CEEB, ETS, and Standardized Testing in Education

The social sector where mass intelligence testing has made its greatest impact is education, particularly in the form of entrance examinations for colleges and universities. Although these tests are often called aptitude tests, the terminological distinction is of little substance. "Aptitude" is used primarily to avoid the political and social volatility of "intelligence," being less freighted with connotations of innate, immutable ability.^[98]

The circumstances that eventually resulted in standardized college entrance examinations may be traced back to the immense burgeoning of American secondary education in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1870, about 80,000 students attended some 500 secondary schools, nearly all of them private. By 1910, the number of secondary school students had grown to 900,000, 90 percent of whom were in public high schools. Between 1890 and 1918, the general population of the United States grew by 68 percent, while the number of high school students over the same period increased by 711 percent.^[99] This explosion of the secondary school population of course produced a like increase in higher education: the number of college students grew at a rate nearly five times greater than the general population between 1890 and 1924.^[100] The old system of screening college applicants soon proved to be hopelessly inadequate in dealing with the changing circumstances.

To call the old arrangements a system is hardly appropriate, because no coordination existed among the admission procedures followed by the various colleges and universities. Many eastern schools administered written entrance examinations on their own campuses. Faculty committees from some midwestern universities would visit various high schools to evaluate them, and graduates of the schools certified by this process would then be admitted to the university. Other universities assessed applicants on the basis of the performance of previous graduates of their high schools who had attended the university.^[101] In an effort to bring order to the chaos, in 1885, the principal of Phillips Andover Academy entered the plea that some organization and standardization be introduced into the preparatory curriculum for college entrance in American secondary schools. Beginning in 1892, the National Education Association formed committees to address this question. Not everyone shared the notion that college entrance requirements should be standardized. Lafayette College president Ethelbert D. Marfield did not look kindly on the prospect of being told by some board whom he should and should not admit. Raising an issue of perennial weight with academic administrators, he insisted that if he wanted to discriminate in favor of the son of a benefactor, he should be able to do so.^[102]

Such dissenting voices notwithstanding, a widespread desire to bring some consistency to college entrance procedures and to open admissions to greater geographic and social diversity than was possible under the old system of requiring applicants to take entrance tests on each campus resulted in the formation of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) in 1900. The CEEB was charged to design and administer standard entrance examinations that all member colleges would accept in making their admissions decisions.^[103]

In the beginning, the CEEB was composed entirely of eastern colleges, thirty-five of which agreed to accept the board's tests in lieu of their own entrance examinations. The first CEEB examinations—essay tests in chemistry, English, French, German, Greek, history, Latin, mathematics, and physics—were offered during the week of June 17, 1901, at sixty-seven locations in the United States and two in Europe. Columbia University was the dominant influence on the board at its inception: the grading committee met to read the examinations at Columbia's library, and of the 973 persons who took those first examinations, 758 were seeking admission either to Columbia or its sister institution, Barnard College.^[104]

The early College Board examinations were achievement tests, intended to measure how well an applicant had mastered Latin, mathematics, and the other specific subjects tested. Aptitude or intelligence testing, which is designed to ascertain an individual's general capacity to learn, was introduced to the college admissions process in 1918. Columbia University again took the lead, this time for dubious reasons pertaining to the changing demographic profile of its student body. Not only did the number of college students vastly increase in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century but immigrants and their children constituted an ever-larger proportion of them. About half of the students in New York City public schools were in this category by 1910. Those who went on to college had for the most part attended City College or New York University. A 1908 change in entrance requirements made Columbia University more accessible to public high school graduates, and during the next decade, the proportion of high school students of immigrant background jumped

dramatically. Many of these were Eastern European Jews, whom "many of Columbia's faculty and administration considered . . . [to be] socially backward, clannish, and hostile to upper-middleclass values . . . and scorned as achieving far beyond their native intelligence."^[105]

In 1918, Columbia was deluged with applicants of immigrant background for its new Student Army Training Corps class, an officer training program. Given the prevalent belief that immigrants were less intelligent than older American stock, intelligence tests appeared to offer one means of winnowing these unwelcome students without establishing formal quotas. Therefore, in the first use of an intelligence test for college admission, applicants to this program were required to take the Thorndike Tests for Mental Alertness. The following year, Columbia allowed applicants with otherwise acceptable credentials to substitute the Thorndike College Entrance Intelligence Examination for the usual, achievement-type, entrance examinations. This seems to have had the desired effect, for the proportion of out-of-state entrants (most of whom were presumably of suitable social status) increased significantly. The Thorndike test proved also to be a better predictor of first-year college performance than traditional entrance examinations or one's high school record.^[106]

In 1919, the CEEB expressed interest in the more general use of intelligence tests for college admissions, but it was not until 1925 that a commission was established under the direction of Princeton psychologist Carl Campbell Brigham to develop one. Brigham had been closely connected with the army testing program during World War I, and the test his commission devised was objective (multiple-choice) in format and heavily influenced by the Army Alpha. One of its major purposes was to test intellectual ability without excessive reliance on any specific subject matter. This would promote the principle of equality of opportunity, in that discrimination against students from inferior secondary schools would be minimized. The new test was dubbed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). It proved to be remarkably durable, for as late as the 1970s, the SAT was still virtually the same test that Brigham's commission had developed.^[107]

The first SAT was taken in 1926 by 8,040 college applicants, but for many years, it remained less popular than the CEEB's traditional essay examinations.^[108] That changed in 1942, when war intervened once again in the history of testing in America. In that year Princeton, Harvard, and Yale shifted to a wartime yearround calendar of instruction, with applicants to be informed of admission in early May and freshmen beginning classes in June or early July. CEEB essay examinations were regularly given in June. Since 1937, however, the CEEB had offered a one-day battery of tests in April. These consisted of the SAT and a series of short achievement tests. They were used in scholarship decisions and, from about 1939, by candidates who wanted to learn the fate of their applications before the traditional date in July. The 1942 decision by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to notify applicants in May directed greatly increased attention to the April tests, so much so that the CEEB decided to cancel the already-announced June essay tests. With that development, the era of essay tests for college admissions abruptly came to an end and the present CEEB arrangement of the SAT plus short achievement tests—all multiple choice in format and to be taken in a single day—was fully established. The enterprise assumed its current form in 1947, when the Educational Testing Service was established as a nonprofit, nonstock corporation that took over most of the work of designing and administering tests from the CEEB.^[109]