Killing Education: SATs to Add ‘Adversity Score’ to Address 'Wealth Disparity' in Results

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PJ Media

Today, it was reported that the SATs are adding an “adversity score” to help colleges and university account for the various educational and socioeconomic factors that may negatively impact students’ scores. “Colleges have long been concerned with scoring patterns on the SAT that seem unfavorable to certain racial and economic groups,” explained the New York Times. “Higher scores have been found to correlate with the student coming from a higher-income family, having better-educated parents, and being white or Asian rather than black or Hispanic.”

 

The adversity score would be a number between 1 and 100, with an average student receiving a 50. It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.

 

Admissions officers have struggled for years to find ways of gauging the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores.

“We’ve got to admit the truth, that wealth inequality has progressed to such a degree that it isn’t fair to look at test scores alone,” Mr. Coleman recently told The Associated Press. “You must look at them in context of the adversity students face.”