Brush Up on Grievance, It’s Time for the SAT

THERE used to be a joke that you get 200 points for simply bubbling in your name in correctly on the SAT, as that was the lowest score possible on the test. Now the bizarre reality is that a student will get points for the circumstances of his birth. The College Board, which administers the SAT, announced last week that it will now take into account a student’s social and economic background to produce a separate “adversity score.” The adversity score will use 15 factors, divided into three environments: home, neighborhood and school.

The first, home, will assess things like the marital status of the student’s parents and the family’s income. The second score, neighborhood, will include home prices and crime rates, while the third, academic environment, will assess things like how many advanced-placement classes are offered at the child’s school and how many students get free or reduced-price lunch.

The problem with this is that adversity is something individual to each of us. Instead of allowing colleges to judge each student as an individual human being, the new score adds one more layer of crude standardization to the admissions process. That’s the opposite of social justice.

Maybe a student lives in a great neighborhood and goes to a great school but goes home to an alcoholic father who beats him. Where’s his adversity score?

Or take the student whose parents remain unhappily married and stage screaming matches that prohibit her from studying. What adversity number will she get if she lives in a high-end zip code? What about the kid who takes

‘ The bizarre reality is that students now get ’ points for the circumstances of their birth.

care of his sick sibling, the one whose parents are disengaged or the one who gets bullied at school for looking different? All of these children suffer in ways that are unquantifiable.

Plus, the new score will no doubt encourage people to game the system. Currently, the most parents can do, lawfully, is enroll their children in SAT prep classes. Sure, the rich have the advantage there. But it’s easy to envision those same wealthy parents renting a shack in the bad part of town to create some neighborhood adversity out of thin air.

Then, too, the new supplemental score ends up acting like one more additional preparation stage for the Grievance Olympics young people will face in college. Humanities and social-studies departments teach them that grievance and victimization are the highest virtues, and now they’ll get an object lesson even before they enroll.

“There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less [on the SAT] but have accomplished more,” College Board CEO David Coleman told The Wall Street Journal.

Of course there are! As any normal grown-up can attest, the SAT ultimately doesn’t matter for how well you do in life. Some kids aren’t great at standardized tests. Some kids might not take education seriously until college or beyond. The SAT was always meant to be a snapshot in time, and that’s exactly why external factors should play no role in the score.

Colleges can then decide how much to weigh the test in their evaluation of a student. If the student did grow up in a rough neighborhood, the college can factor that in. But to pre-emptively offer a supplemental score reflecting biographical challenges only means we don’t have faith in kids to succeed because of where they live or how they were raised.

In any other circumstances, saying “poor kids can’t do as well on tests as rich kids” or “kids of single mothers are at a disadvantage” would be extremely controversial. But that’s exactly what the College Board is trying to do here.

Instead of making sure kids are ready to compete on the same playing field, the SAT move is just the latest way that we’re blowing up the field to make sure no one has a losing game. After admission to college, will the students also be graded on a curve for all tests? If not, why not? Their hardscrabble backgrounds will remain unchanged. Why wouldn’t standards be lowered for them for the rest of their lives?

The whole purpose of standardized exams like the SAT is to implement one standard for everyone. We’re doing kids a disservice when we lower the bar because of some arbitrary set of guidelines.

We’re also letting ourselves off the hook from making sure kids from all backgrounds are prepared for higher learning. Maybe that’s really been the point all along.