Is the SAT a Scam?

Student Guest Opinion

By Quinn De Vecchi | Jan. 10, 2026

Over 100 years ago, in the early 1920s, the military began using the Army Alpha Test: an intelligence evaluation for new recruits to create more competent taskforces that would cost less. In 1923, Carl Brigham, a prominent psychologist and eugenicist from Princeton University, revised the test for it to be used in college admissions. That new exam, called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, became the SAT.

Back then, Brigham had created the SAT to continue his previous analysis of how white, native-born Americans were more intelligent than immigrants or people of color. This followed the same idea as the many other IQ tests at the time—eugenicists used the higher scores from white, native-born Americans to prove that they were superior.

The reason white people were receiving higher scores? Because they actually had the ability to go to private schools and have tutors, and many of them were in high-income households. Today, white people are second to Asians in terms of highest SAT scores.

Even with its racist upbringing, the SAT was first used to choose low-income seniors for Harvard scholarships in the 1930s. During this time, much of the Ivy Leagues’ students came from elite boarding and day schools from the northeast. The SAT was used to give chances to the poorer few who were deemed “smart enough” to go to Harvard.

Although its initial practical use was to ease the class divide a bit, now the SAT is run by the College Board, which charges obscene amounts of money for a required part of the admissions process.

College Board is an American not-for-profit organization that was founded in 1899 to be a bridge between colleges and students. It utilized Brigham’s version of the IQ test to create a more succinct admissions process, especially for the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges.

The College Board owns AP, the SAT, and the CSS financial aid profile (the SAT and CSS are usually required by a majority of schools, especially Ivy Leagues).

Students must pay $68 to sign up for the SAT, and it comes with a $34 fee for late registration. (There is also a large fee for those taking the SAT outside of the U.S.) For AP tests, a student must pay $99 per exam, with an additional $40 late fee. While the College Board does offer fee waivers (usually for low-income students that meet the National School Lunch Act benchmark), those waivers only last for two tests.

Even crazier, the College Board requires students to pay $15 per school when sending official test scores. It goes up to $31 if a student wants their scores to be expedited, though the scores are electronic and aren’t even mailed. This means that a student would be paying more than $100 (not even considering them retaking the SAT, or if they had an AP exam) just to do something that many colleges have made optional. And the cost goes up with application fees; a student is paying well over hundreds of dollars just to apply to colleges.

Some people—and many colleges—are starting to think that the SAT shouldn’t be part of the general admissions process.

“Making the SAT required for so many schools when it isn’t really a good indicator of intelligence isn’t fair,” commented my friend and classmate who recently took the SAT and has chosen to stay anonymous.

“The SAT is a measure of test-taking and how you can retain information in the short-term prior to a big test. GPA—stretched over a longer time—is a lot more useful [for the admissions process].”

In addition to the financial SAT woes, since the fall of 2021, the College Board has been able to sell students’ data for 50 cents a pop. Usually, only colleges buy this information (score, ethnicity, school, etc.) so they know who to send millions of useless brochures to. Students are urged to press “yes!” to giving their data out not just for college views, but also for potential scholarships.

But what many students don’t know is that some of their information doesn’t just go to schools. It also goes to military recruitment programs, public and private companies, and any other place that is willing to pay for kids’ data.

So, is the SAT really still worth it—or has it ever really been worth it at all? From starting as an IQ test to becoming a monopoly scheme, the test is a financial burden on students and sets them up to have their personal information looted.

Personally, I’m beginning to believe that we should leave the SAT in the past and modernize the admissions process. We students have been forced to take a two-hour long test just so our GPA can be sidelined for some one-day, one-time numbers. I think it’s about time we change that.

Quinn De Vecchi is a creative writing senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.