College Board drops 'adversity score'

The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT, is abandoning a plan to develop an "adversity score" for every student who takes the college admissions test after a backlash from parents and advocacy groups.

Instead, the board will provide an array of information to college admission officers to help them compare an applicant's scores with other students in the same high school and provide an overview of socioeconomic background. The information will not alter an applicant's SAT score.

"We think college admissions should be based on merit, and the College Board made a good decision," Wenyuan Wu, director of administration at the New Jersey-based Asian-American Coalition for Education, told China Daily. "We're happy the board abolished the 'adversity score', and we hope our input in May and June contributed to its decision."

The College Board's new program, called Landscape, will include six "challenge factors" for each student: college attendance by other graduates of the applicant's school, household structure, median family income, housing stability, community education levels and crime. Interpretation of the information will be left to college admission officers.

Unlike the adversity score, Landscape won't be reported to college admissions officers as a single number on a scale of 1 to 100. A score of 50 in the now-abandoned system was "average adversity", while numbers above 50 indicated an above-average level of adversity and, critics said, might have given a student an advantage in admission.

The adversity score has been used in about 50 schools in an initial test and would have been expanded to another 150 this year.

"Landscape is more comprehensive," Wu said. "But there's the danger it could be used as a universal tool, and that's why the Asian American Coalition for Education will be monitoring its implementation."

David Coleman, CEO of the New York-based College Board, said he heeded those who objected to the adversity score.

"We listened to thoughtful criticism and made Landscape better and more transparent," Coleman said in a statement. "Landscape provides admissions officers more consistent background information so they can fairly consider every student, no matter when they live and learn. The idea of a single score was wrong. It was confusing and created the misperception that the indicators are specific to an individual student."

Students will have access to details about their school and neighborhood gathered in the Landscape program starting in the 2020-2021 academic year. In the abandoned program, students did not see their adversity score.

Critics of the SAT have argued that race and income inequality are significant factors in test results. The disparity in average SAT scores has been widely reported.

In 2018, white students scored an average of 177 points higher than black students and 133 points higher than Hispanic students. Asian students averaged 100 points higher than white students.

Yale University, believing a diverse student body is vital to its educational mission, said it has nearly doubled the number of low-income students to about 20 percent of the freshman class by using the adversity score.

If the most selective schools relied exclusively on the SAT for selecting the freshman class, Georgetown University researchers concluded student bodies would be richer, whiter and have significantly more males.

Some Asian students, who believe they are held to a higher standard and hence wrongly denied admission to top schools, have sued Harvard University. A judge hasn't yet ruled on the case.

Similar lawsuits have been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the 10-campus University of California system.