<p>From above:</p>
<p>“Wasn’t the original purpose of the SAT to determine how well you’d do in your first year of college? I’m not saying there’s a correlation, but it was designed with that in mind, I believe.”</p>
<p>The perceived justification now is that there is some correlation to success in first year --not that a high score means you will get high grades but that scores along with GPA tend to provide some prediction as to wheher the student will make it through first year with a C average or better.</p>
<p>Nevertheless the SAT has a far more checkered history than to assume its “original purpose” was to tell how well you will do first year of college. The SAT, created in the mid-1920s, was orginally designed to be used as a test to make sure that minorities and immigrants would not get into college. Carl Brigham, a professor at Princeton, created it based on army intelligence tests that he had been involved in during WWI that were used to identify officer material. Brigham, a proud member of the American Eugenics Society whose claim to fame was the belief that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the superior race and that they should avoid mxing with others because that could possibly decrease the intelligence of the elite in America, noticed that the vast majority of persons who did well on those army tests were white upper crust anglo-saxons. His hope in creating and promoting the SAT was that it would be used to weed out all the “inferior” ethnic and racial groups, including Blacks, Asians, Jews, Irish Catholic, Poles, Italians (pick any) so that colleges would devote themselves to the chosen group and prevent that group from intermixing with others. Later Brigham, when Hitler was rising to power in Germany and the concept of superior race was falling out of favor in the US as a result, had an epiphany and realized that the real reason minorities and immigrants averaged worse on the test at the time was because its questions were biased in favor of the educational background of upper crust whites. He even began advocating ridding of the test but by that time leading schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale had adopted it and were not about to abandon it. Fortunately for them, Brigham died before he could actually cause too much trouble.</p>