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SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

• staunch 7y ago
  This seems like a potentially good first step in trying to counter wealthy people's gaming of the system with SAT "prep" and the like.
  • calvinmorrison 7y ago
    studying is gaming the system?
    • markwaldron 7y ago
      Being able to afford $100+ an hour for a pro to teach you exactly what you need to know to do well on the SAT is gaming the system
      • AimForTheBushes 7y ago
        So studying?
      • SaintGhurka 7y ago
        What if I hire an inexpensive tutor? Is that acceptable? Is there a price threshold? This is actually a serious question. I want to get an understanding of the mind-set that creates this class wedge.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • chongli 7y ago
          I think the argument is that no specific prep for the SAT should be necessary, the exam should measure your abilities from your schooling.
    • khalilch2 7y ago
      no, but if you come from a wealthy family that can afford private tutoring, you're at an obvious advantage to your competition
    • fwip 7y ago
      I know you're being rhetorical, but sure. Studying for the SAT doesn't mean you'll do any better in college.
      • calvinmorrison 7y ago
        of course, and many argue that conventional college isn't worth the money. Schooling has always been about jumping through hoops, weeding people out, conforming to the system. Those who play ball inside academia excel at it. I did not study for my SAT. I did not do great. A long time friend who I consider to be one of my intellectual peers, did study, got a great SAT score, went to college, worked the system and now we both work the same job. None of this is scientific, this is just my experience, however I have always had the feeling that people who excel at following the rules of schools obviously do better in that type of system.
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Seems like something even easier to game since it's a score that doesn't depend on your creature's performance.
  • SamReidHughes 7y ago
    You can do online test prep for free.
• maxk42 7y ago
  This isn't right.
• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  What does this do that knowing where the student went to school and how much their parents make (both things that colleges know) doesn't? It seems like yet another opaque metric to be gamed by the people with the resources to spend optimizing for those sort of things.
  • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Yeah. I'm very much in favor of affirmative action and similar measures, but this really seems like the wrong place for it. This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy. "Adversity score" is precariously close to "diversity score" which would certainly store up controversy.
    • jedberg 7y ago
      > This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy. I mean probably not, otherwise they would let the students see the scores. I think it was put there to help the elite colleges defeat the lawsuits against them by being able to say, "see, we used an objective measure of hardship from a third party!".
  • jeffdavis 7y ago
    "Level the playing field" is an over-used and under-defined expression. Do you level the playing field before you start or in the middle of the game? What is the purpose of college admissions -- to award a select few or to match students with colleges where they are most likely to succeed?
    • threatofrain 7y ago
      The goal of admissions is to accept students who enrich their college in one way or another.
• tuesdayrain 7y ago
  I wonder how much of the correlation between income and SAT scores is due to wealthier people's children just being more intelligent, rather than due to having access to better education.
  • qntty 7y ago
    They do control for that when they study the correlation between the two, so none.
    • ve55 7y ago
      Correlations are everywhere, it is unreasonable to expect one of '0' on traits that broad. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3
• CryoLogic 7y ago
  Soon we will have SAT advisers suggesting how to game the "adversity score" as well. - Get a summer job "because your family needed money" - Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions" - Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x" - CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family" etc. etc.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    Oh god. The original idea sounds good on paper, but, oh god.
    • theseatoms 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
      • max76 7y ago
        This was a huge theme throughout the television series The Wire. Here is a clip that specifically shows Goodhart's law working in education. https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM?t=62 https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM?t=62
  • jedberg 7y ago
    > CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family" Colleges are pretty wise to this trick. You aren't the first to think of it. Relatedly is legally emancipating a child so they have "no parental support" and get a bunch of grants. That doesn't work either. I suspect the colleges would get good as sussing out all those other tricks too.
    • ben_jones 7y ago
      Just like they were able to suss out all the student athletes who didn't actually do anything?
• kolbe 7y ago
  I don't get the point of this. The SAT is never used by colleges outside of the context of the applicant's background. I have full faith that there's nothing College Board can add to knowledge of an applicant that admissions committees don't already factor in.
• stale2002 7y ago
  So I think that it is OK to be taking these factors into account at the college admissions level, but I am not sure if the "neutral test administration organization" is the correct place for this to be at. This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree. Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
  • qntty 7y ago
    I would imagine that elite schools won't rely on this very heavily, but not every school has the resources to do a "holistic" admissions process, and not every student has the desire to go through such a process.
  • jandrese 7y ago
    The problem with doing it at the admission level is you have to adjust ALL admissions processes. Doing it at the SAT level avoids the problem where disadvantaged kids are cut off by hard score limits right at the start of the process. It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenario where the admissions looks at the adversity score to weed out kids who they don't think are going to be prepared regardless of how smart they are. This whole process assumes that the universities are interested in reforming the kids that the school system failed in the first place.
    • stale2002 7y ago
      Ok, but SAT cutoffs are a thing that the college itself decides. If a college wants to not do that, fine, I just don't want a centralized organization short circuiting the issue and making decisions for the college.
• abakker 7y ago
  This seems fine if you wanted to use the SAT to measure an outcome for a given level of inputs. If all you actually care about is the actual outcome though, then this doesn't actually help. I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved. I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
  • tlb 7y ago
    Past adversity is in the past. So if someone grew up in a poor environment but you're thinking of admitting them to a good college on full scholarship, they'll soon be progressing at the rate they're capable of without the adversity. So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
    • graeme 7y ago
      The tests are correlated with grades. You're trying to say the correlation isn't there for some subgroups. Are you basing it on anything? The same gaps that appear on these undergrad tests show up on the grad school tests such as the LSAT, GMAT, GRE etc.
      • lallysingh 7y ago
        Correlation between two factors doesn't tell you how to compare two sets of values. Kids who have to work after school until bedtime won't get as good grades in HS, but if no longer made to do so, may perform substantially better in college.
        • SamReidHughes 7y ago
          That's what the SAT is there for. Ability, not grades. If that doesn't cut it, add a third component that is a pure IQ test.
• Glyptodon 7y ago
  This seems likely to end up being ugly. For example wealthy people could buy or rent addresses in "adverse" neighborhoods, or charter schools might locate offices there, in order to attempt to improve scores on this metric. At the same time this won't be able to identify many adverse life circumstances like abusive parents, cancer, etc. What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
  • aqme28 7y ago
    That doesn't seem so terrible. More schools and property taxes in poor neighborhoods is an okay outcome as far as they go.
    • JshWright 7y ago
      I think you're overestimating the taxes paid by a shell office (it's not uncommon for dozens/hundreds of organizations to use the same small office suite, staffed by a single receptionist). Fancy private school in expensive neighborhood registers their official address in a poor neighborhood, and calls the school in the 'nice' neighborhood a "satellite campus".
  • BooneJS 7y ago
    There’s tales of Bay Area families renting and moving their HS juniors and seniors to the Central Valley where UC accepts a higher percentage from.
    • neilv 7y ago
      I was talking to someone who's been involved in elite university admissions, and gaming for the city/neighborhood/HS has been a known tactic for a while. There's a related tactic for people in affluent suburbs, for getting their child into urban school districts with an especially well-regarded primary public school: buy a house or condo in the city, and try to make it look on your application like that's your primary residence.
• weberc2 7y ago
  Presumably the SAT is meant to indicate a student's likelihood for success in a university setting; surely bumping up the scores of students based on how likely they are to be unprepared is counterproductive? This seems like it's going to set underprivileged students up for failure and deprive well-prepared students of an opportunity, no?
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    Why are they likely to be unprepared?
    • leetcrew 7y ago
      because (we're meant to assume at least) that's why they did poorly in the test in the first place?
