The College Board, which administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), recently released an addition to its standardized scoring: The “Environmental Context Dashboard,” containing, as the public is calling it, the “adversity score.”
According to the College Board, the Environmental Context Dashboard is “a new admissions tool that allows colleges to incorporate context into their admissions process in a data-driven, consistent way.”
The score generalizes “adversity,” which acknowledges student “difficulties or misfortune,” on a 1-100 scale. A score above 50 indicates adversity, while below 50 indicates privilege. For example, a student who attends a predominantly white, suburban high school is likely to receive a very low score, regardless of that individual student’s experiences and circumstances.
Few would disagree that the college application and admission process is broken, leaving many students at a disadvantage due to a number of factors that cannot be controlled.
However, it’s interesting that the College Board sees making the process more “data-driven” as a step in the right direction. The addition seems to emphasize further the fact that students are seen as simply data points to the makers of the SAT. One’s hardships should not be measured on a scale.
The College Board says that the adversity score will not affect the SAT score and that it only provides additional information about a student to colleges.
The adversity score will take into account students’ neighborhood and high school, including typical family income, family structure, level of education, housing stability and crime.
It also includes the average number of AP exams taken, as well as average scores, at a student’s school; percentage of students who meet federal eligibility criteria for free and reduced-price lunch; senior class size and other demographic data.
So, the score gives information about the students’ general environment rather than information about the students themselves. Much of the information is already available to admissions counselors in the high school profile that is provided with each application. What it might not show is the difference in background and family resources within a given zip code. For example, within Chapel Hill, as in many towns, new developments house affluent families around the corner from older neighborhoods made up of families of modest means.
In some cases, the adversity score could be beneficial, but for the most part it fails to address the underlying problem: standardized testing isn’t designed to reflect individual students’ realities or aptitude. No amount of generalized data can help to tell a person’s unique story–past, present or future.
