Still no info on how the score is calculated. Weighting of factors is totally arbitrary, as there is no unified definition of adversity to target. Validation of a model is impossible.
One of countless omissions in such a score: adopted / foster children.
Also, completely unethical for a student to be judged by a score that he/she cannot access.
To appreciate why this is necessary you need to know what it means to grow up in a ghetto.
@agreatstory The problem is, though, that the score does not truly reflect the range of adversity faced by students who go to schools that have a more diverse student population and that draws from neighborhoods across a range of SES profiles.
Our local school is diverse—a Title 1 school, more than half free and reduced lunch, about 10% English learners, with Hispanic students making up the majority ethnic group. Many kids in our school are facing real adversity. But there is a significant segment of the student population, like my daughter, who have not faced the same kind of disadvantages that their classmates have.
I find it problematic that our daughter and other privileged classmates could benefit from an aggregate measure that makes it look like their high scores were attained despite adversity that they didn’t actually experience. The assumption that a school “average” fairly represents individuals in a diverse setting is a fatal flaw to the measure. Not all disadvantaged students grow up in an isolated ghetto; many grow up in areas adjacent to more affluent ones. And this score underestimates their adversity at the same time as it overstates that of their more advantaged classmates.
While everyone is calling it an adversity score, it’s actually environmental context data. It does not eliminate or replace personal data. If you look at what is provided to the college (which you can), it shows data on the school like average AP score, how a student 's score compares to others in their school, etc. Remember that most colleges, in setting up their admissions offices geographically, have been trying to compile a version of this material themselves. If your school gets visits from college reps, odds are that they have put together some version of this already.
If a kid is coming from a school where his 1250 SAT is exceptional, that’s noteworthy but might not have been noted. For everyone who is at a school that draws from a diverse SES background and has good stats, you are already probably a school that AOs like - strong academic prep as well as ability to thrive outside your bubble.
It’s interesting that everyone is convinced this will work against them. To me, the reaction speaks more to the anxiety that is college admissions than to anything else.
@EllieMom Completely Agree. Our City has our Magnet schools in the worst parts of town. It’s open to all students in the surrounding area as a regular school but has a Magnet program for those who wish to do the 1.x hour commute for those living on the other side of the city. The area around it has elementary and middle schools with 85% Hispanic and 85% Early Language Learners and could be as high as 90% Economically Disadvantaged. Imagine the Adversity score for those students just from the surrounding ‘environment’.
Our City is Property Wealthy. Housing prices are high everywhere. However, a HS could be Title 1 (This means at least 40% of your students are Low Income) or not. Students are bussed from multiple zip codes. Everyone is free to Transfer to any HS in our City District. Our District tries to equalize college admissions by weighting a Pre-AP class no different than an AP class giving ‘all’ students the chance for a higher ranking. In our case - it seems like our District is doing it’s best to equalize and there is a current battle going on to equalize ‘more’ bussing from those more disadvantaged areas to the more advantaged areas. Adding CollegeBoard Adversity into this mix is going to really upset this well-built balance.
I’m thankful I have no more skin in this game.
If colleges want to know how a student compares to others at their school, there is a very simple, direct method of measuring that: it’s called class rank. If elite colleges care about how students compare to their classmates, they can announce they will no longer accept applications from schools that don’t provide class ranking.
@gardenstategal , you made some very good points.
I’m a bad example for this scoring. The SAT asks for the home address where I receive mail. They are very specific about it being “where you receive mail”. Our family has mail delivered to a service which removes junk mail and scans/emails pictures of all other mail. We can then pickup the mail we want or pay extra to have it forwarded to our current location. This is a benefit my work has provided for 10 years now because I work on-location much of the year. So I’m not sure what my son entered when registering for the SAT.
@roethlisburger , only kinda. Class rank measures how well a kid did in classes graded in a way that we don’t know and is based on weighting we may not understand. It may be valuable in one regard. If a kid got an A+ in a class and a 3 on the AP exam, there are a lot of conclusions you can draw (and most, imo, are not so favorable to that student.) But if you see that the school’s average AP score is 1.2, you might see that differently. How that SAT or AP score compares to others measures something else.
Kids at selective high schools may get into great colleges being at the 50% mark for their class. Why do colleges accept those kids? Because they understand the context of their grades and academic environment. At many lower performing schools, the colleges don’t know the context. I don’t think that providing that is a problem. A college may still decide that a kid, regardless of potential, is inadequately prepared for their environment. It isn’t a score adjustment. It’s an additional profile not prepared by the school and prepared in a way that is consistent across schools.
I would say it’s primarily because private colleges want lots of rich, full pay and legacy kids. It’s even better if they are a great lax player or have a famous parent.
I can see why you might think that, but at most top prep schools, at least half the kids are getting FA. And looking at college acceptances and matriculation at several that I am familiar with, ability to pay isn’t the driver.
