It's fine to recognize it. But if you say, z-score applicants by their 'adversity score' peer group, then you negate the impact of their parents efforts. If you negate their parents efforts, you make it not worthwhile for their parents to make those efforts in the first place. If you make it not worthwhile to make those efforts, they won't be made. And society as a whole will be worse off for it.

The whole point is to devalue those efforts. I thought OP wanted “equality of opportunity.” You can’t have equality of opportunity if some kids get a head start because of their parents.

In a world where the efforts of parents don't help their kids, parents won't make efforts. This will degrade the educational attainment of all kids. Most people consider this to be a bad thing.

"diminishing the effect outsized parental involvement can have on college admissions" != "efforts of parents don't help their kids"

That really depends on how much diminishing you do. Either way, at the margin, you decrease the return to parental investment. At the margin, parents will invest less.

I don't think you can ever eliminate that, short of removing kids from their parents Plato's Republic style.

Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)

I agree that you can’t equality of opportunity without the government taking over the task of raising children. But that undermines OP’s premise. If “equality of opportunity” is not an option, then “equality of outcome” should be on the table.

I really don't like where you are going with this. It is too close to an anti-intellectualism theory for my comfort.

Because the College Board isn't doing it in a way that truly reflects the adversity each kid faced.

For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.

This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.

The crime rate in a neighborhood is actually something kids can control (i.e. they can commit crimes to boost their scores).

The anti-gentrification tactic extended to SATs! I like it!