A History of Revisions to the SAT, Part 2: The 1960s to 1993

Wait! Did you read Part 1 of this series? Click here to read now.

That’s right: we’re back for more thrilling facts and fact-adjacent jokes about the SAT.

In the previous installment, we learned about the environment of the 1800s and early 1900s that led to the creation of the SAT. Then, we learned about the fast-paced changes made to the test format as well as scale of the scores during the early years of the test. 

You read it. You loved it. You have been eagerly awaiting the next part.

Since the years covered here reveal a relatively steady test format, we’ll be focusing mainly on concerns about the test and the U.S. education system in general that began during these years.

The Sky Is Falling

The 1960s

It’s at this point in our great tale that we get to the rise of the heroes of our story: the test prep industry. 

The test had a reputation of being “uncoachable” as it was supposed to be an aptitude test.¹ However, the popularity of test prep schools, courses, and tutors in the ’60s shows that the test had already distanced itself from its aptitude roots and started to focus more on being a generalized achievement assessment. 

It would take the College Board almost three more decades to figure out that what their test tests had changed.² It’s not their fault. They had better things to do than think about the way they framed their premier assessment and how that framing affected students’ and schools’ perceptions of said assessment.

Won’t someone think of the College Board?

Concerns about what the drop in the national average SAT scores meant about students and our nation’s educational system as a whole also began in the ’60s. These concerns would reach a fever pitch in the mid-‘80s and panic about the meaning of test scores continues to this very day.

Part of the problem with scores in the ’60s is that the SAT was still using the 1941 reference group to scale scores. Education as a whole as well as the demographic makeup of SAT test takers had shifted dramatically in the twenty years since (Dorans, 2002).

Additionally, in those early years of the test, seniors made up the majority of test takers. With the switch to multiple opportunities to test per year, more juniors began taking the test.

I’ll let you in on a secret: juniors, in general, haven’t learned all the content that seniors have. Thus, juniors shouldn’t be expected to know all the things that seniors know.

S.S. Wilks—an expert in statistics but perhaps not an expert in common sense—released an officially-commissioned report on the score-decline trend in 1961. He concluded that scores had fallen because “the 1941 reference group had lost its meaning by 1961, if not sooner” (Dorans, 2002, p. 3). However, Wilks didn’t recommend updating scales to a newer reference group because that new reference group would eventually also lose meaning.

Philosophically, Wilks’s attitude just makes sense. Why try? Entropy will eventually destroy anything you work for. It’s a totally healthy, reasonable, and productive mentality to have towards education and life.

The 1970s

In 1974, the Test of Standard Written English was added as a new multiple-choice section and Quantitative Comparison questions were brought in to replaced Data Sufficiency questions on the Math section (Lawrence, 2003).

I was so looking forward to celebrating 50 years of having a separate grammar section on the SAT, but then the College Board had to ruin everything by combining the Reading and Writing sections in the New-New-New(-New?) SAT for 2024. I had already bought “over the hill” balloons and party hats and everything.

In 1978, the College Board released Taking the SAT. This booklet included, for the first time, a full practice test students could use to gain familiarity with the test and test format. Students who received this booklet immediately recognized the benefits of this new information (Powers, 1979).

Previously, students had to rely on a handful of practice questions that were released in an About the SAT booklet. Nothing compares to the sturm und drang experience of test day, but an actual, official practice test can come close.

The 1980s

In 1983, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, was published. The Commission had been commissioned³ to look into the quality of education in the U.S. as well as to identify any problems and solutions to those problems in education.

As the dramatized title suggests, the Commission concluded that our schools are garbage. Part of the problem is the fact that we ask our schools “to provide solutions to personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve” (p. 6). In the forty years since, we have done nothing to change that.⁴

The recommendations at the end of the report called for increasing rigor, standards, the amount of time students spend at school, and teacher preparation and pay.

A lot of that sounds hard to do, so we decided to raise standards and expectations without providing any additional support to teachers or students.

When you increase standards, you need a way to check if students have mastered those standards. As discussed in Part 1, it’s difficult to have to consider students as fully human, so we decided to make standardized test scores the be-all and end-all of educational achievement. However, we told ourselves we weren’t doing that, so it’s definitely not a problem.

