College Board Is Dropping The 'Adversity Score.' Good.

The College Board announced today that it is dropping its recent plan to calculate an “adversity score” for students who take the SAT. David Coleman, CEO of the College Board admitted, “The idea of a single score was wrong. It was confusing and created the misperception that the indicators are specific to an individual student.”

However, the College Board is not totally abandoning any attempt to give colleges more information about applicants’ backgrounds that might be related to their education. It’s going to use the tool it calls “Landscape” that will include a variety of data – not reduced to a single number – such as characteristics of the the student’s school, the size of the school’s graduating class, the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced lunch, and performance in Advanced Placement courses.

According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, admissions officers also will see a range of test scores to show where applicants fall in relation to others, as well as information like the median family income, education levels and crime rates in the student’s neighborhood.

The decision to jettison the adversity score was an acknowledgment of the many criticisms that had been leveled against the College Board’s creation of the original tool (the Board never referred to it as an “adversity score”) as well as how it planned to use it. Critics were not convinced it would do what was promised because the College Board refused to report the weightings it used in computing scores, and it reported only neighborhood characteristics rather than variables unique to a given student. In addition it refused to make the score available to students themselves, raising suspicion about its own confidence in the measure.

Tuesday’s announcement also included the decision that students would be given access to the information about their schools and neighborhood contained in Landscape, starting in the 2020-2021 school year.

Whether this new course will satisfy all critics remains to be seen, as does the extent to which colleges will now use Landscape given the controversial roll-out. The momentum away from requiring standardized admission tests at all is growing as more and more colleges elect to go to a test-optional policy. That trend will continue. Nonetheless, the College Board is to be commended for taking the criticisms of the adversity measure to heart and deciding to not go forward with a measure that was mired in too much immediate controversy to ever be viewed as legitimate.