      • ZebZ 7y ago
        If a poor kid goes to a shitty school and has life impediments that limit the amount of studying and preparation they do and still scores a 1300, is that kid any less capable than a rich kid who goes to a private school and has all the opportunity in the world and gets 1500?
        • leetcrew 7y ago
          the original word choice was "prepared", which has a different meaning from "capable". if the poor kid never took calculus in high school and the rich kid already understands integration, that's probably two whole college semesters behind on a STEM track. there's no way you could say they're at the same level of preparedness for college. as for "capable", who knows?
          • chungleong 7y ago
            Well, someone has to prop up the humanities. Universities are supposed to be communities of scholars. They aren't job training centers. Unless some students are persuaded to pursue less-career-oriented majors, all our universities would soon into polytechnics.
• the_jeremy 7y ago
  Colleges can already access this information in other ways. This is just a proprietary weighing of these things into one number. Given the information the SAT has access to, the number seems likely to be based around the student's address and school, rather than unique challenges to that student, like how present parents are in the student's life and if they have to care for younger siblings or need a part time job to help out. I don't remember having to give the SAT any sort of income or family data, but that sort of thing would be equally, if not more, relevant to the discussion of experienced adversity.
  • lotu 7y ago
    Just because a school has access to the information doesn't mean they have the expertise, time, or money, to turn that information into a number that can then be used in admissions. Admissions tests have existed for centuries the idea of the SAT is by having a single standard you can have one group of people make a better test for less money (and student time). This is very much the same thing, figuring out how to rank high schools and estimate adversity by street address for the whole nation is a HARD problem.
• iamtheworstdev 7y ago
  This is all that I could think of: Privilege Points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
  • RandomInteger4 7y ago
    When I was immersed in the leftist outrage bubble, I used to think this video was ridiculous and insulting, but after breaking out of that bubble, this video has become startlingly accurate.
  • svd4anything 7y ago
    Great video thank you. This “Adversity” score has me thinking of an analogy to physical beauty/attractiveness. I believe there is an incredibly high correlation, especially residual to other factors, between physical traits and success and wealth. Something very unfair for those who are uglier. Obviously the logical solution to that inequality isn’t to kick in the faces of the beautiful and handsome but instead focus on opportunities for those uglier to try and make themselves more attractive. In extremes plastic surgery for those with say cleft lip or other deformations. Those who can’t understand the analogy says much about the source of their rage. Hating the rich is still hate. If the college board really wants to love the poor why don’t they come up with a plan to provide FREE tutoring to all the zipcodes in their model. I bet if they asked a few billionaires like Gates and Buffet they would even fund it. Lifting the bottom up is not done by holding the top down. It just doesn’t work in reality.
• jerkstate 7y ago
  I'm not sure why this is necessary. College admissions boards already consider adversity stories, if they want to.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• crazygringo 7y ago
  > It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials. This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level. Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a student used to go to a fancy prep school and then moved to a local public school the year they took the SAT, or vice-versa). Given the incredible disparities between schools/neighborhoods, they feels like it can only give a more accurate picture of a student's abilities relative to their situation.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    Hopefully it will also help cancel out there effects of biases in the test. I wonder how, 4+ years after it's implemented, the results of the test's predictive accuracy are shown.
• didgeoridoo 7y ago
  This new metric seems to be mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable (short of moving your family to an impoverished neighborhood, which seems... unlikely). That said, colleges already have access to this information through publicly-available high school rankings and ZIP-level demographic data. All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability, shifting responsibility from college admissions departments to a centralized (and, most importantly, private) authority.
  • toast0 7y ago
    > mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable Once the ZIP code to score mapping is known, it's trivially gameble to get a mailing address in the best scoring ZIP code that won't get you kicked out of your school, if the ZIP code comes from school records. People do this all the time in reverse to get kids into desirable schools. Actually getting your kid into an undesirable school to get the full score might be less likely, although that may depend on the specific time requirements to get the score and the magnitude of the score related to other factors.
    • harryh 7y ago
      I can't say for sure, but I'd bet a decent amount of money that the variation in scores for zips in the same school district will be quite small compared to the variation in zips for different school districts. I doubt the kind of gaming you describe would have much of an impact.
  • harryh 7y ago
    All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability I would say that in addition to this just one organization has to do the research & math instead of the [large number] of colleges admitting students. It also provides for a degree f standardization.
• bluthru 7y ago
  >Higher scores have been found to correlate with students coming from a higher-income families and having better-educated parents. Which makes a lot of sense since income correlates with intelligence and intelligence is partially heritable. A century ago the SAT was used to fine diamonds in the rough for first-generation college students. After multiple generations of college students mating with college students, you're not going to find that many first-generation college students anymore. Inserting dumber students into college because of their upbringing is hostile towards the success of a nation. EDIT: Please point out something that's incorrect instead of downvoting because it makes you uncomfortable.
  • fwip 7y ago
    Income correlates with intelligence because measures of intelligence measure income.
    • sisu2019 7y ago
      IQ predicts future income even if the subjects environement is controlled for. It's a very good meassure, probably the best we have in the social sciences. What it tells us is not nice, sure, but denying reality is not going to help anyone.
• logicx24 7y ago
  This, like every other similar attempt made to "equalize" the SAT, is misguided and will accomplish little. If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude. But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test.
    • vageli 7y ago
      > it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test. As an entrenched player, I'd love to know more about their operating costs. They have no need for marketing, have a constant demand and are essentially a monopoly (possibly part of duopoly) on the college standardized test market. If they had optimized supply chains and distribution (which I would expect to improve year over year) I would be curious as to where all the money is going.
  • SeanAppleby 7y ago
    Hypothetically, what if it was true that wealthy people's exposure to better education over a lifetime, reduced stress distracting them from learning, better and more abundant roll models, etc, meant they would do better on pretty much literally any test you could put in front of them? Most research points to this being true.
• JoshTko 7y ago
  Private higher education will always increase inequality in the long run as the wealthy can find ways to optimize/game filters. For the wealthy the more complex the filter the better as they can pay to navigate the complexity.
• max76 7y ago
  I think the goal of quantifying the amount of adversity a person experiences in their life is a fools errand. This is like asking "On a scale of 1-100 how beautiful is The Mona Lisa." Somethings can only be poorly approximated in numbers. Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.
  • berbec 7y ago
    I think this idea of quantifying adversity is worse than that. I'd say "on a scale of magenta to 100 how west is jello?"
  • harryh 7y ago
    Lot's of measures are imperfect. That doesn't mean they aren't useful.
    • max76 7y ago
      What statistics will the Adversity Score be based on? How close to reality are those numbers? What statistics will colleges create using the Adversity Score? Those will surely be even further away from reality. The primary use of a number like Adversity Score is to create a pretty spreed sheet that generates pretty graphs that look good in board meetings, grant applications and pamphlets. While the data backing up the graph is impeccable it also is built on layer after layer of imperfect abstractions until the graph has very little to do with reality.
      • harryh 7y ago
        There are great high schools, decent high schools, mediocre high schools and bad high schools and we can tell the difference. There are neighborhoods full of rich people, middle class professionals, working class people, and slums and we can tell the difference. I don't know why you think that's so hard. It seems quite easy to me. Certainly worth trying instead of (as you seem to advocate) just giving up at the slightest difficulty.
• EGreg 7y ago
  College is now an artificial scarce resource and a signal to arbitrarily select well connected people (ivy league) or people who check a box (others)
  • akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Was it not always? The debate shouldn’t be to distribute the scarce resource more equitably, it should be to increase the availability of the resource!
  • rc_kas 7y ago
    This is off topic, but .. My cousin graduated from Harvard and he's like the least well paid and least connected person I know. Just a nerdy introvert kind of person.
