Posted on May 17, 2019 by Scott Johnson
Scoring the adversity score
You may have heard that the College Board has announced the implementation of a proprietary secret sauce affecting college applicants who take the board’s SAT tests. The secret sauce will supply the colleges with an “adversity score†of each applicant for use by the schools in addition to the SAT scores themselves. Is this because the colleges are incapable of figuring it out for themselves, or because the board is tired of defending itself?
Where I can only groan, Heather Mac Donald assesses the “adversity score†to render an adverse judgment:
For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of ‘diversity.’ The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an ‘adversity score’ that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/scoring-the-adversity-score.php