Stanford to require SAT/ACT
This month, Stanford University announced that for the incoming freshman class in 2025, it is reinstating the requirement of the SAT or ACT.
As one of the top-rated universities in the country, and one of the only such institutions located West of the Mississippi, Stanford holds a special appeal to students interested in studying where the action is in the Tech sector. California in general and Stanford itself have an interesting relationship with standardized tests, which we’ll dive into here.
History of Stanford: Forged in Tragedy
Leland Stanford and his wife Jane had every privilege you could desire on the frontier of America in the late 1800s: successfully converting a business supplying the ‘49ers during the Gold Rush, Leland ran one of the Big Four railroads and would serve as both Senator and Governor of California. His wife was educated herself and together, they raised their only son. But in Italy, he contracted typhoid fever and every parent’s worst nightmare became reality: at age 15, instead of preparing for his entrance to college, he died. This left the Stanfords wondering what they could do in their grief.
They decided that the children of California would be their children, so to speak, and to invest the funds and property they had in Palo Alto to what is Stanford University today. Interestingly, the East Coast vs West Coast rivalry is evident in a false urban legend that Harvard didn’t want his investment capital and he started the school out of pique — there’s no evidence that Leland Stanford wanted to donate to a university he had no connection to, as a graduate of a seminary in upstate New York.
The Stanford-Binet Test Brings Intelligence Testing To the United States
Like Leland Stanford, Alfred Binet, born Alfredo Binetti in Sardinia, was trained in the law. However, his path took him down a quite different path from that of the wealthy industrialist — Binet landed in Paris working in psychology and neuroscience research, including dabbling in “mesmerism,” a 19th-century hypnosis fad.
Though hypnotism was not particularly fruitful for Binet, by not being affiliated with a major university, he was able to pursue the research projects that interested him, less encumbered than his academic peers.
The government of France was early to introduce universal public education, and they approached Binet and his research partner Simon to develop a test to identify children with learning disabilities who would need interventions.
Like any first release of a product, this Binet test had its quirks — the task to “identify the prettiest Gibson Girl out of this pair” (see image) might strike modern readers as being in poor taste. Nevertheless, Binet continuously normed the results and the concept of testing young people on their reasoning ability took off. At its best, this allowed students with disabilities to receive the interventions they needed, intellectually gifted students to pursue the most challenging educational tracks regardless of their class background, and for researchers to isolate the concepts of the ability to learn from what a child happened to know already.
The “Stanford” in the Stanford-Binet test comes from psychologist Lewis Terman, a psychologist at (...wait for it) Stanford who expanded on Binet’s research. Terman was especially interested in two applications of intelligence testing: identifying students at the far top end of the tail, pioneering the concept of “gifted” education, and helping the U.S. army use testing to sort recruits based on their test results. (To illustrate how much society has changed in the intervening century, in 1910, only 8.8% of American 17-year-olds graduated high school, and a quarter of recruits were illiterate and had to use a non-text-based intelligence test.)
Binet’s and Terman’s personalities and social views couldn’t be more different, but their combined instrument lives on as one of the most popular, and one of the most statistically valid, tests of its type. When someone references an I.Q. score, this would most likely be the scale to which they’re referring. Originally with a mean of 1, it was Terman who proposed multiplying the values by 100, which stuck.
Testing Evolves in the 20th Century and Beyond
Due to Jane’s insistence, Stanford was coeducational from the beginning. The advent of World War II and the explosion of technology put Silicon Valley on the map, leading to a rise in its reputation as more and more of the country flocked West. Stanford was 16 years behind its rival, UC-Berkeley, in introducing the SAT into admissions, in 1959.
Today, Stanford has a global reputation, currently ranked #3 according to the U.S. News and World Report. Today, its acceptance rate is in the low single digits, but in the early 2000s, Stanford's acceptance rate was around 15-20%. For instance, in 2003, the acceptance rate was 15.6%. Now, after four years of experimenting with test-optional admissions, Stanford is once again following its Eastern peers by reintroducing the SAT/ACT into the mix of what it considers for holistic admissions.
Seems like some in the Ivy League can’t help half-jokingly thinking that palm trees are merely Hollywood (just see Bart tormenting Lisa). At Mindspire, we believe the history of risk-taking, innovation, and continuous commitment to progress means that Stanford undergraduates will continue to be the lucky “children” the Stanford couple were envisioning helping so long ago.
