Reverse Engineering the "SAT landscape"

I’ve thought about this as well, just out of interest. It would be a lot of work, more than it’s worth for a single individual.

But this older Wall Street Journal story somehow got data from the College Board’s previous version, called the “Adversity Score.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-happens-if-sat-scores-consider-adversity-11574773201

I don’t think this will be exactly the same, since it’s based solely on the high school and I think the Landscape also uses data from the census tract surrounding the student’s home, which may differ from the high school (census tracts are actually pretty small). Moreover, the Adversity Score summed all of this up into a single number, and adjustment factor that was applied to the SAT score. People freaked out over this and so the Adversity Score got dropped, but I’d image that more or less the same data filter through in some sense via Landscape. (Probably adjusting the SAT score made more sense for a college that has to process many thousands of applications, but I can understand people getting upset. Still, I wouldn’t be shocked if colleges are currently doing something similar…)

The advantage of Landscape is that, at very low cost, it tells you about the community and school in which the student grew up. The disadvantage is that it gives an admissions advantage to well-off students in lower-income areas while disadvantaging lower-income students in well-off areas.

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