Once again, College Board has attempted to rectify the fairness of the SAT, this time with the introduction of an “adversity score,” which is supposed to contextualize the social and economic backgrounds of individual test-takers.
That’s the headline you’re seeing. The reality is that the College Board continues to refuse to face the fact that it’s their oligarchic control of the college testing market and the structure of the SAT itself are the problems.
The “adversity score” comprises 15 factors, including those related to a student’s neighborhood environment (crime rate, poverty rate, housing values, vacancy rate), family environment (median income, single parent, education level, English as a second language), and high school environment (undermatching, curricular rigor, free lunch rate, Advanced Placement opportunity).
To its credit, the adversity score correctly points to the fact that a student’s individual environmental factors matter more than purely demographic ones. However noble the intentions of race-based affirmative action, a pure focus on race to rig admissions overwhelmingly favors wealthy minorities who are more insulated from racism than their poorer and more underprivileged counterparts. As an example, 71% of black and Latino Harvard students come from wealthy backgrounds.
The College Board may be attempting to right a wrong, but this just ain’t it. And it’s all because of the structure of the SAT itself.
The SAT is highly correlated with income. It doesn’t necessarily test things that students learn in school, and so students with means to study or get tutored outside of class do better. Even though the test’s acronym once stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” it no longer serves any practical purpose in predicting a student’s success in college.
Its current iteration contains a reading comprehension section, a mathematics section, and an optional writing section that colleges from Harvard to Brown have dropped as a requirement given its general uselessness.
The reading comprehension section may be the only section to test actual aptitude. But that score can be greatly improved with outside tutoring.
The math section only tests Algebra I, middle school geometry, and a sliver of Algebra II, with maybe one trigonometry question thrown in. Aspiring STEM and business-related majors will have taken precalculus at least by the time they see this test. As for students with no interest in quantitative fields, it’s quite a stretch to dedicate to math fully half of a test whose score will be this important to their future.
The SAT explicitly says that it doesn’t test IQ, but IQ testing would arguably be less discriminatory against students with less access to tutoring. So if the SAT doesn’t want to be an IQ exam, then it ought to be a test that correlates with both what students study in high school and with what they will study in college. And this is where College Board could actually solve the problem, if it were willing to put in a real effort.
Unlike the SAT, College Board’s AP courses are well designed. They include introductory college-level classes ranging from art history and English literature and composition to algebra-based physics and macroeconomics. Teachers across the country teach to the test, which, given the wild inequities and inconsistencies of America’s high schools, is undoubtedly a good thing. At the end of each school year, every student enrolled in, say, AP European history, takes the exact same exam, providing college admissions officers an objective score to judge an individual student’s merit in the classroom, not just with a tutor.
Unfortunately, some schools don’t offer AP courses, and those schools are disproportionately in high-poverty and rural areas. Considering that many universities allow passing AP test scores to be applied toward a student’s college credits, this hurts low-income students who would benefit from graduating college earlier even more.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the major problem is funding. If College Board is as woke as they want us to believe they are, they can put their money where their mouth is and create special outreach programs to help fund AP programs in schools unable to afford it. The College Board calls itself a nonprofit, but it racked up $1.12 billion in profit in 2017.
The College Board has an easy mechanism to even the playing field for underprivileged Americans without injecting intersectionality nonsense. Just scrap the main SAT and shift colleges’ focus to its AP subject tests. It’s just that this would take effort and return smaller profits.
[Also read: California lawmakers unveil plan to end legacies and standardized tests in college admissions]
