College Board Decides New SAT Score Was 'Wrong'

"The idea of a single score was wrong. It was confusing and created the misperception that the indicators are specific to an individual student." That's the assessment of the CEO of the College Board, which on Tuesday announced it was doing away with its plans to assign every student who takes the SAT an "adversity score." The AP reports the Environmental Context Dashboard that was launched as part of a pilot program (about 50 colleges used it last year) crunches more than a dozen socio-economic metrics related to the student's neighborhood and high school and spits out a single number: the adversity score. In its place will be "Landscape," a revamped tool that provides a wider range of data points.

The Wall Street Journal reports it's all part of the College Board's moves to try to mitigate the impact that income inequality has on test results—whereby students from higher-income families typically score higher—and a school's perception of an applicant. The College Board says Landscape will give context to an applicant's text scores, showing where they fall amidst other students in their high school, as well as data on the school (like details of its Advanced Placement courses) and neighborhood (like crime rates). And while the adversity score was to be reported only to the college, not the student, students will have access to their Landscape info beginning with the 2020-21 school year, the same year in which Landscape is expected to be widely available. (More SAT stories.)