This national obsession with standardized test scores as the only way of measuring schools’ performance continued through the State of Texas’s pioneering use of the TABS, TEAMS, TAAS, TAKS, and STAAR tests⁵ and into the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

More importantly to our story, the report would lead to increased pressure for changes to the SAT which we would finally see in the 1990s. 

1990-1993

In 1990, the meaning of the SAT acronym changed from “Scholastic Aptitude Test” to “Scholastic Assessment Test.” The name was changed because the a “test that integrates measures of achievement as well as developed ability can no longer be accurately described as a test of aptitude” (Pitsch, 1990).

You might be saying to yourself, “Josh, the words ‘assessment’ and ‘test’ are synonyms. Whose stupid idea was it to name it the Scholastic Test Test?” Rest assured, it would only take the brilliant minds at the College Board seven years to realize their mistake and declare that the letters SAT, like the test itself, no longer stood for anything.⁶

The test’s name changed again in 1993, becoming the SAT I: Reasoning Test. The SAT I: Reasoning Test and the SAT II: Subject Tests were now collectively known as the Scholastic Assessment Tests. This time, the name was changed “to correct the impression among some people that the SAT measures something that is innate and impervious to change regardless of effort or instruction” (Jordan, 1993). Who could have given people that impression in the first place?

Summary of Part 2 and Teaser for Part 3

[Editor’s Note: Seriously, Josh? I told you to change this boring heading in Part 1. What did you think I was going to say this time?]

The general national panic about the state of education as well as hesitancy from the College Board to update the test and its now 50-year old reference group for scaling scores led to the current cycle of big changes to the SAT.

In the third—and, mercifully, final—part of this look into the history of the SAT, we’ll review the 1994, 2005, and 2016 revisions to the test. Of course, this is all still leading up to our gut reactions to the 2024 changes that are fast approaching.

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¹ “Aptitude: 1a: inclination, tendency b: A natural ability or talent 2: capacity for learning.” “Aptitude test n. (1919) : a standardized test designed to predict an individual’s ability to learn certain skills” – Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11^th Edition

² Skip to “The 1990s” section if you can’t wait to find out more. 

³ I know: I’m basically a genius.

⁴ No, I don’t speak from experience as a former classroom teacher. Why do you ask?

⁵ You have to change the name of the test every ten years or so because the previous test was garbage, and teachers were teaching to the test because, again, we’ve made test scores the only way to measure the accomplishments of a school.

Who cares if a student’s reading level was raised three grade levels in a single school year if that student can’t bubble in the correct pattern on a Scantron? Plus, if you totally revamp the test, you get to pay the test maker tens of millions more dollars to develop a new test instead of spending that money on things that matter.

It’s great. Everything is fine. I definitely didn’t have to waste 8-10 instructional days every year forcing students to take a district-mandated standardized test to tell us how they would perform on the week of state-mandated standardized tests we were going to give them in April. It was definitely valuable information about students that the district couldn’t have gained just by talking with teachers about their students. Teachers are heroes, but they are also simultaneously idiots who can’t be trusted.

It’s fine. I’m not bitter. See footnote 4.

⁶ “We’re taking our ball and going home!” – The College Board

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Works Cited & Referenced

Dorans, N. J. (2002). The recentering of SAT scales and its effects on score distributions and score interpretations. ETS Research Report Series, 2002(1), i-21. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2333-8504.2002.tb01871.x 

Jordan, Mary (1993, March 27). “SAT Changes Name, But It Won’t Score 1,600 With Critics”. Washington Post.

Lawrence, I.M., Rigol, G.W., Essen, T.V. and Jackson, C.A. (2003), A Historical Perspective on the Content of the SAT. ETS Research Report Series, 2003: i-19. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2333-8504.2003.tb01902.x

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: the imperative for educational reform.

Pitsch, Mark (1990, November 7). “S.A.T. Revisions Will Be Included In Spring ’94 Test”. Education Week.)

Powers, D. E., & Alderman, D. L. (1979). The use, acceptance, and impact of taking the sat — a test familiarization booklet. ETS Research Report Series, 1979(1), i-81. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2333-8504.1979.tb01171.x