
SAT to Give Students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000
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Bostonian
This is just cover for racial discrimination. Applicants should be able to see
the "adversity scores" that determine where they get in, just as you are now
able to see the credit scores that determine whether you get a mortgage.
According to the article, only colleges see the adversity scores.

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mises
Unfortunately, yes. The College Board is doing this so that colleges can get
around a possible future SCOTUS ruling against racist admissions. Apparently,
they have also been calculating these and giving them away behind the backs of
students and without their consent. More than a little creepy, and certainly
wrong. I hope they get sued into the ground for this.

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pmart123
Yes. This seems like a way to remove the liability away fro m the university,
and therefore, the university doesn't have to give predominantly Asian
applicants a poor "personality rating" to affect their application. This new
way could be more fair though, for instance, it could rate an Asian applicant
growing up in a tougher area higher than one that went to Phillips Exeter.

Potentially, there could be ways to game this too, such as parent's of private
school students renting an apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, and using
that address as the application address. Overall, it seems at least as an
improvement over the dart on a dartboard approach colleges have taken to
measure adversity or hardship.

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strikelaserclaw
yea but then they would also need to go to a shitty high school according to
this article, seems like a lot effort to look poor.

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pdog
_> Students won't be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when
reviewing their applications._

What's the rationale for withholding this information from students?

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sam0x17
Otherwise super rich kids will be taught the types of answers to select to
maximize their adversity score. That is still going to happen though.

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pdog
The score is based on 15 factors in three categories that are pretty hard to
fake: neighborhood, family, and high school.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-
colleg...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-college-
board-calculate-students-admissions-college-wall-street-journal/)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The score is based on 15 factors in three categories that are pretty hard to
> fake: neighborhood, family, and high school.

Actually, several of them are not impractical to fake (and neighborhood is
something people _often_ fake for educational purposes—which also affects
school directly—though usually in the opposite direction that would benefit
adversity score for both; once there's an advantage to going the other way
for, say, the period relevant to the SAT adversity score, of course people
will hack it if they know the factors.)

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sam0x17
And the rich kids are going to be literally trained on how to fake them.
That's just how this works. (source: grew up in Greenwich, CT)

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challenger22
pretty damn kafka-esque.

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ac4tw
_> “The purpose is to get to race without using race,” said Anthony Carnevale,
director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce._

