Destroying merit for racial fantasies

College Board scraps SAT's 'adversity score' months after it was first announced

The company's president admitted that the score had been 'confusing'

 MIKE CIANDELLA

College Board, the company that manages the SAT exam, has announced that it will be scrapping its controversial "adversity score," just a few months after it was first announced.

What's the background?

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that College Board would be adding an adversity score to its SATs. While the exams themselves would judge academic proficiency, they would be attached to an anonymized adversity score that factored in things like poverty level and the crime rate in the neighborhood where the student went to school.

The College Board hoped that by including this score, they could make the test more fair to disadvantaged students.
"There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less but have accomplished more," College Board President David Coleman told the Wall Street Journal at the time. "We can't sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT."

What happened now?

"The idea of a single score was confusing because it seemed that all of a sudden the College Board was trying to score adversity. That's not the College Board's mission," Coleman told NPR on Tuesday. "The College Board scores achievement, not adversity."

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Coleman said that his company decided that "people were right when they said that 'you should not be scoring this'." He said that people were "comfortable" with the College Board "giving general consistent information, so that no matter where you live or learn you get an equal look. And that's fair. And that's a good role for us to play."

Instead of the adversity score, the College Board created "Landscape," a method of providing colleges with information about high schools without using a per-student scoring system. These school ratings would be publicly available.