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SAT

standardized college admission test in the United States

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 17, 2026
Entity authorityQ334113 ↗
Source-derived summary

SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test and had two components, Verbal and Mathematical, each of which was scored on a range from 200 to 800. Later it was called the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT I: Reasoning Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, then simply the SAT.

The SAT is wholly owned, developed, and published by the College Board and is administered by the Educational Testing Service. The test is intended to assess students' readiness for college. Historically, starting around 1937, the tests offered under the SAT banner also included optional subject-specific SAT Subject Tests, which were called SAT Achievement Tests until 1993 and then were called SAT II: Subject Tests until 2005; these were discontinued after June 2021. Originally designed not to be aligned with high school curricula, several adjustments were made for the version of the SAT introduced in 2016. College Board president David Coleman added that he wanted to make the test reflect more closely what students learn in high school with the new Common Core standards.

Many students prepare for the SAT using books, classes, online courses, and tutoring, which are offered by a variety of companies and organizations. However, preparatory courses rarely provide significant improvements in performance, and neither do elite secondary schools.

Editorial summary

“SAT” enters the record as standardized college admission test in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what standardized, college and admission can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1926, 1937, 1993, 2005—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1926. Its strongest next move is a source search built around standardized, college and admission.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“SAT” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, standardized, college and admission provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q334113. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005004060. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1937, 1993 and 2005.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “SAT”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow SAT primary sources, SAT archive and standardized research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “SAT” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.