Education Week - June 3, 2019 - 21

College Board's 'Adversity Score' Riles School Counselors
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students on level of adversity, or grit,
or what-have-you, and ACT is not,
does that mean the ACT is going to
become a better test for more affluent students to take so they're not
identified as low adversity?" she said.
The "disadvantage level" scores are
part of a project the College Board
began developing in 2015 at the request of colleges. The resulting dashboard presents admissions officers
with information about students'
neighborhoods and high schools, such
as the poverty level and the availability of challenging coursework, to
help them see students' SAT scores
"in context" of where they live and go
to school.
Admissions officials can evaluate
ACT performance with the tool also,
because the College Board built ACT
score equivalents into its system.
Those kinds of conversions, known
as concordances, are widely criticized
as inaccurate, however.
College Board CEO David Coleman said the project is meant to help
colleges recognize student qualities
that the SAT can't capture, such as
resourcefulness. Essays, letters of recommendation, and the "profiles" most
high schools post can capture the
challenges and circumstances students face, he said, but in many cases,
colleges must dig to find those things
out, or simply do without them. Without a tool like the dashboard, he said,
"the SAT could be misleading."
"To warrant that the playing field is
now level isn't right or just," Coleman
said. "In the America we live in ... the
vast majority of students are working
with a lot less than the top third. To
then say that the SAT is enough to
reflect what you can do, no, it isn't."
College-admissions representatives
who've been piloting the dashboard
said they've found it useful. Scott
Verzyl, the dean of admissions at the
University of South Carolina, said
that in each of the two years the institution has been using it, his team
has admitted about 125 students "we
probably would not have considered
otherwise" into its entering freshman
classes of about 6,000.
"It helps us find students from underrepresented high schools, first-generation and low-income students, and
students who've done well achieving
academically despite being in an environment that's stacked against them
in some ways," Verzyl said.

Geographic Diversity
Joy St. John, the director of admissions at Wellesley College, said
the dashboard has helped her team
get a more detailed picture of applicants coming from regions of the
country that don't typically send
many students to the Massachusetts
school. Knowing, for instance, that an
Oklahoma student lives in a remote
rural community helps an admissions officer see how she could bring
a potentially enriching perspective to
campus, St. John said.
"Sometimes students don't know
what's most unique about them," she
said. "It might be something really
special and would inform their aca-

HOW DOES THE COLLEGE BOARD RATE THE 'DISADVANTAGE'
OF STUDENTS' SCHOOLS AND NEIGHBORHOODS?
The "environmental context dashboard" is a tool that provides colleges with "level of
disadvantage" scores for a student's neighborhood and high school. The scores are based on
federal education and census data about income, education, family structure, jobs, and housing,
and on College Board data about college enrollment.

Factors that make up the "disadvantage scores"
for a student's neighborhood and high school:

INCOME

EDUCATIONAL
ATTAINMENT

FAMILY
STRUCTURE

(median family income,
percentage of households
in poverty or getting food
stamps)

(percentage of adults
with less than a four-year
degree or high school
diploma)

(percentage of single
parents with children)

HOUSING

COLLEGE-GOING
BEHAVIOR

CRIME RATE

(likelihood that students
will attend a four-year
college)

(factored only into
a neighborhood
score)

(percentage of rental,
vacant, or owned homes;
mobility/housing turnover,
vacancy rate)

EMPLOYMENT
(percentage of adults
unemployed,
in "nonprofessional" jobs
or agriculture jobs)

Legal Battles Looming?

Additional context that the dashboard provides, but does
not factor into the "disadvantage scores":
LOCALE (city/suburban/town/rural)

AVERAGE SENIOR CLASS SIZE

RISK OF "UNDERMATCHING"

AVERAGE SAT SCORES of freshmen

(not applying to colleges likely to accept them)

CURRICULAR RIGOR (school average
AP score, number of AP exams taken,
percentage of seniors taking AP exams)

PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS ELIGIBLE
FOR SUBSIDIZED MEALS

at colleges the school's SAT-taking
graduates attend

INFORMATION TO PLACE STUDENT IN
CONTEXT AT THEIR SCHOOL: SAT or
ACT scores compared to other students
at the school

