Don't throw away those No. 2 pencils, the kind you used to fill in all the little ovals back when you took the Scholastic Aptitude Test. If your parents went to college, too, they probably secured their places on campus by completing the sat with the same type of lead pencils. (It's not lead inside, actually, but nontoxic graphite — maybe that should be one of the multiple choice questions on the test.) And if your children grow up with post-secondary schooling aspirations, they'll also most certainly use trusty old No. 2s to write their tickets to the future.

But through the generations, practically everything else about the standardized tests used for college admissions has undergone incremental changes. Just two years after the College Board introduced the sat in 1926, for instance, math questions were removed. They were absent for just a couple of years before returning in a different form, but disappeared again in the mid-'30s and weren't reinstated for good until 1942. Grammar and writing skills became a focus in the 1970s, and along came an essay section in 2005.

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