What does SAT stand for?
Nothing at all. When the forerunner to today’s test was first given in 1901, it was named the “Scholastic Achievement Test” and looked very different from today’s test. It was renamed the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” in 1941 to reflect the idea that the test measured a student’s innate ability to do academic work, independent of the quality of the student’s schooling. But since you can improve your score by studying, it was questionable that the test ever really measured aptitude. In 1990, the College Board conceded the point by renaming the test the “Scholastic Assessment Test.” But this name is redundant, since an assessment is a test, so in 1994, the College Board declared that “SAT” was just the name of the test and had no particular meaning. In other words, the name “SAT” was kept because it is a familiar brand, but the College Board has distanced itself from the notion that the test measures aptitude.
If you answered C, you might have read a book by high-schoolers called Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT. But the real answer, surprisingly, is D. Yes, the test used to be called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but like so much about the SAT, even the name was causing controversy: some felt that the SAT measured only an aptitude for taking aptitude tests. Plus, the test’s sponsors found that some students viewed aptitude as a genetic quality, casting the SAT as a kind of annual experiment in eugenics. “That was a misconception,” says Janice Gams, spokeswoman for the College Board, an association of 3,200 high schools and colleges that oversees the exam. Hence the test is now simply called SAT. But these days it’s facing more than just an identity crisis. Rarely have those who revile the exam–including many of the 1 million students who take it each year–had so much to celebrate: because of new state prohibitions against affirmative action, public universities in Californi
Why an end to affirmative action might doom a rite of passage that every high-schooler fears BY JOHN CLOUD Here’s a question you won’t find on the SAT: What does SAT stand for? A) Scholastic Aptitude Test. B) Scholastic Assessment Test. C) Slimy and Atrocious Torture. D) Nothing. If you answered C, you might have read a book by high-schoolers called Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT. But the real answer, surprisingly, is D. Yes, the test used to be called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but like so much about the SAT, even the name was causing controversy: some felt that the SAT measured only an aptitude for taking aptitude tests. Plus, the test’s sponsors found that some students viewed aptitude as a genetic quality, casting the SAT as a kind of annual experiment in eugenics. “That was a misconception,” says Janice Gams, spokeswoman for the College Board, an association of 3,200 high schools and colleges that oversees the exam. Hence the test is now simply called SAT. But
What is SAT? At the beginning, SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. In 1993, the SAT was renamed as the SAT Reasoning Test (or known as SAT I). Meanwhile, the former Scholastic Achievement Test was renamed as the SAT Subject Tests (or known as SAT II). SAT Structure Each edition of the SAT includes a Verbal and Math section, with a specific number of questions related to content. The question types and number of questions in each section are listed below. The Verbal Section The verbal section of the SAT focuses on critical reading with more than half of the verbal test devoted to passage-based reading questions. The verbal test also includes analogies and sentence completions, which emphasize logical relationship, vocabulary, and how words relate.
