College Board's new SAT "Adversity Scores" will impact college admissions

[Pea-n-Me]

http://time.com/5590396/sat-adversity-score/

"SAT scores will soon be measured by more than just a teenager’s math and verbal skills — the College Board is rolling out a new “adversity score” program that is intended to give universities a chance to gain a fuller picture of the applicant’s background.

But as several elite universities are already facing lawsuits over affirmative action admissions practices, some wonder how the new rule will be received by more affluent families who do not benefit from this new scoring.

The score, officially called the Environmental Context Dashboard, is calculated with 15 factors that address a student’s home life, community and school system. According to the College Board, it takes into account the student’s local crime rate, poverty rate, whether the student has a single parent, median income, the availability of Advanced Placement (AP) classes and more.

Together, they add up to an overall disadvantage level, scored out of 100, that only universities will be able to view in a special tool that supplements the exam.

Students themselves will not be able to view their own adversity scores, so they will not know how much the score influenced their college admissions decisions.

Race is not a component of the adversity score, which Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, told the Yale Daily News last September is something he found to be helpful. He said the tool “helped us identify kids who have overcome significant contextual adversity in a very race-neutral way and a very data-driven way.”

Like? Don't like? Neutral?

Problems you can see?

Advantages seem obvious, but commentary and practical experiences would be interesting to hear.

 

[Pea-n-Me]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ersity-scores-effort-level-playing-field.html

"The new scoring system has already been tested in 50 different colleges, with plans to extend to 150 universities this fall, followed by a broader expansion in 2020.

Yale University is among the schools that has started implementing the adversity score measure.


The school has already made an effort in recent years to increase the number of low-income and minority students it accepts, nearly doubling the number of those students to reach 20 percent of admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, told The Journal.

'This (adversity score) is literally affecting every application we look at,' he said. 'It has been a part of the success story to help diversify our freshman class.'

John Barnhill, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Florida State University, told The Journal that wealthier parents who have kids attending high-performing high schools will be frustrated by the change.

'If I am going to make room for more of the (poor and minority) students we want to admit and I have a finite number of spaces, then someone has to suffer and that will be privileged kids on the bubble,' he said.

However, some believe the new effort is a step in the right direction, including Sandra Timmons, president of the New York City-based nonprofit A Better Chance, which promotes diversity and works to develop leaders within minority communities.

'We all know and acknowledge that the playing field is not level,' she told DailyMail.com. 'This new score appears to combine a number of mostly objective, quantifiable factors that can reflect this disparity without considering race.'

'This appears to be a step in the right direction to ensure that all hard-working students have a fair look and a better chance for success in the college admissions process,' she added."

 

[Magical2017]

I read that this will most likely impact poor, Caucasian children in rural aeras the most and wonder how this will be received by different groups.

 

[pixiedustedme]

I like this. It should help colleges diversify their campuses a bit, and disadvantaged youth to get more opportunities.

 

[Skippy918]

It sounds like a good idea.

 

[amberpi]

I always wondered if I could be a minority because I was raised in Appalachia?

 

[low-key]

let the cream rise to the top

 

[Pea-n-Me]

And now we are starting to hear some thoughts against...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...w-adversity-score-is-a-bad-idea/#4fe82e4a6c0e

"What should we make of the new SAT adversity score? Will it increase fairness in college admissions? Will it help increase the diversity of enrollments? Or will it backfire, adding to Americans’ skepticism about the fairness of college admissions? Will it be viewed as an algorithm for political correctness, or worse, a form of handicapping that brings students with high scores more harm than good in the long run?

David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, justified the adversity score to the Journal this way: “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”

He’s right, but that doesn’t mean that adversity scores will solve the problem. Here are four reasons why we should be skeptical.

1. The College Board has not revealed the factors or their weights in calculating adversity scores beyond claiming that some of the data are from public sources and some are proprietary. This is unacceptable. If it refuses to disclose how adversity scores are calculated, the College Board should not expect the public to accept them.
2. At a time when standardized testing is under increased scrutiny and is even being discontinued or minimized as an admission tool by hundreds of colleges, one must wonder whether adversity scores are primarily an attempt to protect the SAT’s market or to promote social mobility. Colleges that are genuinely concerned about the bias built into the tests or the cheating associated with the SAT or the ACT, have a simpler choice: don’t require students to take them.
3. Measuring neighborhood adversity is not the same as assessing an individual student’s resilience or grit. Although we can’t know for sure, it’s doubtful that adversity scores measure the influence of parents, siblings, and mentors on a student. There’s not a straight line from socioeconomic background to SAT performance; assigning an adversity number suggests an influence that may not be operating for individual students, and it probably overlooks influences that are.
4. The fact that the College Board does not want students to know their adversity scores reflects their own discomfort with the concept. And for good reason. It’s a potential source of self-handicapping and self-fulfilling prophecy.

We need fair, transparent, college processes that result in the admissions of diverse, capable students prepared to study hard and finish college. But do we really need adversity scores to do so? No."

 

[pezgirlroy]

I always wondered if I could be a minority because I was raised in Appalachia?

I grew up on the outskirts of Appalachia and I actually did have people tell me 24 years ago I should mention that. I didn't. Being from Ohio was minority enough for a small liberal arts school in Maine.

 

[soccerdad72]

I suspect that those schools who truly were trying to factor in demographics and background into their admissions process were probably already using some adversity weighting of their own, so this likely won't change admissions decisions much.

 

[Kellydelly]

Your school transcripts and GPA still count for so much I can't imagine the SAT test changing can impact a college's decision to admit you that much.

