As you read this, hundreds of thousands of high school students across the country are busy preparing for the most important test of their lives so far—the dreaded SAT. The most common college entrance exam has come under fire in recent years for glaring racial disparities, with critics pointing to the racism of its architect, Carl Brigham, as evidence the test belongs in the dustbin of history.
Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.
During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.
During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.
Read more: “How Eugenics Shaped Statistics”
Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.
His conclusion was obviously flawed. The differences he claimed to measure between the groups also reflected the order in which they immigrated to the United States, something Brigham was acutely aware of because he only applied this layer of analysis to explain away an even stronger signal from the data. Earlier analysis revealed that comparing test results to years of residency in the U.S. showed that those who lived in the country longer scored highest, with test scores declining with the length of an immigrant’s residency. In other words, the results of the tests, which were administered in English, had a glaring confounding variable: English language proficiency.
He repeated a similar racist error when attempting to explain the differences in scores between Blacks from northern states, where they were more likely to receive an education, and Blacks from the segregated southern states. Instead of grappling with the obvious differences in educational opportunities the two regions offered, he surmised that Blacks in the north had a greater admixture of white genes—something his tests didn’t even measure.
His original findings being tainted by racism was such an inescapable conclusion that Brigham himself eventually accepted it, disavowing his previous analysis in a paper published in 1930. In that academic mea culpa, Brigham admitted both his grievous bigoted error, and that SAT scores don’t simply reflect some innate intelligence, but are influenced by all kinds of other variables.
Still, for many, the damage had been done, and the College Board which administers the SAT has undertaken decades of revision and refinement to correct racial biases. Unfortunately, racial disparities remain, and educational institutions across the country are taking second and third looks at how much emphasis to place on test scores during the admissions process.
Racism staining the SAT might be Brigham’s fault alone, but whether we can create a standardized test that’s fair for all people, regardless of their background, is a question we’ll have to answer together. 
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Lead image: MdHares / Adobe Stock
