As the journalist Nicholas Lemann recounts in his book The Big Test, the SAT was created and cultivated, in the 1920s and 1930s, in the confines of the Ivy League, championed by the president of Harvard and administered by a team at Princeton. Its inventors had no interest in expanding the college-going population nationally; instead, their goal was to identify and locate a small number of especially bright middle-class students around the country who might be added to the existing student bodies at Ivy League universities, which at the time were populated mostly by wealthy young prep-school
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