Some History of the SAT

Nothing in this post will help prepare you for taking the SAT. …But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool.

I took the SAT back in March. No, not the new SAT. I got bumped from that. I’m talking about taking the very first SAT from 1926, thanks to a very cool link from the Smithsonian website.

Another nice feature of the Smithsonian site is the added yellow pop-up information boxes that give additional context information about the test (for example, in 1926, multiple choice items were pretty new and testers only had about 19 seconds per question if they wanted to finish the whole test). One of the few times I’ve gotten something useful from a pop-up! …This is what I do for a living. I find this stuff fascinating.

It’s amazing how some things have changed (no more translation to and from a fake language) but others have stayed remarkably similar (math story problems)!

Take a look at a sample page from the original SAT test below.

**This post is part of a series called STUNT: SAT Taking to Understand the New Test.