II.

History

In 1900 a consortium of eight East Coast colleges and universities known as Ivy League schools formed the College Entrance Examination Board, or College Board. The purpose of the College Board was to simplify the application process for students who were required to take a different entrance exam for each college or university to which they applied. In 1901 the College Board began administering essay exams in a variety of subjects. This process allowed students to take a single set of exams when applying to more than one school. The exams were evaluated by individual colleges and used to make decisions about which students were qualified for admission. In 1926, to simplify the evaluation process, the College Board began administering the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), a new multiple-choice exam. The test, developed in the 1920s by a commission chaired by Princeton University psychologist Carl Brigham, was modeled in part on short-answer exams used to classify U.S. recruits during World War I (1914-1918). By the 1940s the SAT had replaced essay tests as the standard entrance examination used by colleges and universities.

In 1947 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in cooperation with the College Board and the American Council on Education, created the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to administer both the SAT and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), an examination used to evaluate students applying to graduate degree programs. Henry Chauncey, assistant dean at Harvard University and a member of the College Board, was named president of ETS, and in 1948 ETS began publishing and administering the SAT.