Adversity is the new diversity

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort.

Yet last week we learned from a consultant for the College Board, which administers the test, that in fact ‘the SAT was designed as a way of identifying disadvantaged students to enhance social mobility’, which is news to me. Because, alas, minority students have tended to earn lower SAT scores, this same consultant characterises the exam now as ‘a mechanism for preserving privilege’. So proficiency at solving quadratic equations and familiarity with the definition of ‘balderdash’ isn’t merely meaningless; it’s a kind of cheating.

Uncomfortable with those racial disparities — and especially exasperated that Asians have been acing the test, sometimes with the perfect scores unheard of when I took it — for years American colleges have been steadily reducing the weight they give SAT results in admissions decisions. Keen to remain germane, the College Board has now designed an ‘adversity index’ to accompany the test scores, intended to measure a student’s experience of hardship.

Here’s the drill: students are rated in accordance with 31 factors, using census data on the crappiness of their high school (given the abysmal standards in secondary education across the board, all American high schools are crap, but somehow this algorithm manages to make distinctions) and the crappiness of their neighbourhoods (crime rate, home ownership, property values, prevalence of single-parent households, average adult educational attainment, proportion of households where English isn’t spoken in the home, etc).