Did You Know Why the SAT Even Exists?
If you were applying to college a hundred years ago, the process would look very different. There was no SAT or ACT, and no shared system. Each college wrote its own entrance exams, often focused on subjects like Latin, Greek, or mathematics, and students sat for those exams separately depending on where they applied.
That worked when colleges were drawing from a small and familiar set of schools. Many of the most selective Northeastern institutions at the time—including schools like Harvard University and Yale University—were largely admitting students from known preparatory schools. Admissions officers already understood those schools: their curriculum, their standards, and what strong performance looked like within that environment.
As the applicant pool expanded, that model became harder to sustain. Colleges began reviewing students from schools they did not know, with different curricula and varying levels of access to coursework and opportunities. A GPA was no longer a consistent signal on its own, because it depended heavily on where and how it was earned.
In 1900, a group of universities and preparatory schools formed the College Board to standardize admissions through shared, subject-based exams. That introduced some consistency, but those exams still reflected differences in curriculum and access.
After World War I, large-scale intelligence testing demonstrated that it was possible to evaluate individuals more consistently across different backgrounds. Drawing on those approaches, the SAT was first administered in 1926. Its purpose was not to replace the rest of the application, but to add a common reference point that could be used across different academic systems. In the 1930s, Harvard’s president, James Conant, expanded its use as part of an effort to identify strong students beyond the traditional preparatory school pipeline.
The ACT, introduced in 1959, took a different approach by focusing more directly on school-based curriculum. Both tests, however, were built to address the same issue: how to evaluate students when their academic experiences are not identical.
That issue has not changed—it has scaled.
Before, admissions officers were comparing students from a limited number of familiar schools. Today, they are comparing students across different countries, curricula, and levels of access. You might attend a school with a wide range of advanced courses, while another student may not have access to the same opportunities. Both of you may present strong academic records, but those records are shaped by different environments.
Most parts of an application still require context—what your school offered, what was available to you, and what you chose to do with it.
What has changed is the level of competition. The most selective schools now receive far more applications than they can admit, which makes consistent comparisons across students more difficult. In that setting, having at least one element that can be read without needing that context becomes useful. That is the role standardized testing was designed to play.
At Ivy Link, we help students think through testing early—what role it should play and how it fits into the context of the schools they are aiming for.
If you’re thinking about how this applies to you—where to start, which test to take, and how much preparation makes sense—we’ll be walking through exactly that in our upcoming SAT/ACT workshops.
You can explore the upcoming sessions here: https://www.myivylink.com/workshops
