1926 | Education
Education
England's 34-year-old Reading University receives a royal charter and gains independence from Oxford.
Soviet women 19 years old have a literacy rate of 88.2 percent, men 24 to 25 a rate of 95.7 percent, up from an overall rate of only 78 percent in 1897, following a campaign by the Bolshevik government to teach children to read and write.
The College Entrance Examination Board created in 1900 administers its first Scholastic Aptitude Test (S.A.T.). Harvard chemistry professor James Bryant Conant and former assistant dean Henry Chauncey pick up on Thomas Jefferson's 1782 phrase about a "natural aristocracy" and strive to limit college admissions to a "meritocracy" based on scholastic ability and potential rather than on family wealth and position. Carl Campbell Brigham's 1923 book A Study of American Intelligence concluded that members of the so-called "Nordic" race had higher intellects than Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Russians, or—most especially—blacks, and although he will later recant this view he has been the chief developer of the tests. The College Board Scholastic Aptitude Tests will be graded on a scale of 200 to 800, and colleges will use S.A.T. scores as a supplement to secondary-school records and other relevant information in judging qualifications of applicants, but although the tests will measure only a narrow range of talents, the scores will never be more than approximate, and they will have a standard error of measurement in the area of 32 points. An S.A.T. score will prove to be something far less than an infallible indicator of a student's grades in his or her freshman year at college, colleges will continue to give preferences to the children of alumni (and to good athletes), but a poor S.A.T. score will often bar an able student from admission to his or her college of choice (see Kaplan, 1947).
Former Harvard University president Charles William Eliot dies at Northeast Harbor, Me., August 22 at age 92.