The New and Unimproved SAT The college test’s ‘adversity score’ may foment more cynicism.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-and-unimproved-sat-11558048986
News of affluent parents scamming to get their kids into top universities has again stoked complaints that college admissions are rigged. To level the socioeconomic field, the College Board now plans to assign students an “adversity score” on their SAT admissions tests. This demographic handicap may instead fuel more public cynicism and harm middle-income kids.
The College Board’s new adversity score will include 15 variables such as a student’s neighborhood crime rate, housing values and poverty. These variables will feed into an algorithm with weights assigned to each variable. Out will pop a score that students won’t be able to see or challenge before it goes to colleges.
Some schools have been seeking ways to quantify student socioeconomic challenges, and the adversity score would be superior to the blatant use of race. It could also help them compare similarly situated students. High-performing low- and middle-income students could likewise benefit from being compared to peers with similar means.
Yet the new score will make college admissions even less transparent. Notably, the variables that go into the score will be based on census and proprietary College Board data. So the scores won’t take into account individual circumstances and character, which is supposed to be the purpose of “holistic” admission assessments.
Middle-class kids whose parents sacrifice to send them to private schools or move to neighborhoods with better public schools would score as relatively privileged. Regardless of their own resources and opportunities, they might be compared to more affluent peers who have access to SAT prep, tutors and summer camps. The score could thus prompt families to make perverse decisions. For instance, parents may refrain from moving to marginally wealthier neighborhoods or sending their kids to parochial schools.
Perhaps the College Board is trying to parry complaints that the SAT is biased against less privileged folks. White students on average score 133 points higher than Hispanics and 177 points higher than blacks. Students whose parents earn more than $200,000 score roughly 170 points higher than those from households with income between $40,000 and $60,000.
But these are averages, and the SAT is still the best objective measure of student aptitude and has proven to be a good predictor of college performance. Test preparation can modestly boost scores, but plenty of affluent kids perform poorly and many less privileged students do well. That’s why well-to-do parents were caught bribing SAT proctors to correct their kids’ exams.
Most colleges, especially the higher-ranked, already discount student privilege and handicap for race and socioeconomic status. In 2009 a Princeton sociologist studied 10 highly selective colleges and found that white applicants would have to score 310 points higher than blacks and 130 points higher than Hispanics to have the same odds of admission.
The College Board may also be trying to maintain its college market share. More than a dozen top schools such as Bowdoin, the University of Chicago and Wesleyan have stopped requiring the SAT, and others are considering it because of complaints that the test punishes minority students. Disparities in student test scores can also be marshaled as evidence in court of illegal racial preferences.
And this may be the adversity score’s primary purpose: Colleges want to get out in front of a possible legal ban on race-based preferences. California and Michigan prohibit colleges from considering race in admissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court could forbid racial preferences entirely in the next few years.
Colleges could then use the adversity score as an alternative or proxy for race since many of its 15 variables strongly correlate with minority backgrounds. So they could continue to discriminate discretely without proof that’s what they are doing since the adversity scores are calculated by a third-party algorithm they don’t control. Given how race and identity dominate politics on campus these days, this isn’t an unreasonable inference.
Schools should provide opportunity for kids of modest means or tough backgrounds, but those kids must still be able to succeed once they’re admitted. The adversity score looks like a way to undermine one of the last objective measures of academic merit. No wonder people are cynical about college admissions.
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