^This proves my point. If half the kids get FA, then half don’t. There’s not many high schools, rich enough to where colleges could admit a random student with a 50% probability the student would be full pay. That’s before you look at whether the 50% BS admit to an elite college is a legacy or donor’s kid.
I personally can definitely see how this would be effective, although it does bring up a lot of questions. It makes me wonder how they’ll calculate it. I have a bad feeling that people who are not disadvantaged may find ways to manipulate the system depending on the ways in which it’s made, and I don’t know how effective this could be. I feel like if you want to compare all possible disadvantages, there could be a lot. Would it include mental/physical/chronic illnesses? I definitely think it’s a great idea, but the actual execution of the idea I fear won’t be as good as people hope it to be. But yeah, people who are really dealing with a lot more should be given greater chances – they’ve had to work through harder situations to get in the same place as others.
My kid’s high school had over half the class receiving free or reduced price meals. It was also a magnet. Some of the magnet kids came from very poor backgrounds, a few did not. And some very few kids from the neighborhood were from the strip of waterfront properties on the edge of our zone, where million dollar houses with matching yachts are not uncommon. Most waterfront kids go to private schools, but a couple didn’t. One was a dumbass and trouble maker and I’m pretty sure his parents would have lied about his socioeconomic status to get him into college, if he hadn’t surprised us all and decided to go into the Navy.
This whole thing is flawed.
It is like cutting taller trees down rather than nurturing and caring for shorter trees so that they grow taller.
Consider the following:
Not that I like this adversity score business, but there are kids in my town’s high school that come from extreme poverty (public housing project type poverty), and there are kids who come from multi-million dollar homes, driving BMWs to school! Overall, the town is considered fairly snooty-wealthy, but I think about 20% of the students get free lunch. How can a geographically based adversity score possibly fairly reflect the very different socioeconomic circumstances of the different kids at such a high school? This is ridiculous.
Remember, CB is the same organization that brought us the CSS Profile. So let’s stop calling CB’s new score an “Adversity Score”, and start calling it what it really is: a “Projected EFC” tier score based on the projected financial standing (projected assets and income) of the student’s family. Think for a moment about just how much data CB has. It would not be hard to distill the historical CSS Profile data already on file (wealth, broadly defined) into a Projected Family Financial Strength metric that would nearly perfectly correlate to actual EFC when viewed on a portfolio basis. I’ll bet CB has enough data to get an accurate P-EFC tier score down to the street level in many communities. Now look at this from the perspective of the typical ‘need-aware’ school. Imagine that you are the one who is responsible for deciding between admitting one of two URMs, each of whom has similar apps, except one is P-EFC tier 46 and the other is P-EFC tier 61. It won’t be long before the schools will know what a delta of 15 P-EFC tier points means in terms of revenue to the school. From the school’s perspective, could you afford not to use this information? Really? Most schools do not have an endowment large enough to allow them to make need-unaware decisions. Heck, you might even start to reconsider that policy about not requiring the SAT for admissions…which was CB’s objective all along.
I just think this conversation and the many others like it continue to prove we will never have a system that is entirely fair and maybe we should just accept it and move on. We all have our own personal stories about how we or our children or friends’ children were “unfairly” treated in the college admissions process. I work with lots of kids in college admissions and overall I feel like the decisions made by the colleges are pretty “fair”…the kids with the higher scores and better grades are the ones getting into the better colleges. Yes there are athletes and legacies and URMs getting in with lower stats here and there, but overall, I feel like the results are directionally correct. And most kids, no matter what your status/background, get rejected from the top tier schools and probably would still get rejected if we didn’t have adversity scores or AA, or whatever. When colleges have a single digit acceptance rate, it’s almost like saying it’s not fair that you didn’t win the lottery.
This process will never be fair and no matter how we change things there will be winners and losers, people that get more of a bump than they deserve and people that get hurt in the process more than they deserve. But the kids in the latter scenario, especially if they have money, can still achieve great things at the universities that are lucky enough to get them.
@collegemomjam , I thought maybe I was the only person who felt that way.
It’s amazing that kids and parents want to blame minority students for “stealing” an acceptance from them. Most of the top schools have an African-American enrollment of 2%-8%. That equates to approximately 125 accepted students in a freshman class of 2500 at a university with a total undergraduate enrollment of 10,000.
It seems to me more time ought to be devoted to figuring out why those who did not get in could not beat out the other 95% of accepted freshmen. Or better yet, simply realize that a school that accepts only 7% of all applicants just might not accept your child – through no fault of your child, and certainly no fault of the students who were offered admission.
@roethlisburger My son will be attending a top 20 school (well top 21 to be specific) and was in the top 25% of his class. He is neither rich nor an athlete. He is smart with an excellent GPA and scores. He just happens to attend a school where the majority of the kids are VERY smart. This is why our school no longer ranks. High schools are moving away from class rank because it tells so little about it’s students. The school profile gives much more information. Colleges are not going to start demanding that high schools go back to ranking its students.