Nicholas Christos ‘20
The College Board has instituted a new program to calculate an adversity score for students applying to colleges in the coming year, according to The New York Times. The score will aim to demonstrate the conditions of applicants’ backgrounds and the environments of their youth by examining socioeconomic factors and educational factors.
The adversity score a student will be able to receive will fall between 0 and 100, with an average score of 50. Students with higher scores correlate to more environmental disadvantage. To calculate the scores, the College Board will use 15 distinct factors to illuminate adversity in an applicant’s background. Variables in the score formula will include factors like the poverty and crime levels of an applicant’s neighborhood as well as high school quality.
College admissions officials, not students, will have access to the scores, which will not quantitatively impact students’ testing results. Yale University has utilized the adversity score formula put together by the College Board for the past two admissions cycles at the university. As reported in The New York Times, Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, explains, “It just helps contextualize the SAT score for us. When you’re able to see a student’s SAT score and then compare it to the SAT scores of the other students at the school, that can be powerful to identify a truly transcendent student.” Yale’s Class of 2022 boasted its highest ever rate of first-generation students.