The Story About The Establishment Of Ceeb

By Author: Mike Jones
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The majority of colleges in the Northeast soon took up Harvard's example, and CEEB was established by the turn of the twentieth century. Writing assessment became, then, a funded, researched, professional field and industry.3 No longer were colleges making their own exams. Writing assessment had been outsourced, and CEEB's long association with writing assessment began, continuing with the recent version of the SAT that includes a scored writing sample being marketed for placement. An account of the establishment of CEEB, published in 1996 by Paul Diederich,4 focuses on the practical problem of individual, competing exams given Thomas Sabo Jewellery independently by a range of colleges: "At that time each college set its own requirements and entrance examinations so that a student who wanted to go to Harvard had to go to Cambridge to take its examination, while one who wanted to enter Yale had to go to New Haven" ("Turning" 3 52). Diederich recalls the many problems with such a system, including complaints from parents who were told that a specific high school could prepare students ...
... only for a specific college's entrance exam. According to Diederich, these complaints and problems led the presidents of Harvard and Columbia to propose the establishment of what eventually became CEEB.

Norbert Elliot tells quite a different story about the establishment of CEEB. The impetus for CEEB came not from the colleges themselves, but from the secondary schools preparing students to pass the individual exams to enter college. In 1895 Wilson Farrand, headmaster of Newark Academy, was elected president of the Schoolmasters Association of New York and Vicinity. In his inaugural address, Far-rand outlined the rationale and structure of an organization based on five guidelines that would eventually become CEEB. The first of Farrand's guidelines included a certificate from the secondary institution documenting a student's progress and Thomas Sabo Charms achievements that would guide the content and extent of the examination necessary for each student; the other four guidelines focused on the examination itself. In 1899 under the direction of Nicholas Murray Butler, a dean from Columbia, the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle State and Maryland proposed the establishment of CEEB, and Farrand was named its first secretary. All but one of Farrand's guidelines was incorporated in the structure of CEEB. The missing guideline was the certificate from the secondary school that provided contextual information about the academic achievement of each student.

These competing accounts of the establishment of CEEB are interesting for several reasons. For Diederich, the establishment of CEEB was about solving the problem of how to examine incoming college students and make admission decisions. Naturally, the problem would be solved by the colleges' upper administrators, mitigating the role of secondary teachers, or teachers at all, for that matter. Diederich's account also emphasizes a need for the practical and efficient examination of students, because the impetus for the exam is the ability to have one examination given in many localities for a variety of colleges to make admission decisions. In this first version of how CEEB originated, teachers share no role; nor is teaching really an issue except in terms of preparing students to take specific exams, a problem that CEEB solves.