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NPR Education
College Board Drops Its 'Adversity Score' For Each Student After Backlash
August 27, 2019
Bobby Allyn
The College Board is dropping its plan to give SAT-takers a single
score that captures a student's economic hardship. The change comes
after blowback from university officials and parents of those taking
the college admissions exam.
Announced in May, the "adversity score" was intended to assess the kind
of neighborhood the student came from, including factors such as the
portion of students receiving free or reduced lunch, the level of crime
and average educational attainment. The pushback was swift.
"It just seemed sort of like the higher the score, you know, what? The
poorer you are?" said Zenia Henderson of the National College Access
Network.
Henderson said many parents and school counselors believed one single
number couldn't possibly capture a student's whole story. And there
were other what-ifs.
"Someone can take that information and really use it for wrong to say,
'Wow, this student comes from this kind of community and area, they
might not be a good fit for our school,'" Henderson said.
In an interview with NPR, College Board CEO David Coleman said that
boiling all of that complex information down to one number was indeed
problematic and that the company is now reversing its decision.
Some people worried that the adversity score would affect SAT scores, when that was never the case, Coleman said.
"The idea of a single score was confusing because it seemed that all of
a sudden the College Board was trying to score adversity. That's not
the College Board's mission," Coleman said. "The College Board scores
achievement, not adversity."
And so the College Board is launching a tool called Landscape, which
will provide admissions counselors with information about a student's
background, like average neighborhood income and crime rates, but
Coleman said the data points will not be given a score.
The College Board is letting college officials do their own analysis
from the government information it provides alongside SAT scores.
"We'll leave the interpretation to the admission's officer," Coleman
said. "In other words, we're leaving a lot more room for judgment."
The change comes amid a larger national debate around what role a
student's background should play when they're applying to college. A
lawsuit filed against Harvard University has challenged that school's
use of race in admissions. And earlier this year, the college
admissions scandal drew attention to the difference a wealthy family
can make.
That backdrop isn't lost on Coleman.
"And you know the founding mission of the College Board is it's not
about your connections, it's not about who you know. It's about the
work you've done," Coleman said.
The College Board initially conceived of the idea of providing schools
with a student's background information at the request of colleges and
universities in an attempt to view a student's objective SAT results in
the context of the conditions under which the student lives and learns,
Coleman said. The thinking, he said, was that if a student overcame
economic or other challenges to earn a certain SAT score, that
information should be known by decision-makers.
Diaraye Diallo — a black Muslim 18-year-old and soon-to-be college
student — is glad the College Board will be providing schools with
information about a student's hardships. She's one of four siblings
raised by a single mom in Denver, and she said the idea of admissions
officers judging her by her GPA and SAT score is frustrating.
"There are a lot of other things that limit peoples' potential, such as
money, such as having access to people to tutor you for the SAT," she
said.
"I spent most of my junior year stressing and trying to figure out how
I was going to get into schools — and also be able to afford going to
schools — if my score isn't up to par with my white counterparts.
Because I'm a horrible test taker."
And Coleman says the college admissions process should encompass more than just grades and test scores.
"The founding mission of the College Board is, it's not about your
connections, it's not about who you know," Coleman said. "It's about
what you've done."
The adversity score did not account for a student's race, but schools
that used the tool in pilot testing reported that the socioeconomic
data helped boost nonwhite enrollment.
Revising the approach but keeping the contextual background information
will hopefully appease the college counselors and parents who were
upset over the adversity score, Coleman said.
"The first move was to admit," he said, "that summing it up in a single score was a mistake, so we've stopped that."
Worries about the initial score included the criticism that how the
information was calculated, along with what each student's score was,
remained unavailable to the students and their families. Now, Coleman
said, that will change.
"Within a year, we'll be able for every family and student, on their
College Board account, to show them their neighborhood and school
information transparently," he said.
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