It came as no surprise to many of us in the education field when the College Board on August 27th, 2019—amid much deserved criticism—dropped its plan to include student socioeconomic data known as “student adversity scores” from SAT score reports. Instead, the institution announced it will now try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a more broad array of data points it’s calling “Landscape.” While it is designed to measure much of the same information as the previous plan, Landscape will no longer combine all of the various data points into a single score.

The original tool combined approximately fifteen socioeconomic data points from a student’s high school and neighborhood to create something that was previously called an “adversity score.” Fifty colleges used the adversity score last year as part of a preliminary test, and the College Board intended to roll it out to another 150 higher education institutions this fall.

This is the second time the College Board reversed course on its efforts to reflect a student’s socioeconomic background. It had previously tried to do so some twenty years ago but gave up amid pushback from colleges.

Landscape will rely on six “challenge factors,” which are designed to provide a “summary neighborhood challenge indicator” and a “summary high school challenge indicator,” according to the College Board. These factors include information related to household structure, median family income, education levels, and crime, to name a few.

In 2019, Georgetown University researchers discovered that if elite U.S. colleges and universities only used SAT scores for admissions, campuses would be less diverse, wealthier, and predominantly male. The results of the study raised serious questions about the prominent role college entrance exam results play in admission decisions.

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