I might have come across as a heartless dick that doesn’t care about the less fortunate. But I am not…
It’s not that I am totally against giving some breaks to those that are less fortunate, or that I think a certain level of subjectivity should be allowed as long as it follows the following guiding principles
1. Any sort of subjectivity criteria/score should be publicly well known, where it can be subject to public scrutiny
2. There should be a clear separation between entities responsible for objectivity versus subjectivity
The College Board built its reputation on establishing a standard based scoring system, where one could objectively determine how well or not so well an individual is based purely on academic performance. It was designed so that someone who gets an 4.0 at school #1 could be evaluated versus someone who gets a 4.0 at school #2, and reduces the changes of one school scoring harder versus the other. In other nations, particularly asian nations, that’s the purpose of national entrance exams at the middle school, high school, etc… so that there is a one common source of truth in determining one peer versus the other. The College Board test was to establish this sort of standardization and objectivity. Folks can argue about how true or not true college board tests accurately represents kid’s knowledge and learning in school (I would argue a lot of it is bullshit, especially the vocabulary section), but the gist of some sort of objective standardization, as it was designed to represent, was a good thing… And if anything, improvements should be made to make sure the test contents were more an accurate representation of kid’s knowledge and learning…objectively….
Now that College Board introduces this adversity score… It sends a completely different message… It basically says, that standardized testing isn’t really that meaningful… Even though we are responsible for coming up with an objective academic score for candidates, it’s not that important, and here’s another score that is a “feel good, adversity score that could possibly explain why that kid didn’t do as well”… This begs the question: why bother even having a standardized test to begin with…
The current CEO of the College Board keeps saying that economic adversity is a real problem and it should be accounted for and dealt with… HOWEVER, if the College Board is really so concerned about economic adversity to disadvantaged kids, why does it continue to charge $65 ($95 if you register late) for each ACT/SAT test one wants to take, $25 the first test result transcript, and $15 each additional transcript thereafter you want to send to a college???
More importantly, why is it that College Board, in 2006 took in $582.9 million of revenue but spent only $527.8 million, or the College Board paid out over $1.3 million in 2009 to the CEO and 19 executives more $300k/year, despite being a “non-profit organization”? I guess the non-profit organization means the organization can’t make a profit… but wow, the executives sure are killing it, more so than a lot of for-profit organizations… The CEO of College Board makes more than the head of the American Red Cross and Harvard
There are plenty of vehicles where colleges already consider subjectivity in college admissions. If anything, any sort of subjective scoring/consideration is already behind close doors, and there already lacks any sort of transparency to those subjective measures. All the lawsuits, all the fights, even the ones raised and taken to the Supreme Court by the Asian community has always been about improving the transparency of such subjective scoring… If there was truly nothing to hide, and nothing shady going on, there would not be a need to do any of this hidden/behind closed door scoring. The fact that there is a lack of transparency, is because those doing it knows it would raise eyebrows…because it would be considered systematic discrimination.
All our ‘fixes’ to try to address any sort of inequality is always quick fixes AFTER the impact of adversity has happened. If anything, if money/resources should be spent, it should be spent to shore up those blight communities with adverse environments at the grade level… not lowering the bar after adversity has happened.
Yeah, I get it. My family has money. If my kid wants to retake the SAT 20 times, and takes 10 prep classes, I can afford that and my kid can get a pretty good score… Some kid from the inner city with crack addict parents that have no money probably can’t take the test 20 times, and probably cant afford to go take an SAT prep class a few times too, and would probably score lower…. Because the damn test costs a lot each time and resources to prepare for the test costs a lot too. But instead of addressing THAT issue, let’s not do anything, and just come up with a bandaid and invent this “adversity score” that ranks parents based on how much they can bend over to our fees and costs to prepare for things, so that those who pay more, have a lower score…even though eventually our salaries depend on those very parents that pay more….And if theoretically more and more colleges actually abandoned the College Board standardized tests, and parents/kids no longer had to bend over and pay any of those ridiculous test fees and prep-course fees, while it would allow more families/parents/kids keep more of their hard earned money as they pursue higher education, it certainly would make us, the CEO and executives at the College Board, unemployed! So, of course, the current CEO (Common Core architect) thinks the way to address this is to add a fudge factor, to represent the economic disadvantage of students that itself (the College Board) contributes to, with its exorbitant fees……just another quick fix, so that the big $$$$ can continue coming into the College Board so that the CEO can college his $1million paycheck while not really solving the problem, besides pushing the burden and cost onto some other non-suspecting group of people…
And while we are at it .. why stop at SAT? Why not include the adversity score into LSAT, MCAT, GRE, GMAT, etc…
Also, since we want to start considering economic adversity, what about other forms of adversity, like health/mental adversity. Should a kid who otherwise is mentally fit/physically fit in a ghetto neighborhood be considered using one subjective score…versus a kid with autism that is from 4S Ranch/Carmel Valley? How much harder is it for someone with Autism to learn versus someone who is worried about getting shot in a bad neighborhood???
What about dyslexic kids who take more effort and time to read, that scored well in a AP/Honor’s English, versus someone kid that isn’t dyslexic in the same class. Where’s their adversity score?
Personally, this is one of the cases in which the federal government should salary cap non-profits and heavily regulate the College Board in what it can and can’t do.
