American Students Really Hate One Iowa Professor’s Invention

Wow thanks so much.

When I was getting ready for college applications, I studied wild hours for college entry exams. It was a struggle.

And now, it's graduation season so many students are headed off to college in the fall. Some students are about to spend the summer studying for those exams so they too can go off to college soon.

Blame An Iowa Professor

One of the most infamous college entry exams is the ACT, which originally stood for American College Test and was first administered in 1959.

The ACT exam was invented by a University of Iowa professor.

Specifically, education professor Dr. Everett Lindquist. Before he rolled out that idea, Dr. Lindquist was no stranger to coming up with tests. He had created Iowa's K-12 assessments, helped design the GED test, and came up with a scantron machine that could score 50,000 answers per second.

Then came his own exam.

The year before the first ACT, he proposed a second exam for kids who wanted to go to more exclusive schools. At that time, the SAT was the standard exam for college-bound students. So for that reason, the College Board (which is who Dr. Lindquist proposed the ACT to) saw no reason to bring the ACT into play.

The SAT claimed to "measure aptitude, or the test-taker’s innate intellectual abilities" while the ACT was more focused on measuring the kids' high-school level comprehension.

Dr. Lindquist said:

The [ACT] must make him feel he has earned the right to go to college by his own efforts, not that he is entitled to college admission because of his innate abilities or aptitudes, regardless of what he has done in high school.

In November 1959, about 70,000 students took the ACT, which cost $3 to take at the time. ACT Inc. operated out of Iowa for it's early years. The test had a challenge back then: getting schools to accept ACT results. Harvard didn't until the 1990's.

The ACT and SAT have been switching off the 'most popular' titles in the last few years but now, with a number of schools are going test-optional (or 'test-blind'), meaning they don't consider either test results for a student's admission.