Holy racism, Batman! It looks like the SAT exam used by U.S. colleges as a determiner of a prospective student’s qualifications to attend said schools are introducing an “adversity score” to level the playing field for people they determine make universities more “diverse.”
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college education.
This new number, call an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.
Wow! Apparently it doesn’t really matter how intelligent you are anymore. Your skin color, economic background and living situation seem to be bigger factors than whether or not someone actually qualifies to be accepted at a certain school.
Some of the factors included in the College Board’s “adversity score” determinations include, but are not limited to race, household income, and parents’ highest education level. What this score doesn’t take into account is how many people each level includes. Obviously, households that have much higher incomes represent less of the population than households that make much less, as independent journalist Tim Pool asserted in a Thursday YouTube report on the topic. So, how can the College Board make that kind of determination without factoring in how prevalent each level of whatever parameter they’re taking into account?
The Wall Street Journal also reported the following about the College Board:
The College Board, the New York based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, said it has worried about income inequality influencing test results for years. White students scored an average 177 points higher than Hispanic students in 2018 results. Asian students scored 100 points higher than white students. The children of wealthy and college-educated parents outperformed their classmates.
“This is racist, overtly racist,” Pool said. “And this is what you get when see this social justice, regressive identitarian narrative being institutionalized.”
Pool is absolutely correct. It seems that the College Board could penalize or reward students who perform well on the test simply for the color of their skin or if they come from an affluent background. So not only is this “adversity score” racist, but it could also be construed to be classist as well.
“Reversing discrimination is good, discrimination is bad,” Pool continued. “This [adversity score] is just straight discrimination. It’s not reverse discrimination. It’s not anything. It’s quite literally just them discriminating in another way.”