• writepub 7y ago
  At what point in life can one's hardships be discounted? First job application after college? Should every job application have an adversity score? Should every promotion consider this? Should you be entitled to more government benefits, because of adversity? At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?
• babyslothzoo 7y ago
  The only way to be truly fair with admissions is to admit blind of any defacto discriminatory identity/categorization method and based entirely on competency and scores. I realize that is unpopular for a variety of reasons, but are elite academic institutions meant to be elite academic institutions, or are they social engineering laboratories?
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • fjsolwmv 7y ago
    They are meant to educate students for success in the world, and success for the world. Of course they are social engineering laboratories; that's in their charters. They are schools, not prize contests.
• graeme 7y ago
  I work in LSAT prep, and have taught the SAT as well. Whether this makes a different will depend on whether it's added as a ranking factor for schools. If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private. A few key points: * First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in * Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material. * What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition. * But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight. * Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through * Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that * These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through. * Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more... This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox applied. This might be good, this might be bad, it's really too soon to tell and depends entirely on the implementation and how it's used. But the issue of over restrictive categories could certainly use fixing.
• RandomInteger4 7y ago
  This is stupid.
• DiseasedBadger 7y ago
  It might help us all avoid people with serious problems, and likely bad attitudes.
• MrZongle2 7y ago
  FTA: "The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials." Brilliant. Another aspect of the already sketchy admittance process that will be overanalyzed and ultimately gamed to death -- assuming that this score truly has value to begin with.
  • MagicPropmaker 7y ago
    Now rich parents can buy a house or rent an apartment in a poor area to game the system. The can live there on paper only.
• rlt 7y ago
  "Adversity Score" sounds a bit like something you'd find at the "Oppression Olympics", which is a term often used to criticize exactly this type of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics Identity politics is becoming a parody of itself.
• oh_sigh 7y ago
  This seems like a better system than just blindly adjusting scores based on race. It never made sense to me how a white kid from a broken home in rural West Virginia could be considered by some colleges as privileged over a black kid with multimillionire lawyer parents living in NYC. But, I don't understand why College Board is computing this score, and not colleges themselves.
• BooneJS 7y ago
  Did I miss seeing anything where they factor in kids with anxiety or other mental issues that make school overly challenging?
  • borkt 7y ago
    They have disability accommodations for that (which are abused by the wealthy apparently). I learned from the recent scandal news.
    • souprock 7y ago
      This is the real scandal. It is possible to convince a doctor to provide a disability. This gives advantages on the test, such as extra time. The abnormal testing is not reported to colleges. Probably the only solution here is to offer those advantages to everybody. If you want double time, you should get it. If you want food during the test, you should get it. Whatever it is, let everybody have it. Anything less makes a mockery of "standardized" testing.
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• EventH- 7y ago
  Have these people never read Harrison Bergeron? How do they think this is going to end?
  • dunstad 7y ago
    Don't believe everything you read. Vonnegut is an author, not a prophet.
    • EventH- 7y ago
      Totally irrelevant; this isn't a matter of the author being one thing or another. The point Vonnegut makes in the story is a philosophical one, namely that a blind pursuit of equality is wicked and inhuman, which is transparently correct.
      • knolax 7y ago
        Arguing that point with a fictional novel seems incredibly opaque, inefficient, and sometimes disingenuous.
        • gred 7y ago
          this comment : thought :: soylent : food
          • knolax 7y ago
            Your comment isn't nearly as clever or original as you think it is.
            • gred 7y ago
              At least it was clear, efficient and sincere!
        • bdowling 7y ago
          Sometimes fiction is the best way to express truth.
• khawkins 7y ago
  The SAT itself has been shown to be a poor measure of performance in college when compared to high school GPA or the challenge level of the coursework offered [1]. Instead of trying to turn students into numbers, we should demand college admissions employees do their jobs and actually look at the applications. [1] http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/What-Matters-Most-for-College-Completion.pdf http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/What-Matters-M...
  • knolax 7y ago
    >actually look at the applications. So that they can infer the same "adverse conditions" and call it a holisitc process like they do now?
  • musicale 7y ago
    That's crazy talk. ;-) Though from experience talking with people who work in admissions at "selective" schools, SAT scores and grades are mainly used to filter out the bottom 90% of non-preferred (e.g. not athletes, legacies/donors, or geographic/demographically desirable) applicants and the rest is extremely subjective and/or random, and is influenced by many non-academic factors such as whether you are too similar to some already-accepted applicant, etc.. If you are rejected it often has nothing to do with your qualifications so it should not be taken as a negative judgment of same; similarly, if you are accepted often it's often due semi-random factors that placed you ahead of students with better qualifications.
  • krapht 7y ago
    I read the study you linked and it did not say that the SAT was a poor measure of performance? What it did say was that in isolation, the SAT score was worse than GPA, but the overall best predictor was a combination of SAT and GPA. I think this agrees with other studies about hiring, FWIW, where, as I understand, the best way to measure somebody's ability is a work-sample plus an IQ test. As someone who has been involved in hiring, we crudely approximate this by looking at work experience and how selective somebody's college education was.
• hotpockets 7y ago
  A valedictorian from an impoverished community has the same merit as one from a wealthy school (on average). Think about that and the solution seems obvious.
• lukejduncan 7y ago
  "The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials." That's... kinda scary.
  • elliekelly 7y ago
    Zero chance this non-disclosure policy lasts. Remember how much pressure Uber got to allow riders to see their rating? And that "score" has just about zero impact on anyone's life/future/potential scholarship opportunities.
    • analog31 7y ago
      Indeed, I doubt such a policy would withstand a FERPA challenge.
      • harryh 7y ago
        There are lots of secret scores given by colleges during their admissions process. I think you're probably wrong here.
        • mhuffman 7y ago
          ... sure, but not a test you pay for yourself.
• rhegart 7y ago
  Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
  • perfmode 7y ago
    Can you make an argument why this would be considered about “outcome” for the purpose of conversation?
    • jwfodnpmhl 7y ago
      Can it be called “conversation” at that point?
    • simple_phrases 7y ago
      It doesn't. It falls squarely into the "equality of opportunity" category, but that won't stop ideologues from screaming that the sky is falling.
    • crazy1van 7y ago
      They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school. Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.
      • rexpop 7y ago
        SAT scores and GPA are strongly affected by how much money you have.
        • Erik816 7y ago
• _Nat_ 7y ago
  > The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials. This seems really sketchy. I mean, I can completely understand why the College Board would want to avoid blowback from students knowing their scores, but their convenience seems like insufficient cause to deny students access to their own information.
  • BonesJustice 7y ago
    Might have to do with wanting to avoid people trying to game the system? Not that I expect the shroud of secrecy to actually mitigate that problem.
    • droithomme 7y ago
      The purpose of this sort of secrecy is to avoid people seeing how the system is gamed against them.
      • cm2187 7y ago
        Or rather to keep the capacity to arbitrage the system to insiders.
      • xhkkffbf 7y ago
        You seem to think that the system will be used to boost kids with high adversity scores. Many colleges desperately want kids who will pay full tuition. But they also want to claim they're "need blind." Voila. The "adversity" score tells them whether the kids came from a rich neighborhood.
        • BonesJustice 7y ago
          Actually, there was an interesting link posted here a while back[1] that explored how non-profit colleges have a vested interest in making sure at least half of their students cannot afford full tuition. To keep their tax exempt status, they must act as a “charity” by extending financial aid to at least half of their students. The tax-exempt status enables them to invest their endowment without paying taxes on the gains. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18792515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18792515
• fopen64 7y ago
  Schadenfreude sensation to see USA shooting its feet again and again.
