The College Board, which administers the SAT tests, will be adding what it calls ‘adversity scores’ to the test scores of disadvantaged students wanting to go to college. The official educatorese name of this gift is: Environmental Context Dashboard.
Extra points will be added based on the crime and poverty rates of a student’s neighborhood, whether the student has a single parent, their parents’ income level, the availability of Advanced Placement (AP) classes at their schools, and the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.
Points are not added for the race of the student, but it is obvious that the adversity scores are designed to get more black and Latino students enrolled in the nation’s better colleges.
The adversity score will fall on a scale between 1 and 100, with an average score of 50 — anything above 50 would show hardship.
Many colleges and universities have been embroiled in lawsuits challenging their affirmative action practices. The Environmental Context Dashboard must be the College Board’s way of assuring that those affirmative action practices continue.
Since there are only so many enrollment openings at the nation’s elite colleges, the new SAT scoring system will keep a goodly number of white students out who are more educationally qualified than the disadvantaged students.
Colleges may accept or choose not to accept the added score. Only the colleges to which a student applies will know that the adversity scores were added. The students will not know.
The College Board has already made a test run of the adversity score program at 50 colleges. The program will be officially expanded to an additional 150 schools by the end of this year with more schools to be added in 2020.
David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, defended the program by saying, “There is talent and potential waiting to be discovered in every community – the children of poor rural families, kids navigating the challenges of life in the inner city, and military dependents who face the daily difficulties of low income and frequent deployments as part of their family’s service to our country. No single test score should ever be examined without paying attention to this critical context.”
Coleman obviously threw in the kids of military families in a thinly disguised attempt to gain wide acceptance of the new SAT program.
I was always under the impression that the SATs were supposed to weed out students who would probably flunk out of school the first semester. But that is no longer politically correct.
The educated idiots on the College Board apparently do not see the similarity between the Environmental Context Dashboard and the recent college admission cheating scandals. In this case, the adversity scores take the place of bribes paid by wealthy parents to get their kids into college.
Whatever happened to the concept that one of the purposes of community colleges was to prepare educationally disadvantaged students for a successful last two years at a four-year college? Now elite schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech and Stanford may have to start offering remedial English and remedial math courses to some incoming students. And some white students who would otherwise be accepted by Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech and Stanford may now have to attend a community college instead.
From now on we should say students will be taking the SAD test instead of the SAT.
More SJW’ing. Isn’t the essay the place to give your ‘poor pitiful me, I grew up raised by wolves story?’
If colleges want to look at the whole kid, not just test scores, OK, but the test score ought to be the test score, whether a kid takes the test in River Oaks or Sunnyside.
Why don’t they just dispense with the subtlety and cut to the chase? Do you affirm and attest that you are a committed diehard liberal? Congrats, you’re in!
If you’re Christian, straight, white, and male, screw you, kid.
I must be defective somehow. I watch THE VOICE with my GF and I drive her nuts because I am totally uninterested in the back stories and BS. I don’t CARE if their parents kicked them out because they are gay. I don’t care if they came from a broken home or a parent was gone on deployment forever. I don’t care if a dog bit their ear off and their peers laughed at them. I don’t give a shit. I watch the program FOR THE SINGING. Maybe that makes me shallow.
Same thing here. College entrance exams should be there to determine whether or not a person is academically prepared to do college level work. Many aren’t. In my home state California most aren’t. Over 50% of those entering into community college or even state college have to take either bonehead English, bonehead math or both. It is unfortunate if you grew up in a shit neighborhood or went to a shit school. It is unfortunate if you came up “in the system” or had a dysfunctional family. It truly is. Does that mean you should get a pass on being able to fucking read and write? I think not. However, like I said, maybe I am defective. Missing a “oh, poor baby” gene or something.
Just a general question to throw out there. How would you like it if the doctor removing your hot appendix or giving you a valve job got both into med school and out of med school based on how shitty a life he/she had and not his/her knowledge or tech. skill? Just asking.