It's ironic, since the SAT was developed to give bright kids who DIDN'T go to Andover or Philips Exeter a chance to prove their merit.

Before the SAT, there were certain schools that "Fed" into the Ivy's and other Colleges/Universities, mostly based on letters of recommendation from the Private School Faculty and Admins. Unless you were an obvious prodigy, you had no chance of getting into them since there was no metric.