Students have been prepping, studying, stressing over and finally taking college entrance exams for well over a century, ever since the College Entrance Examination Board formed. The Board, made up of the presidents of the twelve leading colleges in the United States met to standardize admissions procedures and force local boarding schools to adopt uniform curricula.

On this day, June 17, in 1901, the first College Board-sponsored tests took place in 67 locations across the Northeastern United States and two more in Europe.

Over a third of the 973 test takers were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and 60% intended to apply to New York’s Columbia University. The exams were divided into thematic sections on English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Rather than multiple choice, each free-form answer was rated by experts in each subject as Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor.