Danielle Grotsky
Not long before I was applying for college, the SAT underwent a huge change in scoring. The scale went from 2400 to 1600. Additionally, it was revised in that incorrect answers would no longer result in deductions. Recently, in a matter of months, the College Board has also implemented and retracted a new SAT Adversity Score. This score, a calculation including several pieces of demographic information, received some well-deserved criticism and was rightfully dropped.
The Adversity Score was preliminarily used at several schools with plans of expansion. This feature did not affect SAT scores but was provided alongside other data on students. Had it been rolled out nationwide, it would have been up to college admissions officers whether to consider this information and how. Measures like these degrade the integrity of a test that is supposed to measure college readiness based on scores in math, reading and writing sections and counteracts equality, the very goal of the addition.
Diversity initiatives are critical and much needed, but not at the expense of those who were fortunate enough to have had a more privileged upbringing not gaining acceptance into schools they are qualified for. If students feel that their background has influenced them to the extent of it needing to be taken into consideration, then a college application essay is still the perfect opportunity to underline this in detail.
Sure, the developers of the SAT wouldn’t have been the ones making admission decisions. But they were instead enabling admissions officers to decide if adversity, in their subjective opinions and quantified representation, is of magnitude when determining college readiness. Not to mention that the Adversity Score itself faces a number of problems in collecting data.
One pitfall due to the simplicity of the scoring was that students could have been misrepresented as more advantaged or disadvantaged than they truly were based on factors that are sometimes trivial or misleading.
For example, an applicant may have lived in a high-end neighborhood, but in a house with a much lesser property value than luxuriously renovated neighboring homes. Furthermore, because real estate comparables, similar homes that were recently valued through sales, can inflate property values, an adversity score can be misleading.
Another example would be students whose parents earn decent salaries, but make questionable spending decisions and create an adverse environment in emotional ways. On the other hand, if a child lives a beyond-comfortable life with parents who are extremely successful, he or she shouldn’t be punished for this in the pursuit of equality.
As there is no upbringing that guarantees college readiness and no way to accurately determine aptitudes and motivations of students from a numerical score, the subjectivity of scoring students in this way is concerning. Allowing adversity to influence admissions naturally lowers expectations because the standard of acceptance is no longer based on merit.
The college completion rate suggests that we may need to find another way of gauging college readiness altogether. Of course, there are other explanations for this, such as the cost of college and complications in people’s personal lives, but unpreparedness and deceiving representations of applicants such as this are certainly in the mix.
Scoring students’ socioeconomic statuses when the result of adversity is case-by-case is not the best measure. Students with unideal or in worse cases, outright terrible home lives should definitely have support. But this doesn’t mean that they should be given an outlet for competitive advantage based solely on their adverse circumstances when applying to schools, especially when this may not be what is best for them. Efforts to improve socioeconomic diversity need to continue, but this one opened too many complicated doors.