attempting to measure I.Q. or aptitude for learning. Instead, it aims to assess skills that should have been acquired during high school. That’s reflected in the name change from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Assessment Test in 1994, and the removal of the entire full name to formally call it the SAT, no longer an acronym, three years later.

The College Board has made other changes over the years: removing questions about analogies and antonyms, which are items that can be memorized; introducing the use of a calculator; and discontinuing an essay section, which appeared from 2005 to 2021. Zwick, formerly of ETS, says the essay stirred controversy because some educators argued that such a constrained format couldn’t fully demonstrate a student’s writing ability and that it disadvantaged non-native English speakers.

The SAT offers “a standardized assessment of the skills that colleges said students most needed to initially succeed,” says Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board.

Another standardized exam, the American College Test, joined the fray in 1959. In 2024, about 1.4 million high school seniors took what’s now formally called the ACT. This test is more popular in the Midwest and the South, while the SAT dominates the East and West Coasts, though most colleges that review scores weigh the exams equally.

The College Board devotes plenty of resources to what’s called predictive validity, examining whether the SAT truly measures what it’s supposed to: college readiness. The board’s recent reports indicate that SAT scores, especially when combined with high school grade point average, or GPA, are predictive of cumulative college GPA across four years, as well as bachelor’s degree completion within four years. The correlations hold when the data is divided by student demographics, including underrepresented minorities, first-generation college students and individuals whose first language isn’t English, although degree completion rates tended to be slightly lower for those groups compared with the overall numbers.

That’s consistent with past research. Based on self-reported data, “the SAT does predict first year GPA pretty well,” says Fred Oswald, a psychologist at UC Irvine. Although some experts argue that predictive power drops in later years, he adds, “the first year is highly consequential for being able to stay in school.”

The College Board also conducts intense internal and external analyses of new test questions to make sure the SAT is fair, meaning that certain types of students don’t score significantly higher than others. For instance, an infamous analogy question referenced a regatta, which students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and more likely to be of a racially minoritized group, may have never heard of.

In addition to educational opportunities and obstacles, a student’s verbal and math abilities can be influenced by personal characteristics, Oswald says. A love of writing short stories or a passion for construction projects that require geometry might give a student an edge. And being able to afford SAT tutoring and to take the test multiple times is known to elevate scores on the coachable exam. Because of this, the College Board has put out free test-prep resources.

That’s why a test score alone—even from the SAT, one of the most “rigorously developed tests”—can’t determine college readiness, Oswald says. Instead, admissions officers should be using it as “a piece of information to be considered alongside other pieces,” such as a high school transcript, writing assignments and extracurricular activities.

“Ultimately, you have to compare one student to another when making admissions decisions, and the SAT provides some comparative information,” Oswald says.

While the SAT holds a huge role in higher education, it’s also a major money maker for the College Board, which reaps some $200 million to $300 million per year off the test, reported Forbes’ Scott White in 2025. The organization has also been fined for selling student data without parental consent.

Pop quiz!

Here is a sampling of some of the questions that appeared on the very first SAT. Since the College Board cannot locate the answer key, we used Microsoft Copilot to confirm the solutions, which you can find at the end of the story. We're aware that it's ironic we used A.I. to solve these.

Question 1: A man spent one-eighth of his spare change for a package of cigarettes, three times as much for a meal, and then had eighty cents left. How much did he have at first?

Question 2: A submarine can go ten miles an hour under water, and twenty miles an hour above water. How long will it take to go 100 miles, if it has to go three-fifths of the way under water?

Question 3: Three of these are related to each other in some definite way. Indicate which three are thus most closely related.

Priestley, Dalton, Bach, DeSoto, Galileo, Mendelieff [Mendeleev]

Question 4: In the line below, the first two words are related to each other in some way. You are to see what the relation is between the first two words, and find one word in the parentheses that is related in the same way to the third word.

copper — electricity :: air — (heir, wind, sound, breath, oxygen)

Question 5: The numbers are arranged in accordance with some particular scheme. Write the two numbers that should come next.

5, 15, 17, 51, 53

The debate over the SAT

Some view the SAT as a pillar of meritocracy in the American education system. The College Board’s Rodriguez, for instance, describes it as an accessible way for any student to demonstrate what they’ve learned in high school. She, a first-generation American, credits the SAT—along with the preliminary SAT, or PSAT, which qualifies students for the National Merit Scholarship Program, and Advanced Placement classes, through which high schoolers can earn college credits—with helping to change her own life trajectory.

Others see the standardized exam as a flawed instrument that can exacerbate existing inequities.

Because it’s a timed test, “it really prizes processing speed,” says FairTest’s Feder. The SAT is not assessing deep thinking, he adds, in the way that asking a student to read a novel then discuss it does.

What’s more, Feder says, test scores often reflect family circumstance and where a student grew up and went to high school. A study published in the February 2026 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that children of the highest 20 percent of American earners were seven times as likely as children of the lowest 20 percent to score at least a 1300 on the SAT, which maxes out at 1600, or the equivalent on the ACT. According to data gathered by Opportunity Insights, a research and policy institute based at Harvard, the higher the family income, the higher students tend to score.

