SAT to give students "adversity score" in bid to level playing field - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-board-will-use-sat-exam-to-give-students-adversity-score-in-bid-to-level-playing-field/ A new "adversity score" assigned by the College Board on the SAT exam will reportedly reflect students' family income, environment and educational differences in an effort to level the playing field in the highly competitive college admissions process. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that 50 schools used the new indicator as part of a beta test last year and the College Board plans to bring more than 150 schools into the fold this fall. This new "adversity score" number is calculated by assessing 15 factors that can better help admissions officers determine an individual student's social and economic background, the Journal reported. These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment. Each of the three categories has five sub-indicators that are indexed in calculating each student's adversity score. Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities. Together these factors will calculate an individual's adversity score on a scale of one to 100. According to the Journal, a score of 50 is considered "average." Anything above 50 proves "hardship" while anything below 50 is considered "privilege."

I'm fortunate enough to be in a really nice college at the moment and I know how lucky I am, I have a few friends who don't seem to recognize it and it's frustrating. There are those who can afford ACT/SAT prep when they're in high school or even earlier and they have a huge leg up to those who just have to go in blind or live in an area where their school system can't prepare them for it. It's a case where low income can somewhow equate to stupid or lazy when they don't even realize what they've been afforded in terms of preparation for these tests. I don't know how well the folks behind the SAT have accounted for these changes but hopefully we see that this isn't a bandaid solution they've hastily applied.

I really had to laugh when I received the minimum score on the written portion of the test (because I'm dyslexic and can't fucking write by hand), but I was in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension in the United States.

Any time sat's are brought up everyone collectively admits they're made up bullshit and do absolutely nothing. Even the bean counters who'd seemingly directly benefit from Sam's say they're not indicative of a students performance.

I would say that the SATs test how good you are at multiple choice tests more than they do anything that they are actually supposed to be about. That being said, I can't personally think of a better way to get an approximation of a student's ability to learn/retain information. I think the problem with SATs stems from larger problems elsewhere. Too many jobs are requiring college degrees for even entry level positions. As a result, lots of students who otherwise would have no interest in continued education force themselves to go to college for a chance at a reasonable paycheck. This finally ends up with students pushing themselves extremely hard to do well on the SATs and then being generally unprepared for college itself. I want to say something like "SATs are just a way to gauge your ability to learn. Whatever score you get on them will just be a guide to what colleges you are prepared to enter and succeed in" but it is nowhere near that simple. That being said, I don't really like the idea of adversity scores. Seems like bandaging the wound without actually treating it.

Seems like everyone knee-jerked over affirmative action, but all the criteria they list seem pretty reasonable?

academic metrics are so out of control, people will take this and go nuts over it but today to land a job in engineering you need at least 2 co-ops, and to land a job as a co-op you need at least a 3.0 gpa just to hand in your resume, so for students not from an engineering family that may struggle with the curriculum and not have connections in engineering, they're shut out of the field. all of this just to land that 1st job because by the 2nd job gpa is meaningless.

Why not just get rid of SATs all together. Surely a college is picking students based on their grades in school anyways.

the test still has the problem of confirming whether or not you're prepared to take the SAT/standardized tests as opposed to testing your academic skills and aptitude. I have friends who go into ACT/SAT prep classes when they're in middle school and spend a large chunk of high school chasing the perfect score in further ACT/SAT prep courses with tutors who specialize in it. compare that to someone from a lower income background that can't afford classes and tutors, giving them an adversity score comes across as an excuse to continue operating as they were without addressing the core problems of the test.

has pushing "everybody should go to college" actually had a positive benefit for anyone except student loan providers, colleges, and big businesses because all it seems to have done is put an entire generation under crushing debt and made it a thousand times more difficult for anyone to get a job that 30 years ago wouldn't have required anything more than a high school degree

Ehh kinda? If your going for a liberal arts degree yeah your boned at worst and free labor for the professors at best but in the case of the engineering side of academia colleges cost about the same as putting down payments on whatever engineering trade you want to learn. A good example is Auto mills, electrician-ing and CNC machines but this also comes with the cost of having to maintain these machines so to be on the safe side I'd go to college to learn how they operate.