• ARandomerDude 7y ago
  SAT: tries to distinguish the individual from the crowd Adversity score: tries to make the student a statistic
• robzhu 7y ago
  During China's Cultural Revolution, the Communist party also kept track of an adversity score.
• shriphani 7y ago
  How are they going to boil all this down to a single number? So ridiculous. All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable gatekeepers. Society's true vultures.
  • dangerbird2 7y ago
    I mean, the reason of the SAT's existence is the convenience of boiling down one's entire academic experience into one number. Perhaps the real problem is that university admissions allow the dualopoly of College Board and ACT control the academic fates of the nation's students with no public accountability.
    • colechristensen 7y ago
      A university has to reduce a person down to a binary decision to admit or not, not much of a way around that.
      • shriphani 7y ago
        It is different when college board does it. When a university makes that decision, that is the student pool they are going to bring in and they take the risk with their graduation stats, employment stats and failure rates. When college board does it, they have literally zero skin in the game. They bill both the prospective student and the institution, produce this arbitrary number and there is no penalty for getting it wrong since they can just move the goalposts and declare success.
      • lazyasciiart 7y ago
        Set a standard (SAT score, whatever) and say that students who meet that standard should be capable enough to admit. Then pick randomly from among the applicants who meet your standard. Sounds fair, right?
  • thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    And they’re a private company too !
• mlindner 7y ago
  This is a terrible idea! We shouldn’t allow people to arbitrarily pick scores on data they don’t even have a full picture of.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• malcolmgreaves 7y ago
  Good for them on starting to incorporate more realities into the all-too-often unrealistic confines of standardized testing.
• buttholesurfer 7y ago
  Hey look another step towards college being a joke.
• nyfresh 7y ago
  A standardized test should consider all contributing variables when determining a score. In any other context this wouldn't be news.
• djg321 7y ago
  The supply of high quality education and credentialing services needs to increase to meet demand. Otherwise, college admissions will just be a zero sum game.
• GhostVII 7y ago
  I think instead of trying to lower the bar for low income students, we should work on solving the actual problems causing them to perform more poorly on the SAT (or adjust the SAT so it is more representative of their actual skills). If students are accepted with a lower SAT score because of their background, they are likely going to struggle in University, since they have lower scores than the rest of their class, seems like this would be just pushing the problem further down the road, rather than actually addressing it. From what I have seen, the problems for low income students start in grade school, if you are behind academically before you even enter high school, it's going to be hard to catch up. On the other hand though it might be essentially impossible to close the gap between low income and high income students. Your parents have a huge impact on your learning, and if your parents are poor and have to work all of the time, they aren't going to be as available to help you learn. Regardless, I think it is pretty impossible to calculate an adversity score that is actually accurate (how do you compare the challenges faced by a child in a single parent family with one who grew up in a poor neighbourhood?), and it seems pretty wrong to me to have a hidden score based on things you likely can't control influece admissions, but it would lead to some interesting research if it was actually used.
  • Sebguer 7y ago
    How do you suggest solving a problem that comes down effectively to 'some people have more money and free time'? Not everyone can afford high quality tutoring, and high quality tutoring clearly has an impact on test scores.
    • GhostVII 7y ago
      After school programs, ensuring all schools have equal funding, getting better at determining which kids aren't succeeding, and spending more time with them to give them the one on one support they need. I mean it's a very hard problem, and maybe it's unsolvable, but I think we have a lot more things we can try before giving up and trying to put Band-Aids on the problem. I think if class sizes are sufficiently small though, at least in grade school, a teacher should know every student, and be able to identify those who aren't getting the support they need at home. If they are a good teacher, they can act accordingly, and maybe work with the parents to help the child succeed.
• elagost 7y ago
  >Higher scores have been found to correlate with students... having better-educated parents. And this is a problem why?
• cabaalis 7y ago
  And in the end, they'll read the same books, study the same math, learn the same history. No SAT score or college admission can replace an inquisitive mind and a library.
• dba7dba 7y ago
  I see a lawsuit on the way. How can college admission related score be a 'secret'?
• zimablue 7y ago
  The real problem is way more fundamental than this, imo the real problem is the concept of school as a discriminator of aptitude rather than an educator (or indeed as both). When you're teaching someone, teach them. Test them as late as possible, in a way as close as possible to the task you're testing them for (programming assignment completed in-house instead of weird whiteboards, piece of writing completed in house instead of screening English degree). Hopefully micro-credentialling/MOOCs/the fact that a lot of good careers are slowly turning into software (which is one of the easiest things to objectively test) eventually kill this fake-meritocracy bullshit. From the perspective above, this is lipstick on a pig.
• plandis 7y ago
  Im all ears to be convinced this won’t be a proxy almost exclusively for race.
• testfoobar 7y ago
  There are so many solutions that are possible if we are honest about underlying problems. For example, minority children are more likely to live in places with high lead exposure - lead has devastating consequences on brain development - and presumably future SAT scores. Contaminated Childhood: The Chronic Lead Poisoning of Low-Income Children and Communities of Color in the United States: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170808.061398/full/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170808.06139...
  • lamarpye 7y ago
    If this is true, I don't think adding points to SAT scores is the best way to address the problem.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jasonhansel 7y ago
  My (apparently unpopular?) opinion: this is an excellent move. Colleges already try to take adversity into account in admissions. Now they'll have a more uniform, clear, objective, and standardized way of doing so. I do wish it was more transparent--i.e. that students could see their own scores--but this is clearly a step in the right direction.
  • fullshark 7y ago
    > Now they'll have a more uniform, clear, objective, and standardized way of doing so. How do we know this? Why should the College board be reporting this? The lack of transparency is the real issue. What data are they collecting to generate this score and why? Is it just going to be an 0-100 index of the average score for that particular test location?
    • harryh 7y ago
      The College Board has been quite transparent about what data will be used to calculate the scores if you read the relevant articles. - Neighborhood environment - Crime Rate - Poverty Rate - Housing Values - Vacancy rate - Family Environment - Median income - Single parent - Education level - ESL - High school environment - undermatching - curricular rigor - free lunch rate - AP opportunity
  • chaostheory 7y ago
    I'm not sure yet. However, this sounds way better than the subjective application process that most universities still have which are prone to racism. https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-against-asians https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-...
  • ars 7y ago
    Clearly the best option is to live in an affluent area for most of high school and do really well. Then one month before SAT move to a very poor area and attend the worst high school you can find. That way you got a good adversity score as well.
• civilian 7y ago
  When I have kids, I think I'm going to direct them to check the "Decline to respond" box for any race/income/parents-education-level questions. I used to believe in the value of collecting these stats to problem solve what we can do to help everyone achieve. But increasingly these stats are just being used for a different kind of discrimination. We've all got problems, and they're immeasurable. In high school I had severe anxiety that led to a lot of procrastination and avoiding school clubs. And as a 1st-generation immigrant, there were subtle cultural differences, even though I fit in with my appearance.
• MagicPropmaker 7y ago
  The purpose of the SAT is supposed to be to predict if a person would succeed or not at college. I don't see how adding an adversity score will aid in making this prediction.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > The purpose of the SAT is supposed to be to predict if a person would succeed or not at college. I don't see how adding an adversity score will aid in making this prediction. If adversity measures correlate with lower test scores more than they do with lower performance, then it would obviously help. Of course, the adversity score—which is separate from the main test score—may serve a separate function for institutions using it, just because the existing score serves one purpose doesn't mean that everything the College Board packages with it must serve that purpose.
