> 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.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
This adversity score is advertized so that it will help out poorer and more abused students, in an emperical way.
But what this is actually telling schools is if the person is rich-ish or not. Basically, can this family pay the bills and are they likely to attend football games and be donating alumni?
Call me cynical, but if anything, this is going to further segregate the schools towards the rich-ish.
This will give schools a guise under which they can say: 'Look, we're diverse!' But it will allow the space (and the ML inputs) for the schools to maximize profits.
I know that you are very unlikely to be able to maximize all diversity at once. Like, admitting more black women may come at the cost of matriculation rates for transgender people, or more Hispanic people in STEM classes may come at the cost of Asian people in humanties courses, etc. Nothing is perfect.
But this really feels like a Trojan Horse.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-colleg...
"Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities."
These are hard to game, and in many cases if you do game them it's a "Mission Fucking Accomplished" situation. Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing, nor are they willing to put their kids in bad schools with poor people. If they are, great, that neighborhood probably won't stay poor with shitty schools for long.
So the San Francisco school district gives priority to certain neighborhoods roughly based these criteria and gentrification has been a problem. Wealthy folks move into historically poor neighborhoods and benefit from lagging statistics in school choice.
>> Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.
>> This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37 percent white and 21 percent low-income. Districtwide, 15 percent of students are white and 55 percent are low-income.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...
sure, but I don't think any existing laws would prevent them from just buying a second house in a bad part of their home town and using that address for applications and I can't see how the College Board could reliably detect this.
https://whyy.org/segments/the-money-shot-how-school-district...
They'd have a tough time explaining to colleges why their transcript is from Good School District Across Town when they listed their address as Dumpy Neighborhood With Bad Schools.
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.
Not to take away from your point but the colleges having to work against these sort of tricks has a lot of unintended consequences.
There'll be a boom market for Adversity Coaches.
This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-rac...
Realistically, this will be based on ZIP code and registered high school. Information that's already publicly-available. This changes nothing except potentially making neighborhood-level affirmative action more politically palatable.
I do believe with just a few pieces of the information they're taking into consideration (namely, neighborhood, if you have a single parent, and if you're ESL [not sure if they're talking about the child being ESL or the parents]) you could reliably determine if the child is black or Hispanic and therefore worthy of an adversity score boost. Everyone else, get stuffed. They may also be making a big show of using these factors that "technically" don't identify the test taker's race and instead are just disregarding them and relying solely on the self-reported racial information provided when taking the test. Who knows? But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
That is exactly what I expect to happen - as well as poor kids who happen to belong to racial minorities. The College Board published the criteria they will use to calculate the score. Race is not one of the criteria. But you're saying that race will not only be used, but be the primary criteria. So, let's be clear: you're saying the College Board is lying. Which, I can't prove they are not, but I'm inclined to trust them over your claims.
"The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-...
https://twitter.com/i/moments/1129009648214921216
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...
Quote:
These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment.
Each of the three categories has five sub-indicators that are indexed in calculating each student's adversity score. Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities. Together these factors will calculate an individual's adversity score on a scale of one to 100.
I can only imagine the terrifyingly embarrassing situations where people of a race are challenged to prove their race and flip out because they are their race.
[0] https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
- 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.