CURMUDGUCATION: The College Board Tweaked The SAT Adversity Score. But It's Not Fixed-- Or Gone.

CURMUDGUCATION: The College Board Tweaked The SAT Adversity Score. But It's Not Fixed-- Or Gone.

The College Board Tweaked The SAT Adversity Score. But It's Not Fixed-- Or Gone.

Since David Coleman took the helm at the College Board, its flagship product--the ubiquitous SAT, one-time queen of college entrance exams--has been the victim of a series of unforced errors. The roll-out and walk-back of the "adversity score" is only the latest--and recent reports of that score's death may be greatly exaggerated.

The company ran into some glitches in its rush to get a new, Common Core-aligned test to market. Coleman expressed a desire for the test to be a great leveler, a test that would recognize and elevate intellectual prowess wherever it was found. The SAT has long been criticized as being loaded with cultural bias, and the College Board's own data seems to support that assertion. The other knock on the test was that it could be beaten with the help of test prep and coaching (a criticism bolstered by an entire SAT test prep industry). And the College Board has been confirming that these criticisms are valid.

In 2014, the College Board entered into a partnership with Khan Academy to offer free test prep to anyone who wanted it. Rather than designing a test that was immune to test prep (which may, in fact, be impossible), the College Board appeared to be conceding that SAT scores measured, at least in part, how well a student had been coached for the test.

Then came the Environmental Context Dashboard, featuring the Adversity Score. The score was supposed to capture the social and economic background of students through a combination of fifteen dimensions. But though it was supposedly CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The College Board Tweaked The SAT Adversity Score. But It's Not Fixed-- Or Gone.