The College Board Didn’t Actually Drop The SAT ‘Adversity Score’

On Tuesday, the College Board announced that it had abandoned plans to add a so-called “adversity score” to the SAT. David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, insists he “listened to thoughtful criticism” of the proposal, which presumed to measure student hardship by tabulating socioeconomic data such as average family income, crime rates, and educational attainment in applicants’ neighborhoods. But on closer examination, the College Board seems to have preserved the misbegotten adversity score under a different name.

While the original proposal would have combined socioeconomic statistics from a student’s neighborhood into a single score, the renamed program “Landscape” divides the data into six measurements, as though the problem with the plan were its imprecision rather than its premise. But whether the College Board tries to calculate test-takers’ adversity in one measure or one hundred, the fact remains: you can’t quantify suffering.