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.