The people responsible for the SAT exams now assign an adversity score to every student to consider their social and economic background.
Critics, including a Tennessee education expert, say the adversity scores are ridiculous.
According to The Wall Street Journal, colleges will take the numbers into account while reviewing students’ college applications. The paper said the people who oversee the SAT have introduced this concept to clamp down on “income inequality.”
Jackie Archer, affiliated with Tennessee Rising and Tennessee Textbook Advocates, which looks for bias in public school textbooks, said politics motivate this.
“It is another left-wing strategy to break down the traditional merit-based systems of the past, further dumb-down Americans, and put ‘diversity’ above common-sense policy,” Archer told The Tennessee Star in an email Monday.
According to The Wall Street Journal, The College Board is a New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT.
Jeremy Tate, president of the Maryland-based CLT Exam, said the SAT favors the controversial Common Core standards — and he also said his CLT test is a better alternative.
“At CLT we will avoid speaking about the adversity score, but I will say this,” Tate told The Star.
“The College Board long, long ago abandoned any clear vision or philosophy for education. What they think the purpose of education is nobody really knows. For two millennia, from Plato through Augustine through Martin Luther on down to the present day in some circles the point of education has been the cultivation of virtue. It’s been to make people good, virtuous, responsible and civil. The College Board wants to remove any traces of character development or cultivation of virtue.”
Tate went on to say that adversity scores are “a symptom of a much bigger problem with the College Board.”
“They are the most powerful, most influential education company in the United States, and they can’t tell you the first thing about education,” Tate said.
According to The Wall Street Journal, 50 colleges used the adversity score last year as part of a beta test.
“The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Image “SAT Answer Card” by timlewisnm CC2.0.
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