• caseymarquis 7y ago
  The SAT selects for two things: Can you give this school prestige with your brain (high score, low income, no test prep)? Or, can you give this school money with your (parent's) wallet (high score, high income, test prep). All this will likely serve to do is show that given two equally scored students, the one with less adversity tends to get in because they help the college pay its bills or provide connections to their family's firms. Schools already have financial aid data for poor students for grants, so this just makes this data more transparent to the rest of us. I'll be interested to see if future data shows I'm correct on this.
• spookybones 7y ago
  This seems extremely hypocritical if they do not also account for personal adversity (with evidence). Both of my parents died while I was young. It certainly interfered with schooling as I questioned the point of existence as well as not growing up with consistent role models.
• resters 7y ago
  The problem isn't the adversity score, it's the admissions practices that reward mediocre performance in rich public school districts. Colleges already weigh a GPA as better if the school district is more wealthy (competitive). So the adversity score counter-balances that existing bias. If you go to a big state school you meet a lot of mediocre people who went to rich public schools and got mediocre scores and high (memorization-oriented) GPAs. They had access to lots of AP credits and get admissions advantages not just for the results but for taking the AP classes in the first place (weighted GPAs, etc.). The adversity score, if it works correctly, will help colleges find students who attended high schools that were little more than daycare, offered no weighted GPA, few AP classes, lousy teachers, etc. A high potential student from one of those districts will fly under the radar compared to the kid who had a memorization 3.8 GPA and 8 AP classes from a big suburban high school.
• KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
  This is not a good solution. :( The only solution is UBI.
• smilekzs 7y ago
  As a reference: The Chinese equivalent, Gaokao [0], is notorious for its brutal difficulty, but also widely regarded [citation needed] as a great equalizer. To that end, high school students spend obscene amount of their class time doing test prep (yes, in school instead of after). Although YMMV, and the total score usually spreads out quite nicely without need for curving (one such attempt was recently made [1]; it didn't turn out well). That is, despite all the extensive test prep, Gaokao simply refuses to be maxxed out (effectively, due to human scoring of essays). With all its problems and totally valid criticism, Gaokao remains (IMHO) the golden standard in equality of opportunity. Sadly China is moving to "diversify" college admission recently --- euphemism for bias towards wealthier families. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_College_Entrance_Examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_College_Entrance_... [1]: (Chinese Wikipedia) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E5%B9%B411%E6%9C%88%E6%B5%99%E6%B1%9F%E8%8B%B1%E8%AF%AD%E9%AB%98%E8%80%83%E6%88%90%E7%BB%A9%E5%8A%A0%E6%9D%83%E8%B5%8B%E5%88%86%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E5%B9%B411%E6%9C%88%E6%B5...
  • martin__ 7y ago
    Actually, the Gaokao does have something that might be similar where ethnic minorities get extra points: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1595620876524810727&wfr=spider&for=pc https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1595620876524810727&wfr=spi...
    • smilekzs 7y ago
      That, however, does NOT favor the rich, mod cheating/forgery, which surprisingly does get caught, due to the widespread expectation of the system to be fair. And there used to be bonus points for STEM Olympiads, which had totally worked as intended by providing a sound alternative for the talented / hard-working specialists who have not so much family backing. There were varying degrees of cheating (mostly in the form of leaked problem banks), more rampant in some provinces than others, but AFAIK the asking price was not totally out of reach for the common working family, so it'd be unfair to say cheating the exam favors the rich either.
  • lazyasciiart 7y ago
• apo 7y ago
  > A growing number of colleges, in response to criticism of standardized tests, have made it optional for applicants to submit scores from the SAT or the ACT. Admissions officers have also tried for years to find ways to gauge the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores. Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier. This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score. What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?" Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements. There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources. If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.
• unnamedprophet 7y ago
  This is a terrible policy. These factors aren't subject to being quantified, and thus can't be compared equally. You can't compare one zip code versus another to say which is geographically more "adverse". Poor white, trailer trash neighborhood vs drug-infested, gang-ridden city streets. Schools with 75% of students on free-lunch vs schools that have suffered mass shootings. Single black mother working as a nurse making $80k a year raising two kids versus Indian single mom who was abused by her husband and filed for divorce and custody. On the flip side, what message do you tell to a white male from an upper middle class background who is raised in a good school district? He wants to go to an Ivy League. What should he do, how can he prepare?
• wtdata 7y ago
  In part this initiative rewards bad parenting and lack of responsibility for raising your kids. If you made imense effort to provide the best education possible to your child, to put him in a good school (even if that meant depriving yourself from a better material life and having 2 jobs), if you kept a non perfect marriage because that would be better for your child, if you only had one kid because you couldn't afford to provide a good education for more than one, what this law is telling you is: bad luck, you shouldn't have done it because now, we are going to adjust his score back for it so that none of that matters.
  • jm__87 7y ago
    I don't really follow your logic. Bad parents are usually bad parents because they don't care about parenting or they care about other things far more than parenting - parenting just isn't their top priority. Their children's success in life is not top of mind, and some may not care how successful their kids are unless there is something in it for them. From my own personal experience, bad parents get annoyed when their kids are successful and they don't benefit directly in some way i.e. money. Or they are resentful and try to minimize your successes. Either way, bad parents think more about themselves than their kids - their kids being successful is not a reward. If anything, perhaps it punishes good parenting. But I'm not sure it rewards bad parenting.
  • thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    Isn't this a good thing to not encourage this so that your kid don't end up with mental issues because of your failed marriage and his childhood where you never saw them ?
• sologoub 7y ago
  Not paywalled article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sat-add-adversity-score-will-factor-student-hardships-college-admissions-n1006571 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sat-add-adversity-score... Pretty concerning and really doesn’t capture various types of adversity faced in childhood. Feels like another box kids would need to fit in to...
• duxup 7y ago
  >15 factors That just seems so limited considering the variability of life. It seems there are so many well intentioned efforts out there that seem focused on sort of economic or just easily measured statistics .... and people just try to unweave the weave by putting pressure on those easy to measure numbers. I'm not sure that solves anything.
• cheesymuffin 7y ago
  I've actually thought quite a bit about this issue over the past few years. Essentially the problem is that students with parents who did not score well are fighting a constant uphill battle. Grade families like classes. The "class average" should always be a C (assume for sake of explanation that a C is 2000). C, the student's initial score (call it the "crude score", C) is computed the same way it's always been P is the student's penalty, computed from a weighted average of all of their ancestors' crude scores (w_k...w_1) as well as theirs (w_0). For the next generation, set w_k := w_(k-1) if C > C_av: w_0 = w_1 * w_2 else: w_0 = w_1 normalize w_0...w_k P = (sum(w_0...w_k) - C_av) * urgency Where urgency is a measure of how in need the disadvantaged groups are as well as their numbers. This can be adjusted manually based on the political climate, maybe by a DAO that governs the College Board on the Ethereum blockchain.
• james_s_tayler 7y ago
  I feel like a lot of people just don't understand the normal distribution, the central limit theorem and the square root rules. I don't think it's ever going to work trying to rally against the math the universe is built out of.
  • tyopiuy 7y ago
    What are the square root rules
• thoughtstheseus 7y ago
  The question is should people be selected for admission by varying standards based on what set of X number of categories you fill on an SAT test.
• portal_narlish 7y ago
  It seems people are conflating "low adversity score" with "my perfect SAT score is ruined because my family lives in the nice suburbs". I think this is just meant to add some standardized and measured context for admissions officers, like an objective version of other "adversity factors" already present in the admissions packet. However, I think College Board have no business doing this themselves. Seems out of line and very different from standardized testing.
• pkaye 7y ago
  I can see wealthy parents moving their kids to a worse school district for the year of SAT exams to game that score.
