The College Board recently announced that they will begin assessing the level of privilege and hardship that students face. The organization plans to use an “Adversity Score” that aims to provide colleges with more information about their prospective students than the regular SAT score can provide.
 
The Adversity Score will consider factors such as family income, graduating class size and the crime rate of the students’ town. The number will range from one to 100. A score of 50 will signal that a student faces an average level of hardship.
 
As of now, students will not be able to find out what their score is. However, College Board spokesperson Zachary Goldberg said that the organization is “looking into” making the score available to students. The Adversity Score will not alter a student’s actual SAT score. The College Board hopes that this new number will provide schools with an idea of how “resourceful” a student is in their given environment and situation.
 
Although some factors have been used as examples in discussing the score, the exact factors have not been released by the College Board. It is known that factors such as race and disability will not be considered in scoring. This has sparked backlash from some who say that these factors partially determine how privileged one is and should be accounted for in the score.
 
This decision by the College Board comes after celebrities such as Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman were accused of committing crimes to get their children into elite universities. That scandal has heightened debate over the college admission process, particularly concerning the fairness of the process, which could have been a reason for this new score.
 
Ultimately, the goal of the Adversity Score is to make the college admissions process more fair, but the announcement has faced massive backlash. Many critics say that it will have the opposite effect on the fairness of the admissions process, while others are confident that it will not accomplish anything besides making parents and students more weary of admissions.
 
It remains to be seen what the actual effect of the College Board’s SAT Adversity Score will be, but this will likely remain a hot topic for high-schoolers across the country now and throughout the implementation of the new policy.