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After the war, due to several factors including the formation of the , the use of the SAT increased rapidly: by 1951, about 80,000 SATs were taken, rising to about 1.5 million in 1971. During this time, changes made to the content of the SAT were relatively minor, and included the introduction of sentence completion questions and "quantitative comparison" math questions as well as changes in the timing of the test. In 1994, however, the SAT was substantially changed in an attempt to make the test more closely reflect the work done by students in school and the skills that they would need in college. Among other changes, antonym questions were removed from the verbal section, and were added to the math section along with the use of calculators. In 1995, after nearly forty years of declining scores, the SAT was recalibrated by the addition of approximately 100 points to each score to compensate for the decline in what constituted an average score.


On June 23, 1926, the first SAT, then known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, was administered to 8,040 students, 60% of whom were male, many of whom were applying to (26%) and (27%). In 1934, and used the SAT as a means to identify recipients, besides those from the traditional northeastern private schools, for scholarships to . By 1942, the College Board suspended the use of the essay exams, replacing them with the SAT, due in part to the success of Harvard's SAT program as well as because of the constraints from the onset of . At this time, the SAT was standardized so that a test score received by a student in one year could be directly compared to a score received by a student in another year. Test scores ranged from 200 to 800 on each of two test sections (verbal and math) and the same reference group of students was used to standardize the SAT until 1995.

The College Board, the that owns the SAT, was organized at the beginning of the 20th century to provide uniform entrance exams for its member colleges, whose matriculating students often came from boarding and private day schools found in the Northeastern United States. The exams were essay-based, graded by hand, and required several days for the student to take them. By the early 1920s, the increasing interest in tests as a means of selection convinced the College Board to form a commission to produce such a test for college admission purposes. The leader of the commission was , a psychologist at Princeton University, who originally saw the value of these types of tests through the lens of thought.

Ques: What is a good essay score on the SAT?

On January 19, 2021, the College Board announced that the SAT would no longer offer the optional essay section after the June 2021 administration.

In 2005, the SAT was changed again, in part due to criticism of the test by the system, which said that the test was not closely enough aligned to high school curricula. Along with the elimination of from the verbal section and quantitative comparison items from the math section, a new writing section with an essay was added. The changes introduced an additional section score, increasing the maximum SAT score to 2400.

Perelman, along with the National Council of Teachers of English, also criticized the 25-minute writing section of the test for damaging standards of writing teaching in the classroom. They say that writing teachers training their students for the SAT will not focus on revision, depth, accuracy, but will instead produce long, formulaic, and wordy pieces. "You're getting teachers to train students to be bad writers", concluded Perelman.

In 2005, the test was changed again, largely in response to criticism by the system. In order to have the SAT more closely reflect high school curricula, certain types of questions were eliminated, including from the verbal section and quantitative comparison items from the math section. A new writing section, with an essay, based on the former SAT II Writing Subject Test, was added, in part to increase the chances of closing the opening gap between the highest and midrange scores. The writing section reported a multiple-choice subscore that ranged from 20 to 80 points. Other factors included the desire to test the writing ability of each student; hence the essay. The writing section added an additional maximum 800 points to the score, which increased the new maximum score to 2400. The "New SAT" was first offered on March 12, 2005, after the last administration of the "old" SAT in January 2005. The mathematics section was expanded to cover three years of high school mathematics. To emphasize the importance of reading, the verbal section's name was changed to the Critical Reading section.


Ques: Is 20 a good SAT essay score?

Since 1993, using a policy referred to as "Score Choice", students taking the SAT-II subject exams were able to choose whether or not to report the resulting scores to a college to which the student was applying. In October 2002, the College Board dropped the Score Choice option for SAT-II exams, matching the score policy for the traditional SAT tests that required students to release all scores to colleges. The College Board said that, under the old score policy, many students who waited to release scores would forget to do so and miss admissions deadlines. It was also suggested that the old policy of allowing students the option of which scores to report favored students who could afford to retake the tests.

Ques: Can I send my SAT score without the essay?

On one hand, making the SAT and the ACT optional for admissions enables schools to attract a larger pool of applicants of a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. On the other hand, letters of recommendation are not a good indicator of collegiate performance, and is a genuine problem. If standardized tests were taken out of the picture, school grades would become more important, thereby incentivizing grade inflation. In fact, grades in American high schools have been inflating by noticeable amounts due to pressure from parents, creating an apparent oversupply of high achievers that makes actual high-performing students struggle to stand out, especially if they are from low-income families. Schools that made the SAT optional therefore lost an objective measure of academic aptitude and readiness, and they will have to formulate a new methodology for admissions or to develop their own entrance exams. Given that the selectivity of a school a student applies to is correlated with the resources of his or her high school—measured in terms of the availability of rigorous courses, such as AP classes, and the socioeconomic statuses of the student body—, making the SAT optional might exacerbate social inequities. Furthermore, since the costs of attending institutions of higher learning in the United States are high, eliminating the SAT requirement could make said institutions more likely to admit under-performing students, who might have to be removed for their low academic standing and who might be saddled with debt after attending. Another criticism of making the SAT optional is that subjective measures of an applicant's suitability, such as application essays, could become more important, making it easier for the rich to gain admissions at the expense of the poor because their school counselors are more capable of writing good letters of recommendation and they can afford to hire external help to boost their applications.

Here is a time breakdown for the SAT:

Despite the fallout from , which found many wealthy parents illegally intervening to raise their children's standardized test scores, the SAT and the ACT remain popular among American parents and college-bound seniors, who are skeptical of the process of " admissions" because they think it is rather opaque, as schools try to access characteristics not easily discerned via a number, hence the growth in the number of test takers attempting to make themselves more competitive even if this parallels an increase in the number of schools declaring it optional. While holistic admissions might seem like a plausible alternative, the process of applying can be rather stressful for students and parents, and many get upset once they learn that someone else got into the school that rejected them despite having lower SAT scores and GPAs. Holistic admissions notwithstanding, when merit-based scholarships are considered, standardized test scores might be the tiebreakers, as these are highly competitive. Scholarships and financial aid could help students and their parents significantly cut the cost of higher education, especially in times of economic hardship. Moreover, the most selective of schools might have no better options than using standardized test scores in order to quickly prune the number of applications worth considering, for holistic admissions consume valuable time and other resources.