The original purpose of the SAT was to sort students for the “right” college. Their scores on the tests would show whether they could succeed in an selective college. The designer of the SAT was Carl Brigham, a psychologist who had been a pioneer in developing IQ tests. Brigham wrote a book about intelligence expressing the then-common belief that IQ was fixed, innate, measurable, and inherited. Brigham also believed that different races and ethnic groups could be ranked by IQ. Since he believed that IQ was fixed and that it was tied to one’s race and ethnicity, there was little that schools could do to raise up children’s intelligence other than to identify it and place them in the right track. Brigham was the chief scientist who developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, as it was then called. Today it is simply the SAT, standing for nothing in particular. It replaced…