The College Board has dropped the controversial idea of giving students a score for their social-economic circumstances.
The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT, after facing criticism from educators and parents.
Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score.
The original tool, called the “environmental context dashboard,” combined about 15 socio-economic metrics from a student’s high school and neighborhood to create something college admission officers called an “adversity score.”
Considering a student’s race and class in college admissions decisions is a contentious issue. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.
In case the WSJ article is behind a paywall, here is another.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This new metric won’t solve the persistent problem of the wealth gap in this country.
ESPECIALLY since the metric/algorithm deciding need would be thought up and put together by people who have zero idea of what honestly needs to be exposed and measured
I always thought this idea was pretty suspect. I mean, the US is so segregated by race and class, what kind of admissions officer at a major university would have no idea where a student sits on this continuum just based on the high school from which they are graduating, without having the College Board tell them?
An admission officer at a major university? Sorry, but the big schools farm the admission process out to companies that need useless data to select and sort. The tests and the push for every child to go to college has created another head on the hydra of reform.
Hi Lisa M,
You wrote that “the big schools farm the admissions process out to companies…”.
Do you have firsthand knowledge of this?
At the University of California, high school and community college counselors have been told that every student’s full application file is read by a human being at least once, system-wide.
Thanks for any info you can provide!
brk,
I agree. I have never heard of any university subcontracting admissions to a vendor. I talked to a very experienced high level university administrator who thought subcontracting admissions “made no sense”.
Va Tech recently allowed in 2,000 more freshman than they can handle. The excess students will be residing in the Holiday Inn, The Blacksburg Inn and another hotel. They will also be erecting walls in the open spaces in the new dorms for the excess of students. I asked a friend whose daughter works at Va Tech (she was also a student there) and was told that the company that handles their admission process made a mistake. I’ve heard this from other parents as well. My assumption is that most applications are weeded out by a hired company and then for only select majors, the application is read/processed by the college admission office. There is no way that college admission offices can personally handle the thousands of applications that get sent in….especially in that short a time frame.
LisaM,
Your friend is mistaken. Virginia Tech’s office of admission does the whole admission process, though they do have Virginia Tech staff outside the admission office help reading the required essays. See https://vt.edu/admissions/undergraduate/about.html
This is a de facto admission that the SAT discriminates against poor and minority students. So we’re still using this invalid test because … ?
$illy me. Of cour$e I know why.
Exactly. Time for every other college and university in the country to follow the many who have dropped the SAT or ACT requirement. The SAT never was as good a predictor of success in college as high-school grades were.
My department just looked at this. Math SAT/ACT scores do a better job predicting introductory economics grades than either high school grades or high school math grades.
Perhaps we see this in economics because we have a single level of introductory courses that both high and low math SAT/ACT students take. Many of the natural sciences have different levels of introductory courses, sorting the high math SAT/ACT students into one course, the low SAT/ACT score students into another. If each class has the same distribution of grades, SAT/ACT scores will not predict grades, instead they predict which class a student will take. For example, a student at NYU might take Sound and Music, General Physics I, or Physics I as an introductory physics course. I guess that the average math SAT/ACT score for students in Physics I is a good deal higher than for students in Sound and Music. I also think it likely that the class GPA is higher in Sound and Music than in Physics I. If that is true, higher math SAT/ACT scores would actually predict lower grades in introductory physics courses.
The physics classes at NYU can be found here: http://cas.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/cas/academic-programs/bulletin/departments-and-programs/department-of-physics/course-offerings.html
This evening, local news reported that Xavier U. has dropped testing as a requirement and viewers were told two branches of the University of Cincinnati stopped requiring the tests even earlier.
So, wait….wait. Didn’t the College Board come out with this idea not that long ago? And, now they’re reversing their plan? (Or, one might say, revising it?) The College Board….those “Trust Our Numbers to Determine Your Future” people?
It sounds like they are making this stuff up as they go along.
It reminds me of the time I was on a low budget flight to vacation in Cancun and the pilot came on the speaker and said, “We’ll be landing in Acapulco soon!” And, there was a collective gasp among the passengers.
Whoops!..wrong city. Cancun, corrected the pilot.
