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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class is a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,

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Speaker 1: a show that examines history one day at a time.

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Speaker 1: I'm Gabe Lousier, and today we're celebrating the summer season

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Speaker 1: by looking at the rise of standardized tests. Sure it's

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Speaker 1: not as much fun as a trip to the beach,

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Speaker 1: but you've got to start thinking about your future sometime.

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Speaker 1: The day was June one, the newly formed College Board

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Speaker 1: administered its first standardized admissions exams, the precursor to the

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Speaker 1: s A T. The examinations took the form of essay

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Speaker 1: questions that were meant to test to student's knowledge in

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Speaker 1: nine different subjects English, Latin, Greek, French, German, history, math matics, physics,

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Speaker 1: and chemistry. There were no multiple choice questions. For the

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Speaker 1: first half of the nineteenth century, educational testing in the

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Speaker 1: US had been limited mostly to oral exams. Students would

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Speaker 1: be questioned in person by the professors of whichever school

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Speaker 1: they hoped to attend. This system worked well enough when

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Speaker 1: the country was small and education was reserved primarily for

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Speaker 1: the wealthy elite, but by the eighteen seventies oral exams

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Speaker 1: had become much less efficient, prompting many colleges and universities

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Speaker 1: to switch to written admissions tests instead. This removed the

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Speaker 1: performance aspect of oral exams and save time, but it

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Speaker 1: didn't make preparing for the tests any easier. Because each

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Speaker 1: college now had its own separate exam, high schools weren't

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Speaker 1: sure what to teach since the different students would be

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Speaker 1: applying to different colleges. Harvard president Charles William Elliott was

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Speaker 1: among the first to envision a better way. In eighteen ninety,

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Speaker 1: he began to champion a common standard for entrance exams,

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Speaker 1: a written test that would be recognized and accepted by

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Speaker 1: higher education schools across the country. It took a decade

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Speaker 1: of convincing, but Elliott eventually got other schools on board

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Speaker 1: with the idea. In nineteen hundred, he and eleven other

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Speaker 1: college presidents banded together to form the College Entrance Examination Board,

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Speaker 1: which was later shortened to just the College Board. It's

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Speaker 1: worth noting that most of the original member institutions were

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Speaker 1: elite universities located in the northeastern US, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia,

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Speaker 1: and n y U, among others. Although class sizes had

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Speaker 1: gotten bigger since the days of oral exams. The vast

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Speaker 1: majority of students were still the product of wealth and privilege.

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Speaker 1: At the time, only about one in twenty five high

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Speaker 1: school graduate went on to attend college. They were the

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Speaker 1: select few who could afford it. The College Board spent

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Speaker 1: a year developing the admissions Exam of its Dreams, and

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Speaker 1: on June seventeenth, nineteen o one, it was ready to

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Speaker 1: be administered for the very first time. The exams were

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Speaker 1: held over the course of five days at sixty seven

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Speaker 1: locations across the US and at two in Europe. The

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Speaker 1: nine hundred and seventy three test takers represented a wide

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Speaker 1: range of schools, with thirty eight percent coming from private schools,

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Speaker 1: twenty seven percent from public high schools, two percent from

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Speaker 1: academies and endowed schools, and thirteen percent from various other institutions.

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Speaker 1: The College Board didn't go easy on its first crop

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Speaker 1: of students. One question required students to explain the rules

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Speaker 1: for five different Latin sentence constructions and then to illustrate

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Speaker 1: them by writing a Latin sentence for each one. Meanwhile,

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Speaker 1: in the physics portion of the exam, students were posed

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Speaker 1: the following problem. A balloon contains three hundred cubic meters

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Speaker 1: of hydrogen, each cubic meter of which weighs ninety grams.

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Speaker 1: The material of the balloon weighs two hundred and fifty krams.

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Speaker 1: Each cubic meter of the surrounding air weighs seven thousand,

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Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety grams. How many kilograms in addition

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Speaker 1: to its own weight will the balloon lift? If you

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Speaker 1: had a hard time keeping track of that question, well

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Speaker 1: now you understand why written tests were such a welcome

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Speaker 1: change from oral exams. When the nine one exams were finished,

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Speaker 1: the answer books were read and rated by experts in

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Speaker 1: each of the nine subjects. Each test was then assigned

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Speaker 1: a rating either excellent, Good, doubtful, poor, or very poor.

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Speaker 1: The inaugural batch of test takers went on to apply

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Speaker 1: to twenty three different colleges or universities, and many of

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Speaker 1: them the rating on their College Board exams was the

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Speaker 1: deciding factor for their application. The exams continued in much

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Speaker 1: the same way for the next twenty five years, but

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Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty six, the College Board began to administer

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Speaker 1: a drastically different kind of tests. The development of i

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Speaker 1: Q tests in nineteen o five and their subsequent use

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Speaker 1: in the military had piqued the interest of university officials.

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Speaker 1: They wanted to know if so called intelligence testing could

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Speaker 1: be used in the college admissions process, and to find out,

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Speaker 1: the Board hired Carl Campbell Brigham, one of the psychologists

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Speaker 1: who had helped develop intelligence tests for the military. With

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Speaker 1: his expertise, the College Board crafted and adopted a new

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Speaker 1: kind of exam, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or s a T.

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Speaker 1: For sure. It was administered for the first time on

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Speaker 1: June twenty three, ninety six, and with that the original

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Speaker 1: College Board exam was retired for good. The s a

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Speaker 1: T proved a worthy replacement, but it's come under heavy

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Speaker 1: criticism over the years. Many teachers, parents and schools now

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Speaker 1: question the long standing reliance on the s a T

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Speaker 1: and on standardized testing in general, and while the College

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Speaker 1: Board has made changes to help address some of these concerns,

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Speaker 1: the long term future of standardized test remains an open question.

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Speaker 1: One thing is for certain, though, most schools won't be

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Speaker 1: returning to oral exams either way. I'm gay, Bluesier, and

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Speaker 1: hopefully you now know a little more about history today

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Speaker 1: than you did yesterday. You can learn even more about

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Speaker 1: history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at

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Speaker 1: t d I HC Show, and if you have any

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Speaker 1: comments or suggestions, you can always send them my way

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Speaker 1: at this Day at I heart media Dot. Thanks to

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Speaker 1: Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks to you

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Speaker 1: for listening. I'll see you back here again soon for

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Speaker 1: another day in History class