(NBC) – Now, there is a new controversy over class and privilege when it comes to college admissions.
The SAT, the entrance exam taken by about two million students each year, is adding an “adversity score” intended to help level the playing field.
College Board CEO David Coleman said, “What this tool allows us to see is there is so much more talent out there than a test score reveals alone.”
The College Board, which administers the entrance exam, said the adversity score will be a number between 1 and 100 calculated using 15 factors, including the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood, the relative quality of the student’s high school, family income, and environment.
The score will not be reported to students and parents, only college officials.
When asked how difficult is it to put a number on adversity, Director Of College Counseling Woodward Academy Brian Rutledge replied, “I don’t think it can reasonably be done. It risks reducing something that is very human to a number”
Dr. Duke Bradley is the principal of Benjamin Banneker High School in Georgia. To answer critics who argue the adversity score could be a form of reverse racism, he stated, “Well, I think it’s difficult to kind of say that especially when you come from kind of the perch of privilege.”
He said many of his students live in poverty, and students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds have an advantage of taking the SATS because of their access to better resources.
The adversity score’s official name is Environmental Diversity Context Dashboard and it has already been used by fifty colleges as part of a trial period last year.
150 schools are expected to use it this fall and it will be rolled out more broadly in 2020.
The College Board said race will not be a factor in the adversity score.
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