In the face of backlash from parents, students and university officials across the country, the College Board has abandoned its efforts to include an “adversity score” with students’ SAT scores.
The score was slated to be a quantitative measurement of 15 factors of adversity from a student’s neighborhood and high school. As an alternative to grouping a student’s life experiences into one number, the College Board is now working on a program called Landscape, which will create a profile of data, not a combined score, for each student to display their socioeconomic background.
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag told The Chronicle in June 2019 that Duke did not intend to use the score as an exact measure of hardship, but instead as an “insight into a student’s environmental context.”
According to the College Board’s 2018 results reported by the Wall Street Journal, Asian students scored an average of 100 points higher than the average white student, and white students had a score 177 points higher on average than black students and 133 points higher on average than Hispanic students.
Among all races, children who came from college-educated parents in wealthy families scored higher than those who did not.
In 2018, 50 colleges—including N.C. State University—factored the adversity score into their admissions decisions as part of a beta test. According to the original plan, another 100 institutions, including Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would be added in 2019, and the score would be used more widely in 2020.
“We listened to thoughtful criticism and made Landscape better and more transparent,” said David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, in a statement published by the Wall Street Journal. “Landscape provides admissions officers more consistent background information so they can fairly consider every student, no matter where they live and learn.”
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Maria Morrison was a digital strategy director for The Chronicle's 117th volume. She was previously managing editor for Volume 116.