In The Fall of the Standard-Bearers, Diane Ravitch argues that the original College Board exams lifted the level of education in the US:
Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, and Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, persuaded their colleagues in American education of the importance of developing an organization to establish uniform curriculum standards and a uniform examination system. Their planning led to the creation of the College Entrance Examination Board, in 1900.The new organization created the best, most consistent, and most influential standards that American education has ever known. The work of “the Board,” as it was known, had a powerful, uplifting influence on secondary education. Even though roughly only one of every 20 17-year-olds in 1900 finished high school, and even fewer expected to go to college, everyone who attended high school in that era studied the curriculum that was later called the “college track.” Whether they were the children of doctors or farmers or factory workers, they were expected to study mathematics, science, English literature, composition, history, and a foreign language, usually Latin.
The early exam did not resemble our modern SATs:
The board’s first tests were offered in June 1901 to 978 applicants to Columbia, Barnard College, and New York University. Each year more colleges joined the program as they recognized its value.The examinations — in chemistry, English, French, German, Greek, history, Latin, mathematics, and physics — contained no multiple-choice questions. Students were expected to demonstrate their knowledge by writing extended essays or displaying their solutions to problems. In English, 10 classics were assigned in advance for students, including The Merchant of Venice, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Last of the Mohicans, Silas Marner, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Students were told that they would be judged more for their powers of clear expression than for their minute knowledge of those works, but they were expected to have closely studied them and to be ready to answer questions in detail. Every two or three years, the standards and reading lists were revised, and high-school teachers knew well in advance which works would be covered.