Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
131–140 of 959 posts
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#132Presumably 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?
"Presumably..."
You might done well to have stopped there.
I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.
You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.
"...surely bumping up the scores..."
You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#133Soon 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.
Most of the 15 factors are reported here, 4 paragraphs down: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-colleg... "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…
Not exactly the same thing, but related --
So the San Francisco school district gives priority to certain neighborhoods roughly based these criteria and gentrification has been a problem. Wealthy folks move into historically poor neighborhoods and benefit from lagging statistics in school choice.
>> Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.
>> This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37 percent white and 21 percent low-income. Districtwide, 15 percent of students are white and 55 percent are low-income.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothetically, what if it was true that wealthy people's exposure to better education over a lifetime, reduced stress distracting them from learning, better and more abundant roll models, etc, meant they would do better on pretty much literally any test you could put in front of them? Most research points to this being true.
Then wealthy people show more "merit" and the test is working as designed. If the test is an accurate predictor of success in college and success thereafter (which is a big if), then that people who do well on it are more deserving of college admissions. The ancillary qualities of that group of people (wealth, race, etc.) are irrelevant.
The SAT is (well, was) supposed to predict academic success at a college/university. The idea being that an institution could admit students who would likely graduate, as opposed to students who did not.
It's heading away from that.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#135> The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
This seems really sketchy.
I mean, I can completely understand why the College Board would want to avoid blowback from students knowing their scores, but their convenience seems like insufficient cause to deny students access to their own information.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a perfect SAT that preparation can't affect; for the purposes of the hypothetical, the test just stares into your soul and measures pure scholastic aptitude. If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime income, (b) people tend to marry people of similar social and economic class, and (c) scholastic aptitude is fairly heritable (through genes, environment, whatever)... ... then you woul…
Because we've done studies to address exactly that question. What we've found: The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents, hence the adversity score to rectify the inequity in life circumstances. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/money-academic-su...
This study has nothing to do with the SAT. Clearly, money is required in order to study full-time in the US, both for tuition and living expenses, so people with more money graduate more often because it's easier to not work during school, and to pay for tuition. But none of that is relevant to the point you replied to, which was that even a perfect test would have results that correlate with wealth
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
because (we're meant to assume at least) that's why they did poorly in the test in the first place?
I don't think the factor is for kids who did poorly. This is a bonus (AFAICT) added on top of a reasonable test result. One that indicates that the student had some hardship that they overcame to get the result. Which should make the result count more as the kid had to go through more to get it done. Who's more impressive on average? Students with a 1200 SAT in an area with low crime and upper middle class income, or…
The article is ambiguous:
>adding an “adversity score” to the test results
Does this mean an additional number is going to be supplied alongside the individual test scores and overall score, or that the overall score will be a sum that includes an adversity score? In other words, is the article using "adding" in the sense of numbers or the sense of sets?
EDIT:
The Journal reported that this new score will appear alongside a student's SAT score and will be featured in a section labeled the "Environmental Context Dashboard."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sexual orientation, yeah they might not be able to get that one. But here's the factors they're using: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1129009648214921216 I do believe with just a few pieces of the information they're taking into consideration (namely, neighborhood, if you have a single parent, and if you're ESL [not sure if they're talking about the child being ESL or the parents]) you could reliably determine if the…
> But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme. That is exactly what I expect to happen - as well as poor kids who happen to belong to racial minorities. The College Board published the criteria they will use to calculate the score. Race is not one of the criteria. But you're saying that race will not only be used, but be the primary criteria. So, let…
Just to nitpick a bit, race is one of the optional criteria. The school decides whether they want the College Board to include it.
"The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-...
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#139Schadenfreude sensation to see USA shooting its feet again and again.
Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Level the playing field" is an over-used and under-defined expression. Do you level the playing field before you start or in the middle of the game? What is the purpose of college admissions -- to award a select few or to match students with colleges where they are most likely to succeed?
The goal of admissions is to accept students who enrich their college in one way or another.
What about the student?