Everett Franklin Lindquist (June 4, 1901 – May 13, 1978) was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today. Early life Everett Franklin Lindquist was a native of Gowrie, Iowa. He was the son of Jonas A. Lindquist and Hannah O. Anderson. Career Lindquist joined the University of Iowa in 1925 as a research assistant. He received his Ph.D. in 1927 and was a member of the Iowa faculty until retirement in 1969. In 1953 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Educational Testing Desiring to create an academic competition for Iowa students, he developed a set of tests in 1929. These evolved into the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, an exam for elementary and middle school students, as well as the Iowa Tests of Educational Development for high schoolers. Despite their name, they are used nationwide, especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind legislation. Due to their success, he founded the not-for-profit Measurement Research Center on the Iowa campus to score these tests, which was later acquired by Westinghouse, NCS, and its present owner, Pearson PLC. In 1959, he introduced the ACT, an examination to test students on practical knowledge rather than cognitive reasoning examined on the SAT. The ACT is still in widespread use today, and is headquartered in Lindquist's hometown, Iowa City, Iowa. Although it is now administered by the College Board, the competing organization to ACT, Lindquist developed the first National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Tests. Lindquist was on the committee that developed the GED, which evolved during World War II as a way to grant academic credit to servicemen. Testing technology As a result of the fast-growing use of ITBS tests, he developed the first practical optical mark recognition system as a replacement for the electrical mark sense IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine. Although many of his colleagues at the University of Iowa contributed to the invention, Lindquist is generally credited with this development and is the sole inventor listed on U.S. Patent 3,050,248 (Filed 1955, granted 1962). Lindquist's first optical mark recognition scanner used a mimeograph paper-transport mechanism directly coupled to a magnetic drum memory. Although it was not a general purpose computer, it made extensive use