• DenisM 7y ago
  I would like to put forward best arguments for both systems, maybe it will direct our discussion somewhat. -------- Method 1. Give everyone equal chance at competing in the admission process itself, regardless of how they got prepared. Someone who prepared well, for any reason, might do well in the future too, for the same reason. Result 1: Get the best prepared students to best colleges, maximize the number of top scientists / engineers / lawyers / etc graduating. Stronger academia and industry in the end. Result 2: Meritocracy. Result 3: On the feeling level: objective reward for hard work (no good example comes to mind, but maybe a Cinderella-type story). -------- Method 2. Give everyone equal chance both during the preparation and taking the test. Since that cannot actually be done by the time tests are taken, instead normalize the test result to adversity levels, on the assumption that someone held back by difficult circumstance is likely to perform ~25% better once released from the difficulty. Result 1: Uncover potential geniuses in the rough, remove mediocre-or-lazy-but-pampered kids. Result 2: Reduce stratification of society, even if at the expense of overall academic performance of the country. Result 3: On the feeling level: a fighting chance for poor kids in bad situations (think "The Wire" type kids).
• GreaterFool 7y ago
  Just introduce a random pool. RANDOM. I don't trust any of these people to do it correctly. I wouldn't even trust them to make random truly random.
• _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  Kinda feels like admissions departments are not doing their job/the College Board is attempting to do their job for them. Why should I trust a metric from the College Board? Anybody who has taken an AP test can tell you the courses are in no shape or form close to college level. And the SAT is an exercise in anal perfectionism, not intelligence. I don't trust them to accurately judge the socioeconomic background of a cow, let alone a student. And anyways, isn't it the job of the admissions department to judge a candidate by more than their scores? Isn't that the point of "holistic" admissions? Also, is it just me, or are SAT scores wildly overvalued? Maybe it's just my high school, but SAT scores were never emphasized, versus the ridiculous race for grades, extracurriculars and good essays. The days of a "good" SAT score getting you into a college are over. I can generally tell how old someone is just from how much they emphasize SAT scores.
  • nimblerabit 7y ago
    When you say AP tests are nowhere close to college level, do you mean they are easier or harder? Personally I think they are morw difficult, but your comment seems to be implying they are easier (and obviously so).
    • _hardwaregeek 7y ago
      At least for Computer Science A, BC Calculus, Physics C and US History, the tests are nowhere near college level. Plenty of people get 5's on Calculus BC and can't tell you how to derive, say, integration by parts. Or how the Mean Value Theorem works. Or really anything beyond regurgitated power rules, etc. And Physics C? I got a 5 on both tests with some pretty terrible answers. The courses, sure, depending on your school they can be really great and beyond college level. But they'd still be great and beyond college level if they were just regular advanced classes. Not to mention some AP tests are rather ridiculous. Like AP World, which is a test on all of history. Could you imagine a test on all of math? Plus it doesn't count for anything. AP US History doesn't get me out of any classes. It didn't add anything to my application other than another number. And I didn't really learn much either.
• jtr1 7y ago
  The underlying assumption in all of this is that quality education should remain scarce, in which case it must be doled out based on broadly applicable metrics that end up being arbitrary in practice. If education and opportunity were abundant, maybe we wouldn't be at each other's throats and/or concocting elaborate ways to game the system.
• serf 7y ago
  Sounds like a jumping off point to introduce the US to the Chinese social credit system[0], to me. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-social-credit-score-utopian-big-data-bliss-or-black-mirror-on-steroids/#37f37cf48b83 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-...
• hawaiian 7y ago
  Part of me wonders if this is an effort by the universities, in cooperation with the College Board, to keep their hands clean and position themselves as objective, data-driven entities. "Adversity" levels are already assessed by all big name universities in the United States. This score will likely change very little, especially if the 15 factors are broken out and included in the report. What's more likely is that the score will oversimplify "adversity" to a level that can be exploited (even more so).
• daodedickinson 7y ago
  Don't the universities have all they need to know already? Probably someone's excuse to get more data.
• stanfordkid 7y ago
  Shouldn't college admissions officers already be able to take this into account based on data in the application? I am pretty neutral on it, but think the idea is pretty pointless and just leads to people trying to game the system, rather than having decision making criterion distributed.
• pps43 7y ago
  If a bank did that, the regulators would shut it down in a heartbeat for redlining.
• Footkerchief 7y ago
  What is the complete list of factors? None of the news articles seem to have it.
• leemailll 7y ago
  The WSJ article has a more detailed list for this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-... Also it seems Chinese and Indian kids with immigrant parents will be affected the hardest in general
• jorblumesea 7y ago
  So a kid is lacking math/science/reading skills, how will boosting their scores help? They're still behind, you just rigged the game in their favor. They'll still show up at some prestigious college and do poorly for the same reasons they do poorly at the SAT. Testing will never erase the inequality between income, class and race.
• StreamBright 7y ago
  Nor Christians neither Jews are a race
  • roenxi 7y ago
    The Jews actually have a pretty strong family component. In theory they aren't a race but for practical purposes it might as well be a racial stereotype (eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype). Anyway, the point was that the culture is what is important. Jewish culture is clearly somewhat different from Christian culture. If you seep a person in a specific culture that will define how they think in a way that their race does not.
    • kornsh3ll 7y ago
      > eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype Please, do not repeat this filth. It is anti-Semitic nonsense that there is are “Jewish racial characteristics”. Jews come in every shape and skin tone. I know a very nice black man who is an African Immigrant and he is Jewish. There is no Jewish race - Judaism is only a religion.
      • jimmydddd 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism Jewish secularism comprises the non-religious ethnic Jewish people and the body of work produced by them. Among secular Jews, traditional Jewish holidays may be celebrated as historical and nature festivals, while life-cycle events, such as births, marriages, and deaths, may be marked in a secular manner.
      • wolco 7y ago
        Jewish race is a term. Different Jewish tribes/shared genetics is more accurate.
      • lopmotr 7y ago
        Converts and outliers are of course are excluded, but for people with a long Jewish ancestry, there are clusterings of genetic markers that uniquely identify them as distinct from non-Jews. There are different groups of Jews too. Judaism is well accepted as being both a race and a religion. Of course it has fuzzy borders with people who don't believe the religion but are genetically Jewish and vise versa, but so does every race and every religion. It's not helpful for thought to demonize an idea by calling it "filth". How can you consider possibilities if you've decided in advance what's clean and what's too dirty to even say?
• ralph84 7y ago
  It will become just like credit scores. A whole industry will sprout around gaming the score. There will be "adversity score repair" companies guaranteeing to increase your score in 30 days. There will be "Adversity Karma" where you can log in and see your score and its trend over time.
• objektif 7y ago
  On a related note I always thought that US college admissions are very sketchy. Why should children of alumni have have a higher chance of getting into an ivy school. Same goes for extra cirricular activities. Who gives a shit about your exceptional cello playing skills?
• ummonk 7y ago
  This is potentially a good thing since it could be easier to monitor for fairness and lack of discrimination than subjective holistic admissions.
• dba7dba 7y ago
  I checked NYT's discussion on this article and a quick check shows top voted posts are mostly negative against this new scoring from SAT board.
• RenRav 7y ago
  This just enables unpredictable discrimination on behalf of college admissions officials...
• aabajian 7y ago
  I'll play devil's advocate. I went to a public high school that served a large area (it's Rim of the World High in Southern California in case anyone is curious). It's the only high school in the mountains, and services "poorer" areas like Crestline and "wealthier" areas like Lake Arrowhead. To my knowledge, I was one of the only honors kids from Crestline. My morning consisted of getting up at 5:30 am and taking a 45 minute yellow bus ride to get to school (and school started at 7 am!) and back. How do I explain to colleges that every day of my high school was 1.5 hours longer because of that bus ride?