Meh, it would be good if admissions department couldn't see things like race, gender, names, etc. If there was an anonymity filter that masks your personal info with a number or code, and only after acceptance do they get to see your info, then this would be a wonderful thing. But outside of that, the institutionalized racism/sexism in college admission will STILL take precedence over this.

It's difficult because it can go both ways. Some people get average marks in classes involving homework, but can knock the SATs out of the park.

I'm not saying there's no benefit to going to college, I'm decrying the attitude that you have to go to college. there's plenty of white collar jobs where you can (and do) learn everything you need to know on the job so long as you have moderate math skills, jobs where employers can require degrees for a position because there's such a glut of people with them that they could throw away every app without and never notice, despite the job not really requiring them at all. a lot of times, employers just don't want to spend money on actually training their employees.

is that not standard practice over in the US? It's pretty common here for both academic admissions and job applications.

I'm 100% convinced it was a massive scam. I remember in early grades we would have days where people would come talk to us and try to get every single student to want to go to college. In 3rd grade.

Sort of related; Interesting, I've had to deal with this abortion a few times. When I was in high school I knew that I was going to enlist in the Marine Corps and subsequently gave no fucks ultimately graduating with a B average. I went on to serve four years in the Marine Corps infantry and upon completion of my service I started my further education at a community college using my G.I. Bill. The school I attended being the only one that had accepted me. I graduated with a 3.5 overall GPA and yet when I was applying to universities they still wanted my high school GPA and SAT scores. As I had said about not caring when I was in high school, I had never taken an SAT because I had not intended on furthering my education. Fortunately I was accepted to my first choice of an institution of higher education yet I still wonder if maybe they place too much emphasis on these ineffective standardized tests. It's almost a if the person you were in high school isn't who you will be in the future, imagine that.

Nope. I remember an article about how asians hat to score higher on the SATs and shit like that (iirc) to get into certain colleges because they are Asian.

The advantages of a population pursuing higher education are pretty obvious, especially in this globalized, hyper-competitive economy. I also don't think the discussion is nearly as one sided as you make it out to be. There is a huge push to get people to go into trades or other alternatives to higher education, particularly from conservatives in the US. Don't forget about that infamous study where job applications that had traditionally "white" names got twice as many call-backs as traditionally black or ethnic names.

In Ontario we don't even have standardized university tests for admission. Most universities go purely off your highschool averages. The only test I had to take to my uni was an English proficiency test, and that was after I had already been accepted.

Some jobs definitely benefit from college, but a majority don't, yet since high school I was force fed that college was the ONLY way to go if I wanted to spend my life somewhere else besides the fast food industry. I graduated less than a year ago, and the only reason I kept with it that long is because I was told that "u did it" paper you get at the end means life or death. The last year and a half of my schooling I had no drive to stay in besides "well I made it this far I guess." In reality, I don't feel like I learned anything, as most of what I put in to my jobs today came from other jobs I held alongside schooling.

To further (anecdotally) show how dumb SATs are in determining college readiness, my grades in high school were awful. Not because I was dumb or anything, but because I'd either forget to do the homework, or if I did do it, I'd forget to turn it in. But even then, whoever's looking at GPAs for anything meaningful wouldn't care, they'd just assume you were dumber than rocks/lazy. However, I still got $10K+ in scholarships just because my SAT scores were so high.

It's never this simple. I can't find it at the moment but I read an article about a study a couple years back on how socioeconomic class and race indicators that are on a surface level neutral would have major effects on your success on applications. For example, if you did horseback riding (an expensive and upper class sport that is also majority white) you had better chances than if you had been on the basketball team (do i need to even go into this)? So even if race isn't seen (which is the case if you chose not to share your race on your application), it's not as if your grades exist in a vacuum. Things like the sports you played, the school you attended, and even the scholarships you have access to can expose you to bias.

Standardized tests are a scam intrinsically. Yes, you get one free test, but you have to pay more for each other one (at least when I was still in high school, and there was no financial waiver). People well-off had the opportunity to score much better by just brute-forcing it essentially, and I knew people who did exactly that. The College Board has a monopoly on the educational industry, and must be broken up. But, our legislators are fucking brain-dead, so who cares about our children's futures?