"Adversity Score" for Students Taking the SAT

From the New York Times:

Problem:

Scoring patterns on the SAT suggesting that the test puts certain racial and economic groups at a disadvantage have become a concern for colleges.

Also, from The Mercury News:

Sexton also noted that the nonprofit College Board is in a competitive business with the rival ACT and also facing a number of campuses that are making such exams optional in response to criticism of the gap between rich and poor student scores.

“They’ve been losing market share to ACT and test optional schools,” Sexton said, adding the adversity score might be an appealing new product to make it easier for colleges to assess the relative challenges of students’ home environments.

College Board Solution:

The College Board, the company that administers the SAT exam taken by about two million students a year, will for the first time assess students not just on their math and verbal skills, but also on their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, entering a fraught battle over the fairness of high-stakes testing.

The company announced on Thursday that it will include a new rating, which is widely being referred to as an “adversity score,” of between 1 and 100 on students’ test results. An average score is 50, and higher numbers mean more disadvantage. The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood.

The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.

I note that the College Board will fill in most of this information, not the student. 

“Merit is all about resourcefulness,” David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, said in an interview on Thursday. “This is about finding young people who do a great deal with what they’ve been given. It helps colleges see students who may not have scored as high, but when you look at the environment that they have emerged from, it is amazing.”

“Merit is all about resourcefulness,” David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, said in an interview on Thursday. “This is about finding young people who do a great deal with what they’ve been given. It helps colleges see students who may not have scored as high, but when you look at the environment that they have emerged from, it is amazing.”

The adversity score is based on data from the Census Bureau, crime data from the F.B.I., and other sources, College Board officials said. It accounts for circumstances like wealthier students going to magnet schools in poorer areas, as well as the reverse. But Mr. Coleman said that these were likely to be outliers.

“It is much more common that poor people live in poor neighborhoods than the wealthy do,” Mr. Coleman said. “But growing up in a neighborhood with less violence gives you advantages in your academic work.”

Early Criticism

Op-ed in the Times by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Mr. Williams is the author of the forthcoming “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.”

 Though there are a near infinitude of ways both explicit and subtle to experience challenges in life, the adversity index will restrict itself to just three categories: neighborhood environment (including factors like crime and poverty rates and housing values); family environment (the income, education and marriage status of parents and whether they speak English); and high school environment (aspects like the free lunch rate and rigor of the curriculum).

No two lives are commensurate and not all adversity can be taken into account. But the College Board is attempting to dictate which forms matter and which do not. It cannot — and does not — attempt to assess the mental toll of being called a “monkey” on your walk home, or of living through the premature death of a parent or sibling. It will not capture the texture of life with an educated but alcoholic or emotionally abusive parent.

And so the dehumanizing message of the new adversity index is that America’s young people are nothing but interchangeable sociological points of data — and the jagged complexity of an individual life somehow can be sanded down, quantified and fairly contrasted.

No matter how well meaning the intentions, we have been conditioning ourselves to interpret the world exclusively through the overlapping lenses of race — or its euphemisms — and privilege. But one of the most valuable gifts a liberal arts education can offer is the jarring and ultimately liberating realization that differences in money and social background do not, and cannot, explain everything.

From the NY Times article:

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, a group that is critical of standardized testing, said that if the SAT needed a sophisticated contextual framework to make it valid, then “it’s a concession that it’s not a good test.”

He added that the adversity score would not capture individual situations, like a child who was middle class but whose mother was addicted to opioids. “Mentally adjusting scores based on where a student came from and what obstacles she overcame is common practice,” Mr. Schaeffer said. “It’s this attempt to do it in a quantitative manner that opens up many other issues.”

From The Mercury News:

It comes at a time when Asian-American applicants have sued Harvard alleging they were rejected because of their race, while dozens of rich parents have been charged with paying to cheat on their kids’ entrance exams and bribe college coaches to ease their progeny into top schools.

“This will add to the uncertainty for a few years, which will likely only fuel anxiety around admissions,” said Gordy Steil, a private college admission counselor in Berkeley.

“Do you have good parents? Sorry your application has been denied,” tweeted Jorge S. Ortiz, a business development manager at North Side Community Federal Credit Union in Chicago.

FAQs from NY Times 

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