  • Apocryphon 7y ago
    Through the college admissions essay
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • adelie 7y ago
    i'd actually say that's an argument against having an 'adversity score' - a single value simply isn't enough to capture the nuances of your situation, and having a standardized score might pressure colleges to rely more heavily on those values. specifically for your example, there doesn't seem to be any factor in the score calculation that takes into account 'distance from school,' while 'quality of high school' does play a role. so it's quite possible that since your high school did better overall (i.e. serviced 'wealthier' kids, skewing the score), your score would look better than things actually were.
    • learc83 7y ago
      There's several neighborhood scores as well. Crime rate, poverty rate, home vacancy rate etc... Presumably OPs neighborhood would score lower on those.
• cljs-js-eval 7y ago
  Because it appears that no news outlet wants to link to the actual dashboard: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/professionals/data-driven-models-to-understand-environmental-context.pdf https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr... Looks like they try to account for neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment. Seems a bit fairer than I expected, assuming family environment is given the weight it deserves. Otherwise it may penalize people who try to go to a better school or a better neighborhood. Also looks like a play to sell a dashboard. Maybe related to the regulatory environment of colleges - they can prove they're selecting across a broad enough socioeconomic stratus, similar to how banks like to prove they're meeting HUD requirements for lending.
• seizethecheese 7y ago
  If colleges are doing this anyway, then this is just a standardized way to do the scoring. This is basically a service the college board is providing to colleges. This could be seen as a good thing, even if you don’t like affirmative action. Instead of relying on crude metrics like zip code, race and income, this will allow for a more granular approach. If we are going to give a leg up to the disadvantaged (and therefore a push down for the advantages) we might as well do as good of a job as possible.
• adrenalinelol 7y ago
  Perhaps... We could increase the amount of seats at colleges instead?
• redorb 7y ago
  Beyond the score - I see this as colleges accepting more people having more remedial classes and collecting more in tuition.
• cwperkins 7y ago
  I prefer this to school's independently coming up with their own non-transparent systems. That being said I hope this is like Affirmative Action, only meant to be instituted for a length of time ~10 years once the problem has been deemed solved.
  • shard972 7y ago
    What happens if the problem doesn't resolve? Or maybe due to system gaming as has been described by other commenters or external factors it gets worse?
• aj7 7y ago
  Hopefully some poor Queens Asians will now get >800 scores in math.
• ousta 7y ago
  americans are funny. proning positive discrimination to get into a school and sacrify 5 years while not being prepared intellectually to succeed in the degree you got positively discriminated into and they call that a chance. as long as the guys proning that will have positively discriminated surgeon and cancerologist to cure them Im ok with it.
• pishpash 7y ago
  It's really time to give ugly people, short people, fat people, etc. an adversity score boost. I mean what could be more adverse?
  • hyperdunc 7y ago
    What we really need to do is remove all adversity and all other incentives for people to better themselves. I mean, what good ever came from people trying to overcome struggle and strife?
• bikeshed 7y ago
  Jesus this thread is toxic. I can tell the SAT board made the right decision based on the salt content here.
• uptownfunk 7y ago
  This whole thing is about who deserves the opportunity for higher education. The truth is, except for a small handful of schools (whose seats are mostly already spoken for, either through donors, athletes, or the elite prodigies who are going to get in regardless of their socioeconomic background) it is almost irrelevant whether or not you go to school A or school B in the long run. Your grit, your personal talents, your luck/karma/destiny etc are basically what carry you through anyway. Anyone who blames their failure in life on “some kid took my seat at Harvard because adversity score” probably doesn’t have what it takes to make it anyway.
• tropo 7y ago
  The availability of AP classes is part of the calculation. This will backfire for College Board. Now it becomes undesirable to offer any AP classes in the high school! Assuming that means AP classes that have been properly registered to use the trademark on transcripts, we will likely see pseudo-AP substitutes. The material will be taught, and students will take the tests, but officially there will not be AP at the school. Students will have to go elsewhere on test day. Another possibility is that a completely different alternative will become far more popular. This could be dual-enrollment or International Baccalaureate.
• hetman 7y ago
  While equalising opportunity is a noble endeavour, I fail to see how this particular initiative would achieve that. In short, it's too little too late. If someone struggled through high school because of environmental factors, they're not going to suddenly be on their A-game because they were admitted into university. At the end of the day, we should still expect the highest levels of excellence from our professionals. If we want to have a real impact we need to be examining the factors contributing to the disadvantage leading up to this point and find a way to address those.
  • ViViDboarder 7y ago
    The article said that it won’t alter the score. If someone went to a decent school, lived a care free life, and scored decently well, and then another student had the same score despite coming from a worse school district and having to work a part time job throughout high school, my bet would be on the later persons success. Maybe they’d perform similarly in college, and the struggler would still struggle, but post graduation my bets would be on the person who had to struggle.
    • barbecue_sauce 7y ago
      Had to work a part time job throughout high school? Don't most people do this?
• austincheney 7y ago
  This whole conversation is stupid. I graduated from high school class rank 380 out of 386 and nearly failed the SAT. I still got into college without any challenge and graduated. I am now both a US Army officer and a self-taught senior software developer working for a company that until recently generated more revenue than Google. As a hobby I write open source software that is arguably superior and outperforms similar projects coming out of Facebook. My adversity and persistence allowed me to learn a skill that formal education did not and I have been rewarded accordingly.
• DaniloDias 7y ago
  This nourishes some and hurts others. What an authentically American decision.
• systemBuilder 7y ago
  A friend of my sons is brilliant with a 1600 SAT and top grades at a top-5 high school in California. Still, he is not admitted to UCLA. Probably his family needs to Move across town to East Palo Alto where there are gunshots every night to increase his adversity score ....
• lopmotr 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be hilarious if universities found that higher adversity score predicted worse outcomes and used it to penalize applicants afflicted with adversity! Once it's well accepted that it's OK to discriminate based on the adversity score, they can discriminate in whichever direction they want and it will be hard for critics to complain without admitting that it's really racial discrimination in disguise.
• candybar 7y ago
  As someone who's somewhat ambivalent about race-based affirmative action (in short, I feel it's oversold at elite institutions and underused elsewhere) - a widespread adoption of something like this seems like an improvement over the status quo from the perspective of fairness. With that said, I don't think it will end up being used in this manner because fundamentally institutions are indifferent to your hardship and generally want the least fair process possible. At least as far as you can infer from their actions, top schools don't want students that overcame hardships. They want students that are likely to be successful. And given equal test scores, those that overcame more hardships are probably less likely to be successful, since they are likely to face more difficulties and less support in the future. For example, if Harvard admitted purely by academics (assuming that a suitably hard version of SAT exists), they'd certainly have a student body that overcame more adversity they currently do. But they'd miss out on the likes of Jared Kushner who, despite low test scores, certainly had better career prospects than the average Harvard student. In reality top schools are generally looking for well-bred, well-rounded rich kids that are going to be successful no matter what. Everything about their process optimizes for this - relatively easy tests and low cutoffs, focus on extra-curricular and well-roundedness in general, ridiculous emphasis on sports no one without money would play, legacy preference, the list goes on. Admissions officers are even known to prefer more expensive extra-curricular activities - it's not about ability, it's not about effort, it's about interestingness and rarity, which are essentially synonymous with expensive. Then to mask the fact that this is what their admissions process optimizes for, they just put the lipstick on the pig to make the result superficially palatable. This is where race-based affirmative action comes in - the whole holistic admissions process is fairly blatantly regressive, but somehow it's sold as a package deal with race-based affirmative action (it doesn't have to be) to put the critics on the defensive, as though they are the ones defending privilege. It's a fairly brilliant rhetorical technique, I must say. The holistic admissions process is primarily used to admit rich kids who aren't quite good enough academically over middle-class/poor kids who are great academically, but just have a hard time distinguishing themselves due to their chea, extra-curriculars that are available to far too many people to be interesting. But the fact that this process, combined with race-based affirmative action, yields a few more upper-middle class African immigrants and far fewer poor white and Asian kids, is apparently enough to give them the moral high ground. They've done such an amazing job pushing this narrative that most people seem to think rich kids getting SAT tutoring is a big problem from a privilege perspective and de-emphasizing objective metrics is about leveling the playing field. It's the exact opposite - they want every excuse to admit the people that they think are going to be successful (and what better predicts success than growing up already successful?) and de-emphasizing objective metrics allows them to fill the entire class with mostly privileged people, without the riff-raffs that are academically good, but don't have the connections or the upbringing or the money to be successful.
