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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

Presumably the SAT is meant to indicate a student's likelihood for success in a university setting; surely bumping up the scores of students based on how likely they are to be unprepared is counterproductive? This seems like it's going to set underprivileged students up for failure and deprive well-prepared students of an opportunity, no?

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Perhaps the most cynical view of College Board and the SATs is that it is a bloated and useless bureaucracy leeching money and time off of students, their parents, high schools, and universities, and that this new 'Adversity Score' is merely a new way to introduce an entire new army of useless people with new material and classes to be sold to innocent people just trying to get into a decent school and pursue a path to a better life.

"Presumably..."

You might done well to have stopped there.

I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.

You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.

"...surely bumping up the scores..."

You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".

"You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report"

It _is_ pretty hard to make that logical leap from something that is (ok, was once) called the "scholastic aptitude test"...

Maybe if they had changed its name to the "admissions desirability test," people wouldn't be so aggravated by this.

Why are they likely to be unprepared?

because (we're meant to assume at least) that's why they did poorly in the test in the first place?

If a poor kid goes to a shitty school and has life impediments that limit the amount of studying and preparation they do and still scores a 1300, is that kid any less capable than a rich kid who goes to a private school and has all the opportunity in the world and gets 1500?

the original word choice was "prepared", which has a different meaning from "capable". if the poor kid never took calculus in high school and the rich kid already understands integration, that's probably two whole college semesters behind on a STEM track. there's no way you could say they're at the same level of preparedness for college. as for "capable", who knows?

Well, someone has to prop up the humanities. Universities are supposed to be communities of scholars. They aren't job training centers. Unless some students are persuaded to pursue less-career-oriented majors, all our universities would soon into polytechnics.

I chose the Calc I/II sequence as a concrete example that would be familiar to the large number of STEM majors on this forum. my point works just as well if you substitute "reading skills" for "calculus" and "humanities" for "STEM".

I don't think the factor is for kids who did poorly. This is a bonus (AFAICT) added on top of a reasonable test result. One that indicates that the student had some hardship that they overcame to get the result. Which should make the result count more as the kid had to go through more to get it done.

Who's more impressive on average? Students with a 1200 SAT in an area with low crime and upper middle class income, or students with a 1200 SAT in an area with high crime and low income? There's a presumption that the latter probably had external challenges to overcome.

The article is ambiguous:

>adding an “adversity score” to the test results

Does this mean an additional number is going to be supplied alongside the individual test scores and overall score, or that the overall score will be a sum that includes an adversity score? In other words, is the article using "adding" in the sense of numbers or the sense of sets?

EDIT:

The Journal reported that this new score will appear alongside a student's SAT score and will be featured in a section labeled the "Environmental Context Dashboard."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...

What if the former scores 1220 and the latter 1200? That's the concerning case, IMO. If both kids scored 1200, I'm indifferent as to whether a desirable school offers admission to 0, 1, or both of them.

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