SAT SHOULD NOW BE CALLED SAD

The politically correct educated idiots in charge of SAT will now add adversity points to the test scores of disadvantaged students

By Howie Katz

Big Jolly Times
May 17, 2019



The College Board, which administers the SAT tests, will be adding what it calls ‘adversity scores’ to the test scores of disadvantaged students wanting to go to college. The official educatorese name of this gift is: Environmental Context Dashboard.

Extra points will be added based on the crime and poverty rates of a student’s neighborhood, whether the student has a single parent, their parents' income level, the availability of Advanced Placement (AP) classes at their schools, and the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

Points are not added for the race of the student, but it is obvious that the adversity scores are designed to get more black and Latino students enrolled in the nation’s better colleges.

The adversity score will fall on a scale between 1 and 100, with an average score of 50 — anything above 50 would show hardship.

Many colleges and universities have been embroiled in lawsuits challenging their affirmative action practices. The Environmental Context Dashboard must be the College Board’s way of assuring that those affirmative action practices continue.

Since there are only so many enrollment openings at the nation’s elite colleges, the new SAT scoring system will keep a goodly number of white students out who are more educationally qualified than the disadvantaged students.

Colleges may accept or choose not to accept the added score. Only the colleges to which a student applies will know that the adversity scores were added. The students will not know.

The College Board has already made a test run of the adversity score program at 50 colleges. The program will be officially expanded to an additional 150 schools by the end of this year with more schools to be added in 2020.

David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, defended the program by saying, “There is talent and potential waiting to be discovered in every community – the children of poor rural families, kids navigating the challenges of life in the inner city, and military dependents who face the daily difficulties of low income and frequent deployments as part of their family’s service to our country. No single test score should ever be examined without paying attention to this critical context.”

Coleman obviously threw in the kids of military families in a thinly disguised attempt to gain wide acceptance of the new SAT program.

I was always under the impression that the SATs were supposed to weed out students who would probably flunk out of school the first semester. But that is no longer politically correct.

The educated idiots on the College Board apparently do not see the similarity between the Environmental Context Dashboard and the recent college admission cheating scandals. In this case, the adversity scores take the place of bribes paid by wealthy parents to get their kids into college.

Whatever happened to the concept that one of the purposes of community colleges was to prepare educationally disadvantaged students for a successful last two years at a four-year college? Now elite schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech and Stanford may have to start offering remedial English and remedial math courses to some incoming students. And some white students who would otherwise be accepted by Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech and Stanford may now have to attend a community college instead.

From now on we should say students will be taking the SAD test instead of the SAT.