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Arguments Against Standardization Of SAT

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Arguments Against Standardization Of SAT
1.7 million students sit down to take a test that will be essential when determining their acceptance into college annually. In 1926, the Scholastic Aptitude Test was introduced with the purpose of measuring aptitude or innate mental ability rather than the mastery of subjects learned. The test was developed from from an army IQ test, invented by a man who’s purpose of this test was to exclude minorities and immigrants. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is neither fair nor does it actually measure student’s intelligence or college readiness.
The SAT originated for the purpose of excluding minorities and immigrants, and to this day the test proves to still have racial bias. In 1926, Dr. Carl Brigham, the psychologist invented the SAT. He developed it on the basis of an army IQ test, a standardized test that placed 1.5 million soldiers into units during World War I. Brigham hoped that this standardized test for college admissions would exclude immigrants and minorities with scientific-validation (Troy). Of course, the test has been modified and the people in charge of the SAT most likely don’t share the same mindset as Brigham, the discrimination still seeps through the test to this day. “SAT scores showed continued patterns in which white and Asian …show more content…
Psychologist Claude Steele pointed out that “the test has been found to measure only about 18 percent of the things that it takes to do well in school, and thus is not a very good predictor of how a student will do in college” (PBS). Seeing that the test fails to fulfill the purpose it was made for, this a major indicator that the test is greatly flawed. The SAT was created on the notion of determining a student’s innate mental ability, to predict how well they would do in their freshmen year of college. Since, the test fails to do so, then there is no purpose for using the SAT as a factor in admitting
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