Too bad its behind a pay wall. Its interesting that you can plug in your HS and see where it is at on the graph for all US high schools.
Most CC’ers do not have an online subscription to the WSJ.
I do. If you want to post high schools you’re curious about, I’ll look them up.
D’s high school would lose 240 points.
How about a comparison of high schools in one city or district?
For example, Oakland, CA:
Castlemont
Dewey Academy
Fremont
Life Academy
McClymonds
Metwest
Oakland
Oakland International
Oakland Technical
Ralph J Bunche Continuation
Rudsdale Continuation
Rudsdale Newcomer
Skyline
Street Academy
Plus some private high schools in the same city:
Bentley
Bishop O’Dowd
The College Preparatory
Julia Morgan
Head Royce
Holy Names
St Paul’s Episcopal
St Theresa
I was able to access the article on my phone using the “incognito” mode. Couldn’t do it on desktop. Few people in the South take the SAT, so no real info of interest to me.
The first number after the high school name is the median SAT score, the second is the assigned “adversity score” for the overall school (not the state), the third is the adjusted average SAT score after factoring adversity. Median SAT across all schools is 1055.
Castlemont 790, 98, 916
Dewey Academy no info
Fremont 800, 97, 928
Life Academy 860, 98, 998
McClymonds 820, 91, 910
Metwest 890, 92, 988
Oakland 910, 92, 1010
Oakland International 760, 94, 844
Oakland Technical 1090, 60, 1101
Ralph J Bunche Continuation no info
Rudsdale Continuation no info
Rudsdale Newcomer no info
Skyline 900, 83, 963
Street Academy no info
Plus some private high schools in the same city:
Bentley no info
Bishop O’Dowd 1210, 21, 1077
The College Preparatory 1510, 5, 1253
Julia Morgan no info
Head Royce no info
Holy Names no info
St Paul’s Episcopal no info
St Theresa no info
Totally, completely, utterly false.
Hold on a sec. I thought College Board dropped the adversity score (aka environmental context something), renamed it Landscape, and would not be doing an actual SAT score adjustment? See e.g. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/27/754799550/college-board-drops-its-adversity-score-for-each-student-after-backlash. Where is WSJ getting these numbers? (I don’t have access to the article.)
From the article:
The College Board, which administers the SAT, asked this question and developed an adversity score for every U.S. high school, measuring about 15 factors such as income level and crime rate in a school’s neighborhood.
It abandoned the single-number measurement over the summer after a public outcry from educators and parents. Instead, it plans to give colleges a range of socioeconomic data on high schools and their neighborhoods.
The Wall Street Journal obtained the College Board school-adversity scores, which ranked schools from 1 to 100 in degree of adversity.
Just to clarify, so it is (at least in theory) more advantageous to have a high school whose average SAT is adjusted downward after the adversity score? (So that the student compares more favorably, let’s say 100 points higher than their high school’s average rather than only 30 points higher?)
Or do I have that backwards, with greater adversity adding points to the average SAT - in which case, how does that help the college compare the student’s score? Does the college potentially desire to add the same number of points to the student’s score?
Why can’t the high school’s average SAT speak for itself as an indication of the level of adversity? (There is something very odd about this method that I can’t articulate yet.)
Not sure, @evergreen5 . This is not data colleges necessarily see in this form, it’s something the WSJ had compiled. My interpretation of this is that it’s a loose indicator of overall quality of education and students at each high school but beyond that, it’s unclear what value the data has for any individual applicant. In your example, the student that “shines” the most compared to his/her peers might be outstanding but who knows if the colleges would recognize that given how little attention seems to be paid to applicants from schools outside the top feeders and known schools. IOW, that kid could be the superstar of XYZ High, but if XYZ High is considered a low quality school by the colleges it’s unknown how much they care who the school’s superstars are.
Yes, you hear the occasional heartwarming story of the kid from the inner city school getting accepted to Presigious U, but reading the backgrounds of the admitted students for most of the top colleges it’s startlingly clear these are one-offs and not the norm. Colleges value known quality high schools and it’s easy to do their fishing there. There are too many low and mediocre quality schools for them to research, keep up with, recruit from or visit. And they don’t need to. Get most of their students from the known schools and pick out a few heartwarming stories from the 30,000 remaining apps… easy, done.
The adversary score is a crude attempt at leveling the play field a bit. Good (tho short-lived) try!
Only if people would stop equating SAT scores with intelligence, and stop believing their fortunes and riches come SOLELY from their own hardwork and quick mind. (I am dreaming, of course!)
Thanks to @EarlVanDorn I am able to look up schools using the incognito tab on my phone, albeit clumsily.
I looked up a local public school (not ours). “The median SAT score of 203 takers is 1190. College Board assigned the school a state-normed adversity score of 1. Overall, it is a 1. Adjusted for adversity, the median SAT score would be a 988.” The problem with this is that it sounds like students at this school should be docked 200 pts because they didn’t face adversity.
Then why did they “combine the adversity and SAT scores” for high schools’ SAT medians?
Why did College Board release this data to WSJ?
Thanks to the phone format, I thought I was done reading the article although I hadn’t reached the bottom yet. WSJ asked a Georgetown prof to weight the SATs. “Mr. Strohl created a baseline by using the average SAT of schools with an adversity score of 50. Then he calculated the distance between that and the average of every other adversity score. Points were added or subtracted from individual schools depending on their distance from the baseline.”
I think the WSJ was in the mood for creating some clickbait.
The SAT used to be nothing more than an IQ test and was in fact designed to function as one. It was accurate enough that Mensa accepted SAT scores as IQ scores. Given that IQ rarely changes much after age 7 this became unpopular, so they changed the test to measure actual academic achievement. But the test remains g-loaded as heck.
I do agree that the success that many of the best students have doesn’t really come from hard work; but it does come from their high IQ, or “quick mind.” Schools try to discourage these kids from learning as much as possible, so they are never challenged and never have to work. When they finally find a course that actually requires work, it actually blows their minds. Some of these kids fail to do well in late high school or college because they were never allowed to learn HOW to have to try.
I remember taking the SAT back when Mensa accepted it.
The verbal section was basically an English vocabulary test. The math section was algebra and geometry (9th-11th grade math, or earlier for accelerated students). Yes, people with higher IQ (however defined) were likely to do better, but there was still a significant environmental influence (including both what was taught in school and test prep – remember prep books with lists of supposed SAT words?).
Some say the SAT measures how you think and the ACT measures what you know. Well, try to measure.
Well, whatever the SAT measures, it may not be a great idea to be too proud of a high SAT score when some people with SAT math scores over 700 have difficulty calculating a GPA.
As far as I know, College Board was never going to do any type of “adjustment” to SAT scores.
They were going to providing this “adversity score” which was assigning a value to information that many/most schools already had and used in the admissions process.
This wasn’t some revelation that would allow admissions officers to suddenly discover that Exeter Academy and Philadelphia city school students actually had different profiles. AO’s that I spoke to considered it to be of minimal value.
I can’t access the article. Do they state that student would actually receive an “adjusted” SAT score instead of an actual score? Kids at top schools could never earn a 1600?
Edit: just saw the explanation above. Yes, extremely misleading clickbait junk article, IMHO.