SAT Announces 'Adversity Score'
Students’ SAT Scores Will Account for Educational and Socioeconomic Background
The College Board announced on Thursday that it will expand its Environmental Context Dashboard to roughly 150 postsecondary institutions nationwide, with plans to take the Dashboard to scale by 2020. Currently, about 50 institutions use the tool in their admissions decisions. The tool takes into account a student’s educational and socioeconomic background.
The new metric, referred to as an “Adversity Score”, provides additional context for students’ scores. A student’s adversity score does not impact their overall SAT score and is only made available to college admissions officials as part of the overall admissions package a student submits.
According to the College Board, the Dashboard takes into account the following:
SAT Scores in context: Students' SAT scores can be seen within the context of the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile of SAT scores from their high school.
Contextual data on the student’s neighborhood and high school: Including typical family income, family structure, educational attainment, housing stability, and crime.
Information on the high school: Including AP opportunity at the school (average number of AP Exams taken, average AP score from that HS); percentage of students who meet federal eligibility criteria for free and reduced-price lunch; rurality/urbanicity; and senior class size.
As we showed in our Missouri Education Profile, nearly all of our state’s students take the ACT. However, it will be interesting to see if more students in Missouri begin to opt for the SAT instead.