NEW YORK, NY May 16 (DPI) – The College Board, which administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test, announced this week it plans to assign a rating to students’ backgrounds – at least some of their backgrounds – a decidedly non-objective “Adversity Score” that has spurred readers of all political stripes to wonder aloud, again, what the hell’s going on.

The “Adversity Score” is supposed to give colleges some indication of what kind of social handicaps students face, by making a judgment about the quality of the high school they attend, the community and zip code they live in, as well as the crime rate they have to put up with, etc. The 1-100 rating would not include America’s ultra-hot button issue – race and ethnicity – as well as family issues such as divorce.

The score is apparently intended to give college admission offices some indication of hardships overcome by their candidates, even though colleges have been adept at assessing such hardships for at least 40 years.

Readers of the conservative Wall Street Journal were – somewhat predictably – outraged that the people responsible for the SAT would inject themselves into society’s most fraught issue – inequality – with all its attendant issues of privilege, opportunity and social stratification.  But many comments too were remarkably nuanced – and insightful – and powerfully refuted the logic of using incomplete information to assess young people’s personal situations.

The most popular among 1900 reader comments:

Race and wealth are not the only adversities one experiences.  I grew up in a home that on paper fits the bill of white privilege.  Behind closed doors the reality was far from the image.  My mother suffered from severe mental illness, my father traveled for weeks at a time, and my sister and I were left to often times take care of our selves starting in 7th grade.  We fed ourselves, did our laundry, found rides to activities…etc.  We spent more time visiting mental institutions than any child should.   We coped with our mother’s multiple suicide attempts and drug abuse.  We experienced severe emotional abuse by someone who was too sick to understand what she was doing to us and we had no support and no one to go to for help.   Despite all of that we found our way, but this would not consider us to be “strivers”.  So my point being, we all have our own issues and battles to fight, we need to stop pretending that race and socioeconomic status are the only factors.

As a 27-year public school teacher, the privilege I see today is not based on ethnicity; all ethnicities have some form of privilege built into the system now.  The real privilege is the ‘I come from a stable home with involved parent(s)’.  An African -American student from a stable home has more going for them than an Asian-American student from a broken home.  I wonder how SAT will measure that?  I’ve had students from hell-holes that radiated success thanks to a solid family structure.

My wife is Asian, I’m white and our daughter is 50/50.  My wife came from a very poor household, but scored high on her SAT.  If scored today, would her Asian race/high SAT score negate her poor upbringing in this adversity score?  Will my daughter receive a double negative for being both white and Asian?

Regrettably, while intentions may appear honorable, this initiative institutionalizes the so-called soft bigotry of low expectations.  Without exception, today’s students will compete in tomorrow’s work force, where they may suffer perceptions that they aren’t as competitive because they were “pushed” along by the system.  Would you want your surgeon to be perceived as less than the best?

Divorce wasn’t mentioned in the article, but you bring up a great point. How arrogant is the College Board to think that they can measure anyone’s adversity? There are many other challenges, like a broken family, that cannot be scored. This is similar to corporations using the Myers-Briggs test to create ‘diverse’ teams. They’re treating people like ingredients in some overpriced, fancy dessert that will never be perfect enough.

But the real surprise – in reader reaction, at least – came from the comment boards of the NYT, whose treatment of the idea was generally more sympathetic than the WSJ’s. The most recommended comments on NYTimes.com were just as critical:

I don’t want the college board knowing and storing and evaluating the details of children’s lives, and I don’t want colleges and universities to start discriminating against kids and families who value privacy and/or control of their own sensitive data and thus don’t provide information about their hardships. Furthermore, while perhaps well-intentioned, it is a grotesque exercise and a harmful model for our young people to play the game of who suffered more, which hardships “count” and which do not, or whose experience is more or less worthy.

Such a dreadful idea. Let’s fix a slightly flawed predictive tool by creating a non-transparent, impossible to validate, and likely arbitrary scoring system. At least the SAT has lots of independent research investigating it. I thought we just denigrated credit scoring systems that used aggregate neighborhood data to make decisions about individuals. Now likely the same critics are offering neighborhood data as a remedy in admissions decisions. I think that most of this is about preserving the revenue flow for the SAT system, and less about making better decisions.

Colleges know darn well who they are and are not admitting. The SAT folks should stick to administering tests and stay out of politics – it undermines their core function.

“It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. ” So it is based not on the student as an individual, but the area. Therefore, if wealthy, highly-educated families moved into bad neighborhoods, they could increase the chances of their child getting into an elite college?

Future headline: Wealthy family moves to poor neighborhood, parents fake divorce and father actually pled guilty and went to jail on fake assault on his own child in order to get his son a higher adversity score on the SAT.