 

[PaulaSB12]

I just looked up 13% of Americans are black or African American, 16% are Hispanic and 5% are Asian yet Asians are achieving higher sat score so that means to make it “fairer” the smallest minority is go8ng to be penalised, how is that s good thing. Reducing kids to what their race or financial status is saying because you belong to group x or why you can’t get anywhere without our help this is more ridiculous identity politics.

 

[tcufrog]

What about other forms of adversity not reflected by those numbers? I know a mom whose husband left her suddenly with 4 kids and wouldn’t help at all afterwards. She worked two jobs to pay the bills. That’s adversity.

 

[a1tinkfans]

It’s another attempt at justifying
Admittance by basing it on a backdoor, unseen, unscrutinized, set of “excuses”.
Let’s face it.. it is truly not a change at all, they admit who they want and get to further justify it by ticking off more boxes.
So...Accept lower expectations? Lower standards?
If a student cannot perform the work.. how will admitting them... cause them to succeed in that university or elsewhere?That’s not the cream rising. It’s not leveling the playing field.

If they wanted too, they could eliminate the SAT and ACT altogether. They could remove Combining multiple re-take testing submissions.
Imho, Not everyone belongs in college. Take the stigma away from Technical schools, vocation programs. Take pride in those Areas. Encourage them!
I personally think this “ change” is...
Worthless too many but “justifying” for many higher institutions.

 

[ronandannette]

It’s another attempt at justifying
Admittance by basing it on a backdoor, unseen, unscrutinized, set of “excuses”.
Let’s face it.. it is truly not a change at all, they admit who they want and get to further justify it by ticking off more boxes.
So...Accept lower expectations? Lower standards?
If a student cannot perform the work.. how will admitting them... cause them to succeed in that university or elsewhere?That’s not the cream rising. It’s not leveling the playing field.

If they wanted too, they could eliminate the SAT and ACT altogether. They could remove Combining multiple re-take testing submissions.
Imho, Not everyone belongs in college. Take the stigma away from Technical schools, vocation programs. Take pride in those Areas. Encourage them!
I personally think this “ change” is...
Worthless too many but “justifying” for many higher institutions.

I tend to agree with your thoughts here. While various disadvantages certainly explain the performance of a wide swath of the population, it does not negate the fact that these students are not academically prepared for higher learning. What programs will they be able to successfully complete without remedial attention?

And the increasingly-more-pervasive idea that every single person needs a degree, when pursuing one often comes with crushing debt, is troublesome. Facilitating more marginal students to obtain basically worthless liberal arts degrees - why?

 

[Skippy918]

The stigma definitely needs to be removed from trade and vocational programs. These are great options for students. The military is also an option for some kids as well.

I tend to agree with your thoughts here. While various disadvantages certainly explain the performance of a wide swath of the population, it does not negate the fact that these students are not academically prepared for higher learning. What programs will they be able to successfully complete without remedial attention?

And the increasingly-more-pervasive idea that every single person needs a degree, when pursuing one often comes with crushing debt, is troublesome. Facilitating more marginal students to obtain basically worthless liberal arts degrees - why?

The disadvantage stems from poorly funded schools and schools mainly relying on property tax to fund them.
We can look at regular standardized test scores and see that kids that go to a school with more economically disadvantaged students are performing poorer on these tests. I’ve seen the correlation in my own district.

 

[ronandannette]

The stigma definitely needs to be removed from trade and vocational programs. These are great options for students. The military is also an option for some kids as well.




The disadvantage stems from poorly funded schools and schools mainly relying on property tax to fund them.
We can look at regular standardized test scores and see that kids that go to a school with more economically disadvantaged students are performing poorer on these tests. I’ve seen the correlation in my own district.

I understand but does that imply it's only the standardized testing, and how it measures competency that's the problem? Is it not more likely that those students are also under-educated and thus ill-prepared to be successful in college even if their entrance is facilitated?

 

[Skippy918]

I understand but does that imply it's only the standardized testing, and how it measures competency that's the problem? Is it not more likely that those students are also under-educated and thus ill-prepared to be successful in college even if their entrance is facilitated?

I don’t know. This article was a helpful read.
https://ed100.org/lessons/poverty
https://www.educationnext.org/americas-mediocre-test-scores-education-poverty-crisis/

Some kids are able to overcome their upbringing and succeed in college. A had a couple of friends in college who grew up very poor, one was also first generation and they worked their butts off, graduated and are now successful with good paying jobs in the engineering field.

 

[kerry1379]

I am very uncomfortable with the idea of comparing and ranking adversity. Some adversity is obvious, some is not-and it is not always linked to your neighborhood stats or your wealth. Often times we have no idea what trials people are facing because they keep them private. To say "your adversity counts while yours doesn't" seems wrong on many, many levels.

 

[Colleen27]

I like the idea. I think there are a lot of kids from disadvantaged areas that are prepared for higher education, but who don't look as good on paper due to a lack of AP classes (our public high school doesn't offer them) and weighted GPAs, the money to cultivate a stellar extracurricular resume, etc., but unless they're applying only to local colleges, it is unlikely that the admissions officer reviewing their applications has any idea what kind of environment they come from. Yes, there is the school profile counselors are suppose to submit along with the transcript, but with the number of applications schools are receiving hitting all-time highs year after year, that's something we've been told a lot of schools don't really have time to spend much time on. Reducing those same factors to a score that is attached to the student's SAT score increases the chances that admission officers will be able to take it into account.