The SAT and the New Aristocracy
On May 16th, the College Board made a big announcement. The standardized test known as the SAT will now include detailed data about the environment where students live and study. Many refer to this as an ‘adversity score,’ though the College Board isn’t using that terminology. The idea is simple: colleges can select the most talented students by observing how much adversity they have overcome.
One major surprise is that student’s won’t be able to see this information. While colleges will have access to the information, students won’t know what their adversity score is, and whether it helps or hurts their admission into college.
According to information quoted by Slate.com, “the ECD uses census data and includes metrics like the median family income and poverty rate in a student’s neighborhood and high school. All of that info is crunched into a single number between 1 and 100, with 50 as the average, presented as the student’s “overall disadvantage level” compared with peers nationwide.”[1] The higher the number, the more adversity the student has overcome.
At first glance, this might seem like a good thing. If colleges want to select the best and brightest students, won’t it help them to identify the students that succeeded through the most difficulty? Actually, no. While the SAT will pull information from the high school and the census, it can’t really determine how much adversity a student endured. Students who have a disability, or go through a family loss, or suffer some other difficulty, will have no way to represent that on the test. Even if they overcome these difficulties, they may still end up with a low adversity score if they live in a better neighborhood or go to a better school.
In fact, the new adversity score penalizes those whose parents have succeeded. As Heather Mac Donald says, quoted by Insidehighered.com, “The College Board’s adversity score will give students a boost for coming from a high-crime, high-poverty school and neighborhood. Being raised by a single parent will also be a plus factor. Such a scheme penalizes the bourgeois values that make for individual and community success.”[2]
The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movements all aimed to overthrow aristocracy. Americans said, “It isn’t right for some people to have special rights just because of their birth. All men are created equal.”
What we see now is a new aristocracy. The American Dream is based on the ideal of working hard and being rewarded for it, independent of your birth or parents or race. Now, with movements like the new SAT adversity score, you get special advantages – or disadvantages – based on where you live or how the other students in your school performed.
Here is the point: the College Board is systematizing and encoding a method that grades students independent of the student. It is giving people grades based on factors outside their control – and it is standardizing this. This is systematic. It isn’t just an unfortunate side effect. It is being written into how the test works. Now we are standardizing a system by which you get penalized or promoted based on factors outside your control.
This is the rise of an aristocracy: a group of individuals who enjoy systematic privileges because of where their parents live or what school they attend. As a society, we have reached the point that was forecasted by Animal Farm: to paraphrase, “All men are created equal; but some men are created more equal than others.”
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/sat-adversity-score-college-board-algorithm-transparency.html
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/05/20/college-board-will-add-adversity-score-everyone-taking-sat
