The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT, after facing criticism from educators and parents.
Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-board-drops-plans-for-sat-student-adversity-scores-11566928181
Good call.
A rose by any other name? My complaint would be the same, that averages don’t apply to most individuals.
The colleges buying the Landscape scores will do whatever they want with them, although it would be interesting to see what the guidelines are and why guidelines are necessary.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-27/college-board-sat-adversity-score This article on the topic mentions Yale increasing its Pell grant recipients using the former Environmental aka Adversity score. Why not simply unblind need to find the Pell recipients? That would be more accurate. (Pell numbers now play a larger role in US News rankings than in the past.)
My read is that this just eliminates the attempt to boil all of the raw data down to a single number. Which loses much of the context.
As the quote from Yale says, this really doesn’t do anything but collect information that most colleges already used and puts it in a standardized presentation format. Each school probably already had a similar tool - now every school doesn’t need their own way of doing it.
If I read it right, the info will now be available to students/parents, so at least there’s more transparency. (Though most parents and students probably know the demographics of where they live/go to school)
"The College Board is dropping a controversial plan to send colleges a single numeric rating of the adversity students faced in their communities as they took an SAT admission test, opting instead to provide separate measures to describe their high schools and neighborhoods.
Last spring, the revealing of plans to develop an “overall disadvantage level” for each SAT taker, on a scale of 1 to 100, prompted an uproar. Many dubbed it an “adversity score.” Critics said it would be vulnerable to manipulation and could unfairly taint how an actual SAT score is perceived. The test itself gauges math and evidence-based reading and writing, with a widely recognized maximum score of 1600. That scoring scale remains the same." …
The colleges don’t need that “Landscape” score/information. All they have to do is look at greatschools.org, and they can see racial composition, standardized test scores, free lunch recipients, and far, far more information for free about the specific high school and neighborhood for each student. Of course, if the student is at an elite prep school, but comes from a very poor home, the kid is probably going to write about that in his essay, anyway. The College Board is just desperately scrambling to stay relevant in some way, what with more and more schools making standardized test scores optional.
From the article:
“Colleges do not use Landscape to decide who gets in and who doesn’t,” the College Board said. “It simply helps admissions officers give more students from more places a fair look.”
These two statements sound somewhat contradictory to me. If Landscape isn’t used for admissions decisions (“to decide who gets in and who doesn’t”), then what are admissions officers using them for? (Giving more students a “fair look” in part of making admissions decisions.)
Our kids’ school has an amazing outreach program to bring in students from very different socio-economic households into the school that serves predominately upper-middle/wealthy families. The proposed College Board “adversity stat” would not work for these kids as their high school would not get an “adversity” statistic assigned - yet these kids come from very poor families.