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

[Hikergirl]

Before you know it students won't even have to take the tests, they'll just be asked to fill out a profile and be scored based on that.

 

[pxidst119]

Or a provide saliva sample...

 

[Tinks]

This is the information I have regarding the new SAT adversity score:


Coleman was the architect of Common Core. He believes everyone should go to college, regardless of academic abilities.

He was then hired by the SAT (also known as the College Board) to re-design the SAT to align with Common Core. The new SAT - which is nothing like the old SAT - debuted in March of 2016.

In short, the SAT was made easier to complete so EVERYONE (in theory) can do well.

However, most colleges have not been fooled and this is why more academic scholarships are connected to the ACT than the SAT.

In the past, Coleman has discussed making the SAT test "adjust" based on ethnicity, social economic status, etc. This new "adversity score" is one step toward Coleman's SAT dream.

 

[china mom]

When I was 20, I joined the police department and stayed with that career for 26 years. I purchased a modest house and drove older cars. On my days off, I worked security jobs. Sometimes, after two days of twelve hour shifts, I would hire myself out for another two days of twelve hours each. The economic advantages I had came from hard work and extra hours.

I got married and stayed married to the same man.

We had a child and then adopted a child. We did not take vacations every year. We moved away from our economically and racially diverse area to a rural setting. There is still economic diversity here but there is much more wealth than where we used to live. We have an extremely low crime rate, especially when compared to our former neighborhood.

I spent my life teaching my children that if they work hard, they can have things. One of the things I thought they would be able to have is a college education.

But thanks to all of our hard work, our children will have a harder time getting into their choice of college. They will lose diversity points for not being raised by a single mother, for living in an economically advantaged area, for not being on the free lunch program etc.

And that is just the challenge faced by my son. My poor daughter is really screwed. Since Asians are so over represented in college, many schools have had an Asian quote of years. So, even though she is as average as any average white kid, she has to test better than the top 10% of all Asians. That isn't happening.

I'm feeling discouraged.

 

[PaulaSB12]

The fact that the smallest minority is being punished for hard work with Asian quota is wrong. Putting people down for their racial make-up and living area and financial status is also wrong. What you are telling people is you are that group member, poor, different ethnicity whatever and that is all you can be unless we the kind let you do it. Does it say you can't do anything how does that help? Why should Asians be stopped from going to college to make way for a larger group? We are not addressing one point though why is it that African Americans are dropping out of college at a higher rate than everyone else?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news...on-rates-vary-race-and-ethnicity-report-finds

 

[Colleen27]

The question is, what is the fairest way to do things? Diversity goals aren't about putting some people down for their race or income or place of residence. They're about realizing that there are equally bright and capable students who don't have those racial and economic advantages and trying to figure out how to give them a chance. I get the frustration - DD didn't get into her top-choice school, which has aggressive diversity targets but also a strong legacy program, and the fact that so many of the "white" spots are filled by legacies means that she was fighting well above her (blue collar, rural) weight class in trying to get one of those seats.

But at the same time, I don't think demographics should be destiny. I don't think kids from our local public school, which is in such crisis that AP classes are a distant memory and there's talk going on right now about ending ALL athletics, should be excluded from competitive schools because they don't have access to the classes that would let them compete with kids with 4.5+ GPAs and years and years of athletic and extracurricular involvement. But right now, that's what happens because few admissions officers are aware of the economic plight of a particular rural school district in nowhere, Michigan. All they see is a 4.0 in a sea of 4.5+ transcripts, no AP classes when more advantaged students are coming in with a year's worth of credits, minimal extracurriculars in a field of perfectly-crafted resumes. To simply argue that schools should admit the applicants that appear the most qualified by virtue of test scores, transcripts and resumes is to ignore to what extent those things are purchases as much as they are achievements.

 

[DopeyDame]

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.

That makes sense as they wouldn't have received any "bump" in race-based admissions, but will definitely have higher "adversity scores" than suburban white upper middle class kids (as will poor rural and urban students or any color)

 

[DopeyDame]

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?

But that actually hasn't been shown to be true. There have been plenty of studies that show that the correlation to SAT/ACT performance and GPA during college isn't as strong as one would hope, and that minority and poorer students with a lower SAT score go on to perform just as well in college. (ie, rich white student X with one SAT score would be predicted to have the same college GPS as poor minority student Y with an SAT score a few hundred points lower.)

So if you're using college admission as a prize for doing well on the SAT, then it makes sense to just consider the straight scores. But if you are trying to use the SAT to try and predict who would be best in a given college, you have to take into account a more holistic look at the person to more accurately gauge their SAT score and what it will mean for performance in college.

Also, for the most competitive colleges, there are FAR more kids who would be successful there than there are spaces, so accepting kid X instead of kid Y doesn't at all mean that either kid wouldn't have done just fine.

 

[DopeyDame]

This. There are obvious disadvantages, and less obvious ones. Your family might have money and a good zip code, but how do you account for a parent with a mental illness, or gambling addiction, or terminal cancer? Any of those is going to affect a child's approach to life.