I get the same discomforting feeling when I hear from so-called education “experts” like these people at the College Board. They just keep on ‘building that plane while they are flying it’
Phonies!.
Meanwhile….our children, our public schools, our democracy is being flown into the ground.
“It sounds like they are making this stuff up as they go along.”
Building the plane in mid-air as it’s flying.
Ju$t like Boeing.
“Math SAT/ACT scores do a better job predicting introductory economics grades than either high school grades or high school math grades.”
The important thing for economics is that one is good at regurgitating/repeating BS so a correlation between SAT/ACT scores and economics grades would not be surprising (at least not to some of us)
The folks who actually know how to think and do legitimate math would question all the unreasonable, highly artificial assumptions and “analysis” of economics and hence would be less likely to get a good grade because most economists don’t like it when people question their BS.
Experts! LOL. These people made David Coleman their president. That, in itself, should say it all.
Excellent point, Bob.
The information assembled in Landscape is in the public domain. Admissions officers will use it in ways the College Board cannot control.
Estimates of the “chances of suceess in college” have been published every year by Ed Week, based on information from the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign and the perverse influence of data-mongers who have rigged the Civil Rights Data Collection to included specific course offerings said to be essential for “College and Career readiness.”
Admissions officers may use the Landscape data dashboard to nudge their decisions about individual students based on factors over which students have no control, including the SES of the neighborhood where the school is located, the number of AP courses offered and pass rates for these and so on.
I think the larger aim of the Landscape program is to link evidence of a student’s completion of postsecondary education to “a broad array of data points” selected as if describing a student’s social and economic background to create a profile that can then be used to offloading some judgments to artificial algorithms The AI system will offer “probablity of success” estimates refined by the outcomes for each student.
Sociometric data points do not need to be reduced to a single score for AI to be used as if a proxy for judgments by an admissions officer. Landscape may well function like the resume screening programs that deliver promising candidates to persons who are recruiting for jobs. For a look at this process and its consequences see Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neal and/or posts at her website: mathbabe.
I was feeling a little better about “Landscape” as a tool per the WTOP article (thank you for the link, Diane), until I got to the part about using the # of students taking and passing AP tests as a metric of “adversity”.
My school district is located in a fairly low-income community. The students in my district are choosing to take community college classes instead of AP classes for a number of reasons:
Costs:
AP: $94/test
Community College: Free for all HS students (in my community in CA)
Who pays?
AP: Fee waivers are paid by the school district out of the school district’s General Fund
(Previously, College Board absorbed the testing cost of qualifying low-income students, but no longer.)
Community College: Taxes pay 100% of HS student fees in my county, except for books and supplies, and the college library has most textbooks on a two-hour, in-house loan.
College Credit:
AP: Must score a 3 or better for college credit; some colleges require a 4 or 5
Community College: if course is designated as “transfer-eligible”, college credit is automatic to a public, in-state, 4-year universities, assuming the course is passed
Ethics:
College Board creates a tool (“Landscape”) which uses passage rates of their tests (AP) as one of the metrics. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? How is that an unbiased metric?
As a side note, most of the students from my community are choosing to start their college education at community college. Except for students with the very highest grades and scores, College Promise (first 2 years of FT attendance is free at community college), has really changed the metric for matriculation to a four-year college directly from HS in my area.
In some ways, that is a real loss for many four-year institutions, especially those which are private, as my community is quite diverse.
Some years ago, when my wife and I had been teaching at the same school long enough to know a lot about the children, we used to sit at graduation and watch with some pride at graduation as the children we knew got their diplomas. We knew what adversities they faced, and independently of each other, we started assigning an adversity number to each child as we knew them. Kind of like the doctors now ask you about your pain. We would write the number down beside the kid’s name in the graduation program. It was an astounding exercise. Nestled out in the country, our school seemed impervious to all the violence and hostility in tunes during the 1990s about students and their schools. To the contrary, a huge majority of the students were dealing with trauma that could not have helped but impact their performance in school. Our graduation programs were splotched with ink.
Perhaps it is a good idea to try to quantify the degree of personal adversity a student has overcome, but I think it interesting that I never thought of trying to make money off our scale. Maybe we should have fabricated some algorithm that we kept secret and used it to give teachers the shaft. I could retire.
Thanks for the Jeremianic vocab.