OP is saying that their family sacrificed a lot to live and attend school in a geographic area that was probably catering towards wealthier people. The new system will be unfair for people like OP as their socioeconomic adjusted scores now get bunched together with the average wealthy student in the area despite not having actually been well off. Perhaps the student had to work after school at her mother's laundromat all day despite living in a good neighborhood and attending a decent school. Not only does this "adversity" not get reflected but basically the effort part of the student (and their family) is getting lost with this new system.

Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.

Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.

In the zero sum game of admissions, boosting someone else for their poor location/school impacts those who sacrificed to get score better without the boost.

A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.

All theoretical at this point I guess. I would prefer to let this play out a little bit more rather than race based quotas/scholarships which more often than not seem to go to kids with the same good backgrounds who just happen to be minorities.

> A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.

They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.

Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.

Who's to say that their lower-income status doesn't out-weigh the other factors you're describing?

The student's family's income is not taken into account for the adversity score.

Seems like an oversight in how the score is calculated, then.

As I understand, there is no 'out-weighing' - holding other factors constant, their adversity score would be even higher if their neighborhood had more crime, or spoke worse english.

Race and geography covary more strongly than ~all other pairs of parameters, such that the one is a reliable proxy for the other.

Exactly, Facebook and a few others got in trouble because advertisers could set geographic criteria which translated quite neatly to race demographics.

The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.

>The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.

That goes both ways. If you've got a group of mostly upper middle class whites, Asians and Indians (i.e. your average tech company) the poor whites are going to hand out with the blacks, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Not having much in common with the majority group is the trait that ties the minority group together.

That’s an impressive claim. Source? I can think of a half dozen things that probably correlate as strongly with race. For example, what you ate for breakfast this morning.

One issue with discriminatory initiatives like this one is that they invite corruption. Given human nature, the invitation will be readily answered and then some. Triple so if the procedure is secret.