The College Board officially administered the very first Scholastic Aptitude Test, now universally known as the SAT, on June 23, 1926. More than 8,000 high school students across the country took the experimental exam, which was designed to provide a standardized, objective measure of academic potential. The historic test aimed to democratize the college admissions process by identifying talented students regardless of their socioeconomic or regional backgrounds.
The original 1926 exam was directly adapted from the rigid Alpha intelligence tests used by the U.S. Army to sort millions of military recruits during World War I. Its chief architect, psychologist Carl Brigham (shown), believed the test measured immutable, innate intelligence rather than learned high school curriculum. Over the following decades, the test completely shifted away from this rigid psychological theory, evolving instead into a fluid metric of acquired academic skills that fundamentally transformed the landscape of American higher education.
