College Board, the university entrance-exam company that produces the SAT, has walked back its plan to assign a numeric “adversity score” to students’ college-application profiles, according to CBS News.
The plan was designed to give college admissions officers an opportunity to “view a student’s academic accomplishment in the context of where they live and learn,” said a College Board spokesperson back in May, as reported by InsideHigherEd.
Factors that would have boosted a student’s adversity score included an unrigorous curriculum, local property values, percentage of students receiving discounted lunches, and the education level of the students’ parents, reports InsideHigherEd.
But many people at the time criticized the College Board for a variety of reasons, including lowering standards and providing opportunities to game the system. Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, wrote an op-ed in May at City Journal criticizing the college board’s decision, calling it “the latest response on the part of mainstream institutions to the seeming intractability of the racial academic achievement gap.”
“Colleges pay lip service to socioeconomic diversity, but that concept is inevitably a surrogate for race. Colleges have repeatedly rejected admissions schemes that purport to substitute socioeconomic preferences for racial preferences, on the ground that those socioeconomic schemes do not yield enough ‘underrepresented minorities,'” Mac Donald continued.
Jason Richwine, a contributor at National Review, wrote that colleges should just say that “diversity is so important to our schools and to broader society that lowering standards is a worthy price to pay.”
Derek Newton, an education writer at Forbes, called the adversity score “worse than no score at all” because it provided a path for well-off families to game the college admissions system. “It’s only a matter of time before highly-resourced, expensive, elite prep schools establish satellites with official addresses in communities with high adversity scores,” wrote Newton.
According to CBS News, the College Board will replace the adversity score with the “Landscape Program,” which provides colleges with data showing the type of schools and neighborhoods applicants come from.
David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, says “we made changes because we heard and thought we could do better,” reports CBS News.
“There is no longer a single number that tries to sum up your neighborhood and school. Today, we’ll share with everyone exactly how we calculate it, and within a year, every student and family, they’ll be able to see the information for their neighborhood and school,” says Coleman.