The Deep-Rooted Issues of College Board
Eliot Bicknell
February 23, 2025
My SAT tutor is 70 years old, very lonely, and half-crazy. I usually get through four or five practice problems before he spirals into spiteful ranting. These verbal onslaughts are awfully repetitive, revolving almost exclusively around two things; his ex-wife and the depravity of the College Board. While it’s still unclear who was truly at fault for his divorce, he has a point about the latter. The College Board is by no means one of America’s most beloved institutions, but its power over education is often understated; it has a monopoly on our college admissions, yet it fails in many crucial aspects, measuring intelligence and college readiness through largely arbitrary and classist means.
Much like many of America’s institutions, the birth of the College Board was one drenched thoroughly in white supremacy. The SAT’s founder, Carl Brigham, was at the forefront of the eugenics movement and developed the SAT as a means of asserting the intellectual superiority of white people. He wrote in his book “A Study of American Intelligence”, that the “American Negroes, the Italians, and the Jews are genetically ineducable. It would be a waste of money to even attempt to give these morons and imbeciles a good Anglo-Saxon education.” While this rhetoric was hardly rare during the early 20th century, it exemplifies the College Board as an institution, as well as standardized testing at large: a means of maintaining the segregation of education in America. While this is no longer an overt goal of the College Board, we cannot sweep its foundation under the rug. An institution’s founding purpose is bound to influence its policy somewhat throughout the years, even if significant changes have been made since.
Additionally, the SAT disproportionately favors the wealthy and white. This is to be expected, affluence and academic performance are intrinsically correlated in America. Wealthier kids have extra resources, fewer responsibilities outside of academics, and can afford tutors and prep classes. But the SAT is not the great equalizer that many at the College Board imply it to be. It does not sift out talent and intelligence regardless of background. Instead, it tests specific concepts that are largely contingent upon the resources that particular teenagers have access to. Questions on the SAT are often completely different from the content that students have seen in school, thus requiring outside preparation, which many students just do not have access to. High test costs, both for the SAT and AP tests, add significantly to these class disparities and raise questions about the integrity of the College Board in general.
The College Board is categorized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, exempting it from income taxes and classifying it as a public-serving company. However, it consistently makes profits over 100 million dollars and pays its executives million-dollar salaries. With such high funding, you would expect the College Board to run smoothly, but this is also not the case. Inconsistent curving, exam leaks, and an overall scramble to remain relevant have made the College Board a less-than-optimal organization. The College Board masquerades as a nonprofit, using its monopoly on college admissions to make uncharacteristically high-profit margins for a nonprofit organization.
SAT scores are also not nearly as indicative of college success as they are claimed to be. A study at the University of Chicago found that standardized testing scores are not very representative of a student’s future college achievement. GPA is a much better predictor, encompassing a much more diverse multitude of skills than standardized testing can. The SAT contains a unique set of questions, the likes of which students have never seen before and will never see again. It is therefore difficult to put much stock in an SAT score as an indicator of future success, as there is no antecedent nor future application for much of the content tested.
It is not exactly that we have failed as a society to create effective aptitude tests. It is just an impossible pursuit. Intelligence is too multifaceted of a concept to be truly defined, much less measured in any truly meaningful way. That being said, the College Board is doing a particularly bad job of it. A narrow and somewhat arbitrary question set, limited subject scope, and large contingency on wealth make the SAT a generally ineffective means of testing a student’s intelligence or predicting their future success. The organization’s high profit margins are not used to solve these issues, which could be done through the funding of new, more equitable programs, or scholarships for test prep classes. Instead, they are used to line the pockets of the company’s high-ranking executives and maintain its monopoly on college admissions in America.