Before reading the article:
If you were a college admissions officer, what information would you want to have about each applicant? SAT or ACT test scores? Grades? A record of extracurricular activities or work? A personal essay? What else, if anything, would you like to know about the applicant’s life to give context to the documents?
Would it help to know the median income of the neighborhood where the applicant lives? What about crime statistics? How about data that tells about the quality of the applicant’s high school? Or is this information irrelevant? Explain.
Now, read the article, “SAT’s New ‘Adversity Score’ Will Take Students’ Hardships Into Account,” and answer the following questions:
1. What is the College Board? What new measure did it announce last week?
2. What is the goal of this new rating?
3. What are some of the factors that will be taken into consideration in calculating a student’s adversity score? What factors are not taken into consideration? Why were these decisions made, according to the article?
4. What is the Environmental Context Dashboard? When will this system be widely in use?
5. “But the score met instantly with an array of criticisms,” states the article. What are those criticisms? Who is complaining and to whom?
6. Who is Jeremiah Quinlan? How did he describe Yale University’s experience with the College Board’s adversity score?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
Reread the article, looking for statements made by David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, about resourcefulness. How does he define this quality? How would you define it? Do you think that resourcefulness can be measured by looking at a student’s school and neighborhood demographics?
In a related Opinion essay, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes:
No two lives are commensurate and not all adversity can be taken into account. But the College Board is attempting to dictate which forms matter and which do not. It cannot — and does not — attempt to assess the mental toll of being called a “monkey” on your walk home, or of living through the premature death of a parent or sibling. It will not capture the texture of life with an educated but alcoholic or emotionally abusive parent.
And so the dehumanizing message of the new adversity index is that America’s young people are nothing but interchangeable sociological points of data — and the jagged complexity of an individual life somehow can be sanded down, quantified and fairly contrasted.
What is your reaction to this stance on the new rating put forth by the College Board? Does it complicate or affirm your view? Explain.
