Like the corporate monikers of KFC or AT&T, the initials SAT, denoting the test that has been the scourge of generations of high school students, now stands for nothing, officials with the College Board say.
''Please note that SAT is not an initialism; it does not stand for anything,'' said a statement by the College Board, which since 1941 has administered what was once the Scholastic Aptitude Test and is still part of what it now calls its Scholastic Assessment Tests.
Three years after the name change, the switch is still causing confusion among students, educators and the news media, but experts say that beneath the confusion is an instructive story in academic fashions.
After years of controversy about what its test measures, aptitude or achievement, the College Board in 1994 changed the name of what had been the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T.
It said then that its two tests, one for overall college readiness in English and math, and one for achievement in specific subjects would be known as SAT I: Reasoning Test and SAT II: Subject Tests. But the term Scholastic Assessment Tests, as the tests are collectively known, is always supposed to be in the plural and neither test alone can properly be called the Scholastic Assessment Test, the College Board says.
''The SAT has become the trademark; it doesn't stand for anything,'' said Scott Jeffe, a spokesman for the College Board in New York. ''The SAT is the SAT, and that's all it is.''
In short, like companies whose products became less fashionable or definitive of a company's identity (fried chicken) or obsolete (telegraph), the College Board decided to simply keep the old initials but lose the meaning.
Diane Ravitch, a senior research scholar at New York University, who has been critical of the College Board's decision in 1994 to ''re-center'' the tests -- raising most grades upward to account for falling scores, says the name change has its roots in differing views of what the test is supposed to be.
The test began as a national sorting system intended to measure aptitude for college. Some critics still say the test is culturally biased toward males and whites, and College Board officials now say that the old name, Scholastic Aptitude Test, is misleading if it connotes aptitude as something innate or immutable.
Rather than send the wrong message of what the test is about, the College Board decided to evade the issue by sending none, Ms. Ravitch said.
''They don't want to refer to aptitude, and calling it the Scholastic Assessment Test is like calling it the Scholastic Test Test, because that's what an assessment is,'' she said. ''It's really about what students have learned, achievement, but rather than dealing with the dilemma of what the test is, they're just saying, ''Call us the SAT' ''
At least the College Board is not alone in its choice. The other major college test is one administered by American College Testing in Iowa City. Officials there say that as of last September the test, which carried the name of the organization, was officially changed to the ACT, which also stands for nothing.
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