How Iowa Built the Testing Industry
In 1929, Iowa held a statewide academic competition so intense that high schools held pep rallies for their math teams.
They called it the "Brain Derby."
It's one of the most forgotten moments in American education, and its failure changed how every student in the country is tested.
The Brain Derby was designed to turn the University of Iowa into a coliseum for smart kids. High schools held internal exams to select their "champions" in Algebra, Latin, English, Physics, and History. The elite teams traveled to Iowa City for state finals. For many rural farm kids in the 1930s, it was their first time leaving their home county.
The hype was real. Local newspapers ran photos of the "Math Team" alongside the football team. Schools competed fiercely for the title of Best Academic School in the state.
Running the whole thing was a University of Iowa professor named E.F. Lindquist. Thousands of students on campus at once. Professors grading handwritten tests in hours so winners could be announced before kids caught their trains home.
But Lindquist began to hate his own creation.
He noticed schools were gaming the system. Teachers would identify their 2-3 smartest kids early in the year and spend all their time coaching them to win the Derby, while ignoring the average students falling behind.
His conclusion killed the Brain Derby: "We are determining what the top 5% of students know, but learning nothing about what the other 95% are learning."
He cancelled the whole thing. No more traveling, no more trophies, no more selecting stars. He replaced it with something radical.
In 1935, he released the Iowa Every Pupil Test of Basic Skills. Every student took it. Not just the champions. The goal wasn't to win. It was to diagnose what schools were actually teaching and where curriculum was failing.
This was a direct challenge to how the East Coast thought about testing.
At the time, the SAT dominated. It was designed as an aptitude test, essentially an IQ test measuring innate intelligence you couldn't study for.
Lindquist believed that was wrong. Tests should measure achievement, what you actually learned in class. Not what you were born with.
As his Iowa Tests went national, the university was drowning in paper. Hundreds of clerks grading millions of tests by hand.
So in 1955, Lindquist invented the first high-speed optical mark recognition scanner. It read 4,000 bubble sheets per hour. Humans did 40. Every bubble sheet you've ever filled in descends from that machine.
Then in 1959, Lindquist created the ACT. Unlike the SAT (logic puzzles and vocabulary riddles), the ACT tested what you actually learned in high school. English, Math, Social Studies, Natural Sciences. Headquartered in Iowa City. Still there today.
This split American testing in two:
Princeton, NJ: SAT, aptitude focus. Iowa City, IA: ACT, achievement focus.
Two philosophies. Two cities. One question: what should a test actually measure?
The Iowa philosophy won. Even the SAT recently redesigned itself to look more like the ACT, focusing on curriculum instead of abstract logic puzzles.
Lindquist's career was three moves:
- Create the spectacle. Get people to care about academics with the same energy they give football.
- Once you have attention, redirect it toward what actually matters. Stop measuring the stars. Start measuring the system.
- Build the machine. Automate so it scales beyond what any human effort could touch.