SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

My claim is that the latter is a skill that nobody is born with. Autistic savants aren't some type of magic creature that know things just by virtue of being savants. They still have to go through the process of skill acquisition. Now that process may be accelerated compared to me or you, but I disagree with your claim of proficiency with zero effort, especially with skills that have shown to require thousands of hours of deliberate practice to establish proficiency.

I think the key is in your last statement: "or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts". It seems you found yourself in an environment which didn't sufficiently challenge you. This would only argue that you should've been pushed up to more challenging AP/honors classes. This would again have the effect of placing you in a higher standing compared to your peers. So if both you and your peers would be pushed to your true potential, it seems consistent with your statements to say your performance/output would've been superior.

So why should colleges deny you entry because of your ability to be proficient in the system they've set up?

It's not. Some students apply with subpar scores, but often the majority of applicants to these universities apply with perfect or close to perfect grades and SAT scores (think 3.9+, as many AP classes as the school offers, good extracurricular, and probably a >2200 SAT or >33 ACT). It's not just about performance, there's a lot of additional character judgement and luck involved. I went to one an institution widely considered "elite" myself, and I can say firsthand that plenty of students from other universities are just as smart and can work just as effectively under pressure as my classmates. The universities themselves state that many more qualified students apply than are positions. For universities where this is legal, race absolutely comes into play as far as which applicants are selected. There are many universities that can't discriminate based on race due to legal restrictions, and it's widely suspected that this adversity score will be engineering to be strongly correlated with demographics these institutions discriminated in favor of when such discrimination was legal. A backdoor means to what is meant to be prohibited discrimination.

> No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.

Yeah, but how we engineer the metric to measure how much of an "impoverished local yokel" is easily subject to abuse. The fact that these 'Adversity Socres' are kept private is highly suspicious. This comes on the heels of racial discrimination becoming more prohibited by the current government. There's strong reason to suspect that this is about circumventing the principles of equal protection of the law. And this is to mention the possibility of people gaming this system to portray themselves as enduring adversity. Wealthier people can probably better min-max this system to boost their diversity scores. Not to mention, in doing so we may be discouraging things that are demonstrated to be healthy. If this adversity score penalizes two parent households, then we're basically discouraging marriage. Even if its creation is earnest, it could easily have negative effects.