SOURCE: College Board
Images: Getty

demic work, and their interactions in
the classroom and on our campus. It's
another form of diversity we want to
be able to consider."
The dashboard is based in part on
research by Michael N. Bastedo, a
University of Michigan scholar. He
has found that low-income students
are more likely to be admitted to college when admissions officers review
"contextual" information about their
circumstances.
But the College Board's program
caused enough uproar that Bastedo
took to Twitter, posting a long stream
of tweets to clarify what the program
does and doesn't do.
"It's not just one adversity score,"
he wrote. "The [dashboard] is not a
panacea. Applicants will have other
stressors and adversities in their
lives (disabilities, death of parent,
many things) that have to come

through the rest of the application.
That's holistic review. This [new tool]
is only trying to improve one part."

'Striver's' Tool Scrapped
This isn't the first time the College
Board has considered using socioeconomic and other data to round out the
perceptions of students' SAT scores.
In 1999, the Educational Testing
Service, which designs the SAT questions, created a "striver's" tool that
would have identified students who
scored higher than expected based on
racial, socioeconomic, and other data.
Race, class, and parental education
have long influenced students' SAT
scores, causing widespread mistrust
of what those scores reflect.
The striver's program emerged
from worry that the U.S. Supreme
Court might ban affirmative action.

tage" scores. "If they're going to continue to push testing as a factor in the
admissions process, then they might
as well give us more data to put those
numbers into context," said one participant in a private Facebook group
for college counselors.
Others were suspicious of the College Board's motives for building the
new tool, at a time when the list of
colleges that now make the SAT or
ACT optional has grown to more
than 1,200. Could the new tool be a
bid to stop more from jumping ship?
David Quinn, an International Baccalaureate coordinator in Lynnwood,
Wash., got this text from a colleague:
"[College Board President] Coleman
is gonna hand out shirts at [the next
counselors' conference] that say: The
College Board! We're Still Relevant!"
Many counselors felt caught in a
bind. They knew they'd have to explain to parents how the additional
score might affect their children, but
didn't have enough information yet.
Some posted notes to colleagues on
social media, asking if anyone knew
which 150 colleges would pilot the
system next year because parents
were already asking.

Several states had already done so.
But colleges "freaked out" about the
news, and the College Board shut
down the program, said Anthony
Carnevale, who led the striver's project for ETS 20 years ago.
The reaction to the College Board's
new dashboard drew comments online that showed its power to reignite old affirmation-action debates.
A woman who identified herself as
Carol Ambrose9 posted on Twitter:
"do U want a person who got into
school because of a high #adversity
score performing surgery or making life & death decisions 4 U or do
U want someone who actually has
the ability and intelligence 2 get into
school. Really just #affirmativeaction
renamed." She ended her post with
"vote @realDonaldTrump."
Others sounded grudgingly supportive of the new "level of disadvan-

Jill Madenberg, the founder of
Madenberg College Consulting, in
Lake Success, N.Y., said that she
got a call from one parent of a 9th
grader and a 7th grader.
"She was questioning the SAT
versus the ACT in light of this,"
Madenberg said. "I told her it's way
too early to make that call."
Veteran counselors predicted a
period of confusion and anxiety in
the shortage of information about
the College Board's new system.
"Counselors will be asking, how
will this child be measured? And
at least initially, they won't have
much clarity," said Scott Griggs,
who worked as a college counselor
and principal in private schools
before assuming leadership of the
Independent Schools Association
of the Southwest, which accredits
private schools. "It will add a layer
of confusion to an already complicated process."
Many who reacted to the College Board's new plan were uneasy that students and counselors
wouldn't get to see the "disadvantage scores," learn how the factors
in it are weighted, or check their
accuracy.
"If school counselors and students are not told the score, what
happens when it is inaccurate in
some way? Who is checking?" Cunitz said.
Some saw legal battles looming.
Jon Boeckenstedt, the associate
vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University in
Chicago, and an outspoken critic
of admissions testing, posted on
Twitter that students won't see
their disadvantage scores "[u]ntil
the parents of some rich, white boy
at a New England prep school sues,
claiming the Adversity Index unfairly penalizes the boy for being
rich and white and from a New
England prep school."

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