100 Years of the SAT, and the One Thing That Has Never Changed
The SAT turned 100 last week.
On June 23, 1926, a little over 8,000 high school students sat down for the first one. It looked nothing like the test your kids take now — 315 questions in about 90 minutes, built off an aptitude exam the Army had been giving its recruits. Today it's a digital, adaptive test of 98 questions, and roughly two million students take it every year.
In between, the test has been rebuilt more times than anyone can likely count. They've added question types and dropped them. They've recentered the scoring. They've gone from paper and pencil to a laptop or an ipad. Whole universities walked away from it during the pandemic, and now most of them are walking back.
The SAT. A century of arguments, redesigns, and reinventions.
Yet, through every single version of this test, the thing that actually moved a student's score has never changed.
It was never a trick. It was the work.
There's no shortcut. There never was.
I've been doing this for nearly a decade now, and I'll tell you the same thing I tell every parent or student in search of a secret to higher scores. I don't have an easy one. Proven strategies? Yes. Good coaching? I like to think so.
But none of that is a substitute for the work required for a student to "own" the test. The test has been reinvented a dozen ways in a hundred years, and not one of those changes ever produced a shortcut that beat sitting down and doing the reps.
I use the same comparison every time because it's the truest one I've got: a concert violinist doesn't cram. You'll never hear of someone playing Carnegie Hall on the strength of two hard practice sessions the week before. They got there by playing every day, for years, when nobody was watching. The SAT is no different. A student who works a little bit every day will pass the student who does a big push once a week, every time.
That's not the fun answer. But it's the real one.
Is it still an I.Q. test?
There's one section from the article in Smithsonian that I disagree with, though.
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.
I can tell you that "moving away from an I.Q. test" is merely a cover up. It's still very much an I.Q. test. It measures cognitive capacity under the guise of "not measuring cognitive capacity."
What is that, you ask?
Cognitive capacity: The baseline maximum amount of information and mental processing an individual can handle at one time. IQ tests measure this through components like working memory, fluid reasoning, and processing speed.
The very things the SAT measures.
I've taken the SAT about 5-6 times per year. While the questions have changed, the underlying structure hasn't. It's a "gotcha test" in many ways that requires massive amounts of cognitive capacity.
The good news? Cognitive capacity can be increased, just as IQ can be. This is exactly the sort of thing that I work on with my students – timed, stressful exercises under heavy loads, i.e. The Gauntlet questions. It's no different than going to the gym.
Something new from the College Board.
This fall, the College Board is rolling out a brand-new course: AP Business with Personal Finance. It merges entrepreneurship with personal finance, it was built by business professors out of MIT, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt, and it's been endorsed by the Council for Economic Education. Their CEO described it as an invitation to first-time AP students and to schools that haven't offered many AP options before.
I find the timing kind of perfect. As the importance of the SAT and ACT continues to surge, we're also seeing AP courses redefine the entire landscape of high school education, for better or worse. The College Board is taking over, ostensibly. Pretty soon, I wouldn't be surprised to see the SAT as a requirement for interviews. I'm already seeing an uptick in the number of requests from younger students – 8th/9th graders hoping to prepare sooner.
The curve for academic competition is starting earlier and earlier.
Hopefully there is some value in all of this. The diploma might gather dust. But what students learn getting there, and what they proved to themselves about their own capacity to work — that compounds for the rest of their lives.
A hundred years of this test, and that's still the only edge that's ever mattered: hard work.
-Mr. John
