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The Daily Signal
The
New SAT ‘Adversity Score’ Turns the Idea of Meritocracy Into a Sham
Jarrett Stepman
May 16, 2019
Editor: Education Dive announces on Monday... The Other Side of the
"Adversity Score" story today
It would be nice to think that high school students can get into a good
university based on their abilities or talents, but a proposed change
to the SAT shows how the concept of meritocracy has been turned into a
sham.
The College Board, according to The Wall Street Journal, will now
assign an “adversity score” to SAT test takers, “calculated using 15
factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s
high school and neighborhood.”
“There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less [on
the SAT] but have accomplished more,” said David Coleman, chief
executive of the College Board, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth
reflected in the SAT.”
The adversity rating has already been used by 50 colleges in 2018, but
will eventually extend to significantly more colleges.
Every student who takes the SAT will receive this adversity score,
according to the Journal, but the students and parents won’t know what
it is.
Of course, how something as subjective as “adversity” can actually be
boiled down to a number for each person is already dubious.
Worse, it can be so obviously gamed by both students and school.
Clever students and parents may simply find ways to artificially boost
“adversity” in any way they can, just as colleges can use this tool to
continue what they have rightfully come under scrutiny for in recent
decades: race-based admissions.
Race-based admissions systems, even surreptitious ones, could be on the
way out as these practices are challenged in court.
For instance, a case against Harvard for screening out Asian
students—who typically get better SAT scores, yet are admitted at lower
rates—could make its way to the Supreme Court. There is a good chance
that the Supreme Court will declare these practices illegal.
The adversity score would make for a convenient way around whatever
changes happen in the future.
As Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on
Education and the Workforce, said according to The Wall Street Journal,
it’s easy to see how the purpose of the new system “is to get to race
without using race.”
The score’s lack of transparency will only feed into that notion.
The adversity score system makes sense for College Board and
diversity-obsessed colleges, but it hardly ensures that our schools
will admit and graduate the best and brightest among us.
Students exist to fulfill quotas and keep the gravy train of public
funding and backing going for our bloated and oppressively expensive
system of higher education (of rapidly declining tangible utility).
And it’s hardly likely to bring any real diversity of backgrounds to
our universities.
Does anyone doubt that students coming from super zips, the wealthiest
parts of America, won’t still be able to game the system and get access
to elite schools?
Finding ways to demonstrate levels of “oppression” will simply become
another tool in the arsenal of those in the ruthless rat race to the
top, while burying the qualities of what really makes one elite.
Perhaps there’s a reason why our education system struggles to produce
individuals like Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, men who
received little or no formal education at all.
Furthermore, the adversity score reinforces the attitude that
victimhood is more important than merit or accomplishments, a poisonous
characteristic that is now escaping our college campuses and entering
the mainstream.
Higher ed, as a whole, deserves a rethink in this country.
As my wife, Inez Stepman, wrote for The Federalist:
Universities appeal to the public purse on the basis that they form
better workers and citizens, and take the best from all walks of life
on a meritocratic basis for the study of higher things. The reality
they offer is a laughable shadow of that promise…
The adversity score just adds another toxic element to a system that
makes a mockery out of the idea of meritocracy, and reinforces the
concepts of collective identity over individual achievement.
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