“Education doesn’t predict for wealth; wealth predicts for education,” says Andre Perry, who researches structural inequality in education for the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“We talk about education being this great equalizer,” Perry says, “but by far and away, we know that wealth is the predictor, and consequently, we should have programs and initiatives for low-wealth individuals, particularly in their first year” of college.

He sees the SAT as a way to assess where students might need extra help. Colleges could provide that support through tutoring, pre-matriculation programs to give high schoolers some college exposure, or mentorship, Perry adds. Students could also use their score as a tool to make decisions about what they will need to achieve their academic goals.

What’s more, the skills tested on the SAT might not be relevant to a student’s pursuits. Performance-based assessments can be better predictors of success for some fields, such as music, Feder says, and the University of Michigan’s undergraduate business program asks applicants to submit a business case discussion exercise.

Soft skills like perseverance, determination and grit—needed to stay in college beyond the first year—aren’t measured with standardized tests, Perry says. For instance, a 2017 report co-authored by Oswald found that a sense of belonging, a growth mind-set and personal goals and values strongly support a student’s college success.

One way to capture a college hopeful’s ability to navigate an academic space, regardless of resources, is Texas’ top 10 percent rule, Perry notes. Since 1998, students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class at a recognized public or private high school in the state, be it a low-resource or a high-resource school, have automatically gained admissions to most Texas public universities. (Some experts debate how well the strategy is working, particularly for people of marginalized groups.)

“Every student transforms themselves when they’re in college,” Perry says. When looking at application materials, “you’re really trying to assess if a student’s willing to transform themselves, whatever their background is.”

The test-optional movement and beyond

Standardized test scores are now required by just a small proportion of U.S. universities. Of the roughly 2,300 four-year institutions offering bachelor’s degrees, about 80 do not take standardized test scores and about 2,000 give applicants the option not to submit scores for fall 2026 admissions, according to FairTest. (Some schools are test-optional if applicants meet certain academic criteria, and some use scores only for course placement.)

The test-optional movement skyrocketed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, largely because the College Board paused SAT testing in the spring and summer of 2020, and availability was limited for the rest of the year and in 2021. A mere 4 percent of colleges required standardized test scores for fall 2022 applications, compared with 55 percent in 2019.

The movement has far earlier origins, though. Bowdoin College in Maine was the first school to adopt a test-optional policy, in 1969, and more joined over the following decades. A study published in March in the journal Educational Researcher found that among nearly 200 selective private schools that had adopted test-optional policies prior to the pandemic, the lack of an SAT or ACT score requirement did not affect rates of first-year retention or graduation within six years. Breaking down the institutions by selectivity revealed that those with more competitive admissions had improved student success with test-optional policies.

In 2001, the then-president of the UC system, Richard Atkinson, proposed that standardized test scores should be dropped as a college admissions requirement. “America’s overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system,” he said during a keynote at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, maintaining that it shows students’ test-taking techniques rather than critical-thinking skills.

UC schools did not eliminate the requirement following Atkinson’s speech, but they did in recent years because of Covid-19 and to lower barriers for college entry. Now, however, UC professors are calling for entrance exams to be reinstated for applicants pursuing science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) majors.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they write in a May 2026 open letter signed by more than 1,500 faculty members. A more recent letter, signed by more than 600 non-STEM UC faculty, endorses the return of test scores to help assess prospective students’ reading and writing abilities.

Dozens of universities, including MIT, Purdue, Stanford and the University of Florida, have reinstated entrance exam requirements since the height of the pandemic. But will the higher education system experience a huge swing back to an SAT mandate?

“I think, for the time being, we’ve reached a kind of equilibrium,” says Feder, of FairTest. He and some of the other experts who spoke with Smithsonian magazine suspect that certain elite schools might return to requiring test scores but that many will remain optional in the short term.

Others think that the SAT will make a comeback in a world with rising high school grade inflation and the pervasive use of artificial intelligence for classwork.

Kindergarten through 12th grade teachers surveyed by NPR and the polling firm Ipsos believe that A.I. is affecting students’ critical-thinking skills, according to results released earlier this month. Most respondents see the technology as a shortcut for kids to avoid schoolwork and say that it’s making it harder for educators to assess students’ knowledge.

The SAT, by contrast, says the College Board’s Rodriguez, is “a way for a student to raise their hand and say, ‘Here’s what I can do.’”

Many colleges, however, are now facing another crisis: whether they can admit enough undergraduates to stay open. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of students enrolled at degree-granting institutions in the U.S. fell by 15 percent, largely because of a “demographic cliff”—a declining U.S. birth rate since 2007.

Loosening admissions requirements might be one way for struggling higher education institutions to keep going, says historian Thelin, although he suspects it’s too late for that, as many students today consider options outside of traditional colleges.

“All colleges are going to have to work harder” at attracting students, he adds, but the key will be student retention. “I think that’s where they’re going to increasingly put their attention and resources.”

Answer key:

1. $1.60

2. 8 hours

3. Priestley, Dalton, Medelieff [Mendeleev]

4. sound

5. 159, 161

McKenzie Prillaman | Read More

McKenzie Prillaman is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, science and innovation. She specializes in all things life sciences, with a particular penchant for neuroscience. Her work has also appeared in Nature, Scientific American and Science News, among other outlets.