At the most competitive colleges, where they take the time to really do holistic admissions, things like that can be addressed in the student's essay or in the guidance counselors recommendation package.

 

[DopeyDame]

People realize that this is just another piece of information that colleges get, right? They'll still get the regular SAT score from the college board *in addition* to this piece of information. For some schools, they'll completely ignore the adversity score. Some schools will use it now because it's a handy way to get a profile of the student's community and schools. Other schools were already figuring out all this info in a different way, so it really won't change anything.

It's not like your snowflake's 1410 will magically appear as a 900 to the college admissions folks.

 

[Lilacs4Me]

When I was 20, I joined the police department and stayed with that career for 26 years. I purchased a modest house and drove older cars. On my days off, I worked security jobs. Sometimes, after two days of twelve hour shifts, I would hire myself out for another two days of twelve hours each. The economic advantages I had came from hard work and extra hours.

I got married and stayed married to the same man.

We had a child and then adopted a child. We did not take vacations every year. We moved away from our economically and racially diverse area to a rural setting. There is still economic diversity here but there is much more wealth than where we used to live. We have an extremely low crime rate, especially when compared to our former neighborhood.

I spent my life teaching my children that if they work hard, they can have things. One of the things I thought they would be able to have is a college education.

But thanks to all of our hard work, our children will have a harder time getting into their choice of college. They will lose diversity points for not being raised by a single mother, for living in an economically advantaged area, for not being on the free lunch program etc.

And that is just the challenge faced by my son. My poor daughter is really screwed. Since Asians are so over represented in college, many schools have had an Asian quote of years. So, even though she is as average as any average white kid, she has to test better than the top 10% of all Asians. That isn't happening.

I'm feeling discouraged.

Yeah, i was kind of thinking the same thing.

We decided to move our family away from the economically depressed mid-west area we grew up in and to a close urban-type suburb of Chicago, where the cost of living is triple. We are the "poor" people in a wealthy area. We stay and struggle because we want our kids to go to our highly ranked school district, which has/is doing an amazing job getting our kids ready for college. We could move less than 5 miles to the east and be the rich people in a socioeconomically "diverse" and disadvantaged zip code with terrible, dangerous gang and drug infested schools, and our kids will *theoretically* get a higher level of consideration/acceptance when applying to college!? What the heck are we doing here, then!

Same song and dance throughout history....the middle-class loses out.

 

[Hikergirl]

People realize that this is just another piece of information that colleges get, right? They'll still get the regular SAT score from the college board *in addition* to this piece of information. For some schools, they'll completely ignore the adversity score. Some schools will use it now because it's a handy way to get a profile of the student's community and schools. Other schools were already figuring out all this info in a different way, so it really won't change anything.

It's not like your snowflake's 1410 will magically appear as a 900 to the college admissions folks.

Then there is no reason to implement this. Except of course if it does in fact change the way that 1410 "scores" overall now.

I have no dog in this fight, my kids didn't bother taking the SAT or ACT because they decided to start at the CC.
But making it more "fair" for someone always makes it less for someone else.
We ignore the real issues because we can't dare talk about them so instead we do these feel good approaches that aren't going to make much of a difference unless there is a change in the value people put on their education.
Of course like the pp above, who did what they had to do in order to ensure a better quality education for their kids, they will now be penalized.

 

[Colleen27]

Then there is no reason to implement this. Except of course if it does in fact change the way that 1410 "scores" overall now.

The reason to change this is because with this information, maybe the 1410 kid with a 4.0, no weighted classes, and only one or two sports/activities on his application because he was too busy working will actually get a second look from some schools, rather than immediately being passed over for the 1400 kid with a 4.5 GPA and a dozen AP classes who is also president of the debate team, captain of two sports and has attended academic camps or worked unpaid internships every summer since middle school. Right now, that first kid often doesn't have a chance unless he's applying to schools close enough to home for the admissions staff to be aware of what the district/community is like, he just looks like he didn't push himself as hard as the kid who went to the school with every AP class imaginable and who had parents footing the bill for his resume-building activities.

I have no dog in this fight, my kids didn't bother taking the SAT or ACT because they decided to start at the CC.
But making it more "fair" for someone always makes it less for someone else.
We ignore the real issues because we can't dare talk about them so instead we do these feel good approaches that aren't going to make much of a difference unless there is a change in the value people put on their education.
Of course like the pp above, who did what they had to do in order to ensure a better quality education for their kids, they will now be penalized.

​

So we should do nothing and simply accept that in an increasingly competitive college admissions environment, being able to afford to live in excellent school systems and pay for sports and music lessons and tutoring and SAT prep are the price of playing the game? That kids whose parents can't or won't do "what they have to do" to ensure a better education are just out of luck?

I'm not sure what "real issues" you think are being ignored here. The fact that school quality depends mostly on how expensive a neighborhood you can afford? The fact that more kids are applying to colleges every year? The fact that as college becomes ever less affordable, getting into those selective schools with generous need-based aid programs is more and more essential for high-performing kids from low-income families? We're not going to solve any of that in our lifetimes, so why not at least give colleges a practical way to pursue greater economic diversity in their admitted student pool if that's something they care to do?

