I don't get the point of this. The SAT is never used by colleges outside of the context of the applicant's background. I have full faith that there's nothing College Board can add to knowledge of an applicant that admissions committees don't already factor in.
SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
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Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#12So I think that it is OK to be taking these factors into account at the college admissions level, but I am not sure if the "neutral test administration organization" is the correct place for this to be at.
This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree.
Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#13What does this do that knowing where the student went to school and how much their parents make (both things that colleges know) doesn't? It seems like yet another opaque metric to be gamed by the people with the resources to spend optimizing for those sort of things.
Yeah. I'm very much in favor of affirmative action and similar measures, but this really seems like the wrong place for it.
This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#14This seems like a potentially good first step in trying to counter wealthy people's gaming of the system with SAT "prep" and the like.
studying is gaming the system?
no, but if you come from a wealthy family that can afford private tutoring, you're at an obvious advantage to your competition
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#15I wonder how much of the correlation between income and SAT scores is due to wealthier people's children just being more intelligent, rather than due to having access to better education.
They do control for that when they study the correlation between the two, so none.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#16This seems fine if you wanted to use the SAT to measure an outcome for a given level of inputs. If all you actually care about is the actual outcome though, then this doesn't actually help.
I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved.
I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#17Soon we will have SAT advisers suggesting how to game the "adversity score" as well. - Get a summer job "because your family needed money" - Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions" - Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x" - CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family" etc. etc.
Oh god. The original idea sounds good on paper, but, oh god.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#18This seems likely to end up being ugly. For example wealthy people could buy or rent addresses in "adverse" neighborhoods, or charter schools might locate offices there, in order to attempt to improve scores on this metric. At the same time this won't be able to identify many adverse life circumstances like abusive parents, cancer, etc.
What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#19Presumably the SAT is meant to indicate a student's likelihood for success in a university setting; surely bumping up the scores of students based on how likely they are to be unprepared is counterproductive? This seems like it's going to set underprivileged students up for failure and deprive well-prepared students of an opportunity, no?
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#20Colleges can already access this information in other ways. This is just a proprietary weighing of these things into one number. Given the information the SAT has access to, the number seems likely to be based around the student's address and school, rather than unique challenges to that student, like how present parents are in the student's life and if they have to care for younger siblings or need a part time job to help out. I don't remember having to give the SAT any sort of income or family data, but that sort of thing would be equally, if not more, relevant to the discussion of experienced adversity.