The College Board recently announced that it will begin sending colleges new ratings that take into account SAT test takers’ educational and socioeconomic backgrounds based on where they live and attend school. These new ratings, which the College Board refers to collectively as the Environmental Context Dashboard (ECD) but have been colloquially dubbed the SAT “Adversity Score”, will not affect students’ test scores nor will they appear on the SAT score reports students receive. The ECD will include a score of 1-100, with 50 being average and higher numbers representing students who come from more disadvantaged environments. The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including neighborhood factors such as median family income, crime rate, education level of residents along with high school factors like geography, school size, percentage of households with food stamps, and advanced course offerings. The ECD does not take into account the personal hardships a student has faced, but rather uses the student’s neighborhood and school socioeconomic demographics as a proxy. The ECD is based on demographic data from the Census, crime data from the FBI, and information from other state and federal agencies.

Colleges have long attempted to inject their student bodies with diversity, and over the years there have been growing complaints that tests like the SAT can be “gamed” by families with means who hire test preparation professionals. Higher scores have indeed been found to correlate with students from wealthier families and those with better-educated parents. College admissions officers have struggled for years to find consistent ways to measure the hardships that applicants have had to overcome, and thereby better predict those students who will have success in college despite relatively low standardized test scores.

The new “Adversity Score” is intended to help college admissions officers measure some of the hardships test takers face. A trial version of the ECD rating system has already been field-tested by 50 colleges, and it will be rolled out officially to 150 schools this year and more widely during the 2020 admission cycle. The ECD provides largely the same socioeconomic and demographic information that colleges have been evaluating for decades, but it does so in a more standardized way across schools and applicants.

The College Board’s announcement of the ECD has been met with much controversy. While most would agree that viewing SAT scores in light of a student’s life experience and obstacles overcome is quite appropriate, attempting to do so in a quantitative manner opens up a host of issues. Though the ECD is designed to account for circumstances like wealthier students attending magnet schools in poorer neighborhoods, and vice versa, there are many areas of hardship that it simply cannot take into account. Many detractors complain, for example, that it does not capture individual situations that demonstrate immense hardship, such as a student from a middle-class neighborhood whose parents are addicted to opioids, or a student who lives in a household with educated, yet abusive parents. By only taking into account a student’s neighborhood socioeconomic demographics and the quality of their school, the ECD, according to these detractors, misses myriad hardships that could be identified by evaluating students on a case-by-case basis. The College Board has countered that students are indeed evaluated on a case-by-case basis through their college applications and essays. The ECD is merely an additional tool schools can use to put test scores into better context.

The ECD is purposefully race-neutral, which the College Board claims is because race is less of a predictor of success in college than “resourcefulness.” In reality, this seems to be a concession that including race as part of the ECD would surely expose the College Board to litigation. Many universities, including Harvard, Yale, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UT-Austin among others, are currently facing legal challenges to their affirmative action policies. Many believe that the newly conservative Supreme Court will take a hard line towards the use of race in admissions decisions, and it’s likely the College Board decided to stay out of the fray.

In all, it’s unlikely that the ECD will have a considerable impact on most students’ college admissions prospects in the foreseeable future. Colleges and universities have already long considered the factors the ECD measures in their admissions decisions, and the ECD merely consolidates many of those factors more efficiently. While it’s a stretch to claim that the ECD is nothing more than a PR move on the part of the College Board, as many claim, it would also be disingenuous to say that its intentions aren’t in the right place.

“Adversity Score” FAQ:

Does the Environmental Context Dashboard affect a student’s SAT score?

No. It doesn’t alter a student’s score in any way. It does, however, compare a student’s SAT score to those of other students in their school.

What does the Environmental Context Dashboard take into account?

It takes into account context about a student’s neighborhood (e.g., socioeconomic factors such as median family income, crime rate, and educational background of residents) and quality of high school (e.g., geography, school size, advanced course offerings, percentage of students on food stamps, school’s average SAT scores). It does not take into account any of a student’s personal or individual characteristics, however.

Can students or high schools see students’ Environmental Context Dashboard results?

No. Currently, the College Board only provides this information to college admissions officers, though it’s exploring making this information public in the future. The ECD doesn’t appear in a student’s score report, but rather it’s provided directly to college admissions officers. Again, there is no information included regarding an individual student except their SAT scores. All of the information included in the ECD is based on a student’s school and neighborhood, not their personal socioeconomic circumstances. Frankly, the vast majority of students’ ECD scores would come as no shock to them.

Are all colleges using the Environmental Context Dashboard?

Not yet. The tool was piloted with 50 colleges and universities in 2018-2019, and will expand to 150 schools in the 2019-2020 admission cycle with further expansion planned for the 2020 admission cycle. Thus, the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities will not use the tool during the current admissions cycle.

Is the rollout of the Environmental Context Dashboard that big of a deal?

Not really. While it’s always admirable when strides are taken to level an imbalanced educational playing field, and this is certainly a step in the right direction, the information the EDC includes is not new. Colleges and universities have always taken socioeconomic and demographic information into account when creating their student bodies. The ECD is simply a standardized metric that presents colleges and universities with the same information. Schools will continue to evaluate applicants on a case-by-case basis and use the information in their colleges essays and applications to evaluate the personal hardships they’ve overcome.

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If you have any further questions about the ECD, please feel free to reach out to Maki Gorchynsky at maki@mosereducational.com.