College Board openly trying to skirt the Supreme Court with secret adversity score!
NEW YORK (PNN) - May 16, 2019 - The College Board is going to assign a secret “adversity score” to students who take the SAT in an apparent attempt to help colleges get around a potential Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions.
The score will be assigned to every single student who takes the test, but students will not know what the score is, and the College Board is not disclosing how the score is determined.
Colleges will see the 1-100 score, called the “Overall Disadvantage Level” when they view a student’s test results. Anything over 50 designates hardship.
The move is an attempt to do away with differences in test scores that result from disparities in wealth and education and preempts a ruling from the Supreme Court on race-based affirmative action. Several college admissions officers told The Wall Street Journal the tool would be especially useful if the Supreme Court bans race-based admissions.
“The purpose is to get to race without using race,” said Anthony Carnevale, former employee of the College Board and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
A group representing Asian American students has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University claiming admissions officers discriminate against them by penalizing them as a group for high test scores in order to get a more diverse student body.
The College Board would not say how it makes the score or weighs the 15 factors considered, which include poverty levels based on a student’s address and the crime rate in his or her neighborhood. The score will be based on public records, including the Census, and other sources “proprietary” to the College Board. It does not include race.
The Amerikan College Testing (ACT) plans to announce a similar score later this year.
“If I am going to make room for more of the [poor and minority] students we want to admit and I have a finite number of spaces, then someone has to suffer and that will be privileged kids on the bubble,” said John Barnhill, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Florida State University.
FSU was part of a beta test of the score last year, and Barnhill said the score resulted in a 5% rise in nonwhite enrollment.