• systemBuilder 7y ago
  My sons best friend is Asian, 1600 SAT, 4.0 GPA, top-5 California high school, top-50 in country, almost 20 AP/honors courses, but I guess just too low an adversity score to get into UCLA ....
• systemBuilder 7y ago
  I can see a new score based up height and good looks which are correlated with higher incomes and executive success. After all, these colleges care more about polishing their own scores (sat, rejection rates, library volumes, GPA scores, alumni starting salaries) even more than the poor kids trying to gain admission ...
• summm 7y ago
  How about having lots of decent, desirable universities instead of a few elite ones and many weak ones? Furthermore, one could abolish tuition and provide students with living expenses, either all or those who need them. Furthermore, reverse grade inflation in school such that the final grade is a better predictor for learning aptitude. That would solve the stupid admissions problem once and for all. Btw we had all that here in Germany, but since about 20 years they are trying to shift finances to artificially create few "elite" unis and lots of crap unis in order to emulate the American system.
  • qazpot 7y ago
    > How about having lots of decent, desirable universities instead of a few elite ones and many weak ones? Bell curve
  • intenex 7y ago
    As someone who went to Harvard, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of extremely decent universities that all basically provide the same quality of instruction. People just get unreasonably hung up over the 'best' schools, but there are easily at least like 100+, if not several hundred, that provide easily roughly the same educational experience as far as I'm aware. The peer group may definitely dramatically different from what I can tell, but if you're a serious student and there for the learning above all, very straightforward to get into a school that will teach you just about anything you could learn at Harvard or any other Ivy League or similarly 'elite' school.
    • cm2187 7y ago
      The thing is what makes a university good has more to do with the quality of the recruitment of its students than the teaching. In fact much of the teaching in ellite US colleges is done by researchers that are not particularly good at it.
    • applecrazy 7y ago
      Yep, this is true. Graduating HS senior here, and people don't seem to look past prestige. Most of us are aware that Harvard/Stanford isn't the end-all, but still chase those institutions anyways.
• xenihn 7y ago
  I'm late to the party, but I think this is a good first step towards actually prioritizing/penalizing around class, instead of using race as a proxy for it. I've always felt that it was completely ridiculous that a Laotian student from a low-income family would be penalized under modern American systems when competing against an African-American student whose parents are both doctors/lawyers/engineers, and surpass the aforementioned family's income by 10x or more.
• yibg 7y ago
  Fundamentally I think pretty much everyone agrees on the concept of equal opportunity. But what people don't seem to agree on is the definition of equal opportunity. Or even I guess what is opportunity? If we have 2 people, A and B. A belongs to a wealthy family and lives in a nice neighborhood and goes to a nice high school. B has a poorer family, lives in a worse neighborhood and goes to a worse high school. What would providing equal opportunity look like? It seems like it should be something along the lines of B should also be able to attend the nice school, have access to tutors if desired etc. Not adjust B's scores up by some arbitrary amount because of circumstance.
  • rexpop 7y ago
    I was with you until the very last sentence. Look, it's a question of implementation. There's a quantitative threshold at which students qualify for admission. Either we change that threshold, or we fudge the score.
    • yibg 7y ago
      Not sure I agree with that. The two choices are not just change the threshold or fudge the score. Ideally it would be to provide the right conditions so that neither is needed. Of course real world is more complex than that, and that condition is not easy to provide. I'm just not sure having an subjective, arbitrary and opaque fudge factor is the right answer.
      • rexpop 7y ago
        Sure, there are many other solutions. A world of solutions. My point was only that it's an understandable implemention.
  • djtriptych 7y ago
    Ok but why not include achievement in the face of adversity. Why not consider this a perseverance/tenacity score? Since when does GPA/SAT completely describe fitness for the future?
• pndy 7y ago
  This sounds like thing what we had during communistic times in Poland; universities were giving extra points for place of origin of student candidates during entrance exams, adding these to the sum of points obtained for results in individual exams and for grades on the secondary school exit exam aka matura exam. The general idea was to give better chances for young people coming from workers and countryside families
  • randunel 7y ago
    This sort of "positive" discrimination led to more discrimination where I grew up, in Romania. Highschools and universities had "reserved spots" for Moldovans and ethnic gypsies who where placed in classes ahead of ethnic Romanians with higher grades. This led to them being hated and bullied more, many to the point where they dropped out. Don't fight discrimination with discrimination.
• alexgartrell 7y ago
  I don't think people realize that SAT scores are a lot more arbitrary than they look. If you're one of the lucky kids whose parents set them up with reasonable coaching (and academic expectations in general), you do much better. I did good but not great on the SAT and only got into CMU because I was a student athlete. But once I had my foot in the door I did very well (high gpa, TA'ed, graduated w/ honors and awards) and then continued to do very well in industry (arguably). If an adversity score can help out other kids like me who don't happen to be "impressive-for-a-D3-school" level athletes, then I think it's a great thing.
• kilotaras 7y ago
  This reminded me about the quote from "Winners take all" > A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones. Hardship score is a symptom. A large part of the problem lies in aristocratic-like school funding system.
• dwinston 7y ago
  The SAT is designed and delivered by a private, for-profit company. They are providing additional information that they think will add product value for their customers (schools). Do we want our public schools to continue encouraging/requiring such products?
• parsamzand 7y ago
  This is a terrible idea. Why further punish kids for the success and efforts of their parents? Even if this isn't outright lowering the score of high-achieving kids, this is lowering the worth of their accomplishments in the greater college-admissions market.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• prirun 7y ago
  Nature and life is full of diversity, from where you are born to the structure of your brain to the occupation of your parents. We say "celibrate diversity", but then try to quash it by making everyone appear equal and the same. We are born in different circumstances. Sometimes being rich is a hindrance, making people lazy and unmotivated. Sometimes being poor is a hindrance. But sometimes it is motivation to work hard to escape poverty. I think it's a little crazy that a committee of people get together and think they can "fix" someone's life circumstances, while in the process they are also hurting others'. We are not wise enough to make these decisions for others.
• busymom0 7y ago
  As a brown immigrant from a poor south asian family who recently moved to Canada, I still oppose this. I don't think measuring one student's hardship to another student's can be achieved objectively. What if someone comes from a rich family but was always beaten, ignored, molested, raped by their siblings/parents? Is this person's hardship not as measurable as someone from a poor family but never had to face those issues? Let's take an example of Elon Musk. His childhood was full of abuse but they weren't poor. How would you compare objectively his score from someone who wasn't abused but was poor? And let's say you give lesser points to Elon, do you think you did the right thing considering he has achieved a ton to push mankind forward?