 

[DopeyDame]

Then there is no reason to implement this. Except of course if it does in fact change the way that 1410 "scores" overall now.

I have no dog in this fight, my kids didn't bother taking the SAT or ACT because they decided to start at the CC.
But making it more "fair" for someone always makes it less for someone else.
We ignore the real issues because we can't dare talk about them so instead we do these feel good approaches that aren't going to make much of a difference unless there is a change in the value people put on their education.
Of course like the pp above, who did what they had to do in order to ensure a better quality education for their kids, they will now be penalized.

I was about to write a reply, but then read what @Colleen27 wrote, and she said it perfectly.

 

[maddiel]

But that actually hasn't been shown to be true. There have been plenty of studies that show that the correlation to SAT/ACT performance and GPA during college isn't as strong as one would hope, and that minority and poorer students with a lower SAT score go on to perform just as well in college. (ie, rich white student X with one SAT score would be predicted to have the same college GPS as poor minority student Y with an SAT score a few hundred points lower.)

I'm from Canada and haven't had to deal with SAT/ACT, but as a parent who has guided two children through the process of choosing universities, I find the American process fascinating.

I understand why - with so many more students and high schools and many and more diverse universities - the standardized tests were a reasonable tool for universities to evaluate students in the beginning. But it appears that very few students just go and take the tests. There are the PSATs as early as junior high, and multiple re-writes for higher scores, not to mention both in school and private prep courses and private coaching. Do you think that this trend has lead to test scores being less accurate predictors of post-secondary performance? I can't see how students from wealthier families wouldn't currently have a substantial leg up in achieving higher test scores than their peers who couldn't afford multiple test fees and preparation costs.

M.

 

[FlightlessDuck]

I am not a college admissions professional but I will give my opinion because this is the Internet and I'm a white man:

...

I have no opinion.

 

[DopeyDame]

I'm from Canada and haven't had to deal with SAT/ACT, but as a parent who has guided two children through the process of choosing universities, I find the American process fascinating.

I understand why - with so many more students and high schools and many and more diverse universities - the standardized tests were a reasonable tool for universities to evaluate students in the beginning. But it appears that very few students just go and take the tests. There are the PSATs as early as junior high, and multiple re-writes for higher scores, not to mention both in school and private prep courses and private coaching. Do you think that this trend has lead to test scores being less accurate predictors of post-secondary performance? I can't see how students from wealthier families wouldn't currently have a substantial leg up in achieving higher test scores than their peers who couldn't afford multiple test fees and preparation costs.

M.

Yup, I think that's definitely correct. Old-school SATs (like 80s and early) showed to be pretty well correlated to IQ, which presumably is a useful piece of information for college-level academic work. But since then, the test has changed dramatically and the testing environment has changed dramatically. So it's really not a "standardized" experience.
As a super-irrelevant example, my DH took the SATs once, without any prep at all. His mom was a single mom who hadn't gone to college, and while she took school and his education seriously, she just didn't realize other people were prepping and taking the test a zillion times. He took advanced classes in high school and did well, but didn't focus on the SAT for reasons largely out of his control. I, on the other hand, took it for the first time in 7th grade, had in-school SAT Math and SAT Verbal test prep at my small private school starting in 10th grade, and took the test twice in high school (in addition to the PSAT twice). None of those things were because *I* chose to do them, they were what my parents and my school did for/to me.
I scored about 100 points higher than DH.

But are our scores comparable? Does it mean I'm smarter/more ready for college than DH? Of course not.

 

[iivye]

I'm not sure what "real issues" you think are being ignored here.

One of the real issues is that different cultures put different emphasis on the importance of education. Asians tend to score higher on the SAT because as a culture there is great emphasis on the importance of education which translates to better behavior at school and a greater respect for teachers.

 

[mjkacmom]

I'm from Canada and haven't had to deal with SAT/ACT, but as a parent who has guided two children through the process of choosing universities, I find the American process fascinating.

I understand why - with so many more students and high schools and many and more diverse universities - the standardized tests were a reasonable tool for universities to evaluate students in the beginning. But it appears that very few students just go and take the tests. There are the PSATs as early as junior high, and multiple re-writes for higher scores, not to mention both in school and private prep courses and private coaching. Do you think that this trend has lead to test scores being less accurate predictors of post-secondary performance? I can't see how students from wealthier families wouldn't currently have a substantial leg up in achieving higher test scores than their peers who couldn't afford multiple test fees and preparation costs.

M.

Actually psats are given as early as 8th grade, they take their last psat junior year, and then start on the sat/act later junior year.

 

[maddiel]

Actually psats are given as early as 8th grade, they take their last psat junior year, and then start on the sat/act later junior year.

That's what I was trying to say but maybe I wasn't clear - where I live, high school is grade 10-12 and junior high is grade 7-9. We don't tend to use the Freshman/Sophmore/Junior/Senior categories. (Well, maybe seniors for grade 12s sometimes....)

M.