Like many immigrant parents in Saratoga, my parents worked their way to a better life for themselves and for my sister and me. My father attended graduate school in America on a full-ride scholarship in computer engineering and made a living working as a research assistant.
After graduating, he worked at a small startup company for long hours every day, often over the weekend, for several years until he saved enough money to purchase a home in Saratoga.
It’s an understatement to say my father worked hard to give me the life I lead today, so when the College Board announced on May 16 that it will fully implement an adversity score system in 2020 to taxonomize students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, I was livid.
The College Board calculates a student’s adversity score, a number from 1 to 100 with higher numbers indicating greater adversity, based on socioeconomic factors associated with a student’s school and neighborhood, such as crime rates, median family income and parental education, according to the Washington Post. College Board’s chief executive officer David Coleman said the score intends to provide admissions officers with a deeper framework when considering SAT scores.
Despite these good intentions, the index poses a multitude of problems regarding equality and leveling the educational playing field. One of these issues lies in the name itself: adversity score.
Adversity, like happiness or any other abstract concept, cannot be quantified. When the College Board implements this system, they might as well add a variety of other equally unquantifiable indexes that attempt to quantify ways that students can be disadvantaged, such as through battling mental illnesses.
These other challenges can arguably affect students’ SAT scores more than their socioeconomic backgrounds do. Adversity comes in a multitude of other forms that wealth cannot eliminate.
As a matter of fact, according to the National Review, College Board’s own data has shown that test scores predict students’ college performances almost equally regardless of their adversity levels.
Not only does this number provide an inaccurate representation of the hardships a student has faced, but it punishes students, like many of those in Saratoga, whose parents worked hard to give them better lives. Even if their parents can afford tutoring or other resources to help them prepare for standardized exams, not all students use those materials. Some opt for using practice books they borrow from the library, Khan Academy or other free online resources, all of which students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds can access as well.
Access to tutoring does not guarantee higher scores; if a student from an affluent family does not take their extra help seriously, their test score will still reflect that lack of effort. Likewise, if a student from a lower-income family studies hard and uses whatever resources they can access, their score will reflect their hard work. Factoring in an adversity score only places middle class students at an extreme disadvantage.
To make matters worse, students cannot see their adversity scores and have no control over them. The College Board simply attaches numbers to them without any transparency, and students can do nothing but accept these unfair labels.
It is not in the College Board’s position to interfere with admissions. They should adhere to their original purpose: providing standardized testing and numbers that can give colleges objective measures of students’ skills.
From there, universities can consider socioeconomic backgrounds with their own methods. Colleges already have their own versions of these adversity scores in forms like affirmative action. The adversity score only complicates and skews these decisions against qualified but financially stable applicants.
To properly address the education gap between students from lower-income families and those from middle to high income families, people should focus instead on education reforms and extending greater educational opportunities to the poor. This would altogether abolish the need for the pity points of an adversity score.
Students all have different backgrounds and economic factors that may play certain roles in their academic performances. But in the end, the adversity score is harmful and misleading because money and economic status only tell a fraction of our stories.