Invention

Standardized Test

Students answered only 35.5% of the questions correctly on the first one.

United States · 1845

Before 1845, American schools measured learning through oral recitation. A teacher would call on a student, ask questions, and judge the answers by ear. The method favored children with confidence, social fluency, and fluent English, and it left no permanent record.1

Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, believed written exams would be more objective. After visiting Prussian schools in 1843, he returned convinced that a printed test could produce what he called a "daguerreotype likeness" of each student's mind, a record that could be carried away and compared across schools.2

In 1845, Mann had examiners prepare and administer written tests to students in Boston's grammar schools. The teachers had not seen the questions in advance. Five hundred and thirty students, selected as the best below high school age, sat for one-hour written exams in geography, grammar, history, rhetoric, and philosophy.3

On average, students answered only 35.5% of the questions correctly.4 Mann released the results to the public and used them to criticize the quality of teaching in Boston. Teachers responded that the exam questions had little connection to what they had actually taught.

35.5%

Average score on the first standardized test in American public education, 1845.

The resulting conflict led to teachers being fired and school board members losing their seats. The effectiveness of the method itself was not questioned. As one congressional report later noted, it was taken as an article of faith that test-based information could improve a bureaucratizing school system.5

The Army Alpha and Army Beta tests, developed during World War I to sort 1.7 million recruits by cognitive ability, became a model for civilian schools in the 1920s.6 The SAT followed in 1926, originally designed by Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who had worked on the Army tests. By the time the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001, federally mandated standardized testing reached every public school in the country.7

Timeline

1845

Horace Mann administers the first written standardized exams in Boston.

1917

Army Alpha and Beta tests sort 1.7 million recruits during World War I.

1926

Carl Brigham designs the first SAT for college admissions.

2001

No Child Left Behind Act mandates standardized testing in every public school.

Endnotes

1 Carole J. Gallagher, "Reconciling a Tradition of Testing with a New Learning Paradigm," Educational Psychology Review 15, no. 1 (March 2003): 83-99.

2 Lehigh University College of Education, "History of Standardized Testing," citing Horace Mann's seventh annual report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1844.

3 William J. Reese, Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

4 Edward E. Cureton, cited in U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right Questions (Washington, D.C.: OTA, 1992), 104.

5 U.S. Congress, OTA, Testing in American Schools (1992), 104.

6 Daniel Kevles, "Testing the Army's Intelligence," Journal of American History 55, no. 3 (1968).

7 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Public Law 107-110.