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Throughout the U.S. students are getting out their No. 2 pencils, ready endure a stress- packed four hours of bubbling in answers for theDeC、12 administration of theACT, part of some 1.5 million expected to take the test this school year. Standardized tests have been a scourge of student life inAmerica for more than 50 years, but it’s fair to say they’re more pressure-packed and ubiquitous than ever before. TheACT and its counterpart, the SAT, have become one of the largest determining factors in the college-admissions process, particularly for elite schools.At least this year’s applicants should be familiar with the format by now: students in the U.S. are taking more standardized tests than ever before, and at ages long before college beckons.

The earliest record of standardized testing comes fromChina, where hopefuls for government jobs had to fill out examinations testing their knowledge ofConfucian philosophy and poetry. In the Western world, examiners usually favored giving essays, a tradition stemming from the ancient Greeks’ affinity for the Socratic methoD、But as the Industrial Revolution (and the progressive movement of the early 1800s that followed) took school-age kids out of the farms and factories and put them behind desks, standardized testing emerged as an easy way to test large numbers of students quickly.
In 1905, French psychologistAlfredBinet began developing a standardized test of intelligence, work that would eventually be incorporated into a version of the modem IQ test, dubbed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test.By World War I, standardized testing was standard practice: aptitude quizzes calledArmy Mental Tests were conducted to assign U.S. servicemen jobs during the war effort.But grading was done manually at first, an arduous task that undermined standardized testing’s goal of speedy mass assessment. It would take until 1936 for the first automatic test scanner was developed, a rudimentary computer called the IBM 805. It used electrical current to detect marks made by special pencils on tests, giving rise to the now-ubiquitous bubbling-in of answers. (Modem optical scanners opt to use simple No. 2 pencils, as their darker lead is most scanner-friendly.)
The SAT and theACT are by far the most famed standardized tests today. The SAT came first, founded in 1926 as the ScholasticAptitude Test by theCollegeBoard, a non-profit group of universities and other educational organizations. The original test lasted 90 minutes, with 315 questions testing knowledge of definitions, basic math and even an early iteration of its famed fill-in-the-blank analogies (e.g. blue: sky::______:grass).By 1930, the test grew and assumed its now-familiar form, with separate verbal and math tests.By the end of World War II, the test was accepted by enough universities that it became a standard right-of-passage for college-bound high school seniors. It remained largely unchanged (save the occasional tweak) until 2005, when the analogies were done away with and a writing section was addeD、(That extra section is graded separately from the verbal test, boosting the elusive perfect SAT score from 1600 to 2400.)
In 1959, an education professor at the University of Iowa namedEverett Franklin Lindquist (who later pioneered the first generation of optical scanners and the development of the GED、test) developed theACT test as a competitor to the SAT. Originally an acronym forAmericanCollege Testing, the exam also included a section to guide students toward a course of study by asking questions about their interests. In addition to math, reading andEnglish skills, theACT assesses students on their knowledge of scientific facts and principles; the test scored on a scale of 36.Both theACT and SAT have found their niche. TheACT is more commonly accepted in the Midwest and South, while schools on the coast show a preference for the SAT. Students also show a propensity for one test or the