

It's about the work you've done," Coleman said. "And you know the founding mission of the College Board is it's not about your connections, it's not about who you know.

And earlier this year, the college admissions scandal drew attention to the difference a wealthy family can make. A lawsuit filed against Harvard University has challenged that school's use of race in admissions. The change comes amid a larger national debate around what role a student's background should play when they're applying to college. "In other words, we're leaving a lot more room for judgment." "We'll leave the interpretation to the admission's officer," Coleman said. The College Board is letting college officials do their own analysis from the government information it provides alongside SAT scores.

"The College Board scores achievement, not adversity."Īnd so the College Board is launching a tool called Landscape, which will provide admissions counselors with information about a student's background, like average neighborhood income and crime rates, but Coleman said the data points will not be given a score. That's not the College Board's mission," Coleman said. "The idea of a single score was confusing because it seemed that all of a sudden the College Board was trying to score adversity. Some people worried that the adversity score would affect SAT scores, when that was never the case, Coleman said. In an interview with NPR, College Board CEO David Coleman said that boiling all of that complex information down to one number was indeed problematic and that the company is now reversing its decision. "Someone can take that information and really use it for wrong to say, 'Wow, this student comes from this kind of community and area, they might not be a good fit for our school,'" Henderson said. Henderson said many parents and school counselors believed one single number couldn't possibly capture a student's whole story. "It just seemed sort of like the higher the score, you know, what? The poorer you are?" said Zenia Henderson of the National College Access Network.
#College board view sat scores sent history free
The change comes after blowback from university officials and parents of those taking the college admissions exam.Īnnounced in May, the "adversity score" was intended to assess the kind of neighborhood the student came from, including factors such as the portion of students receiving free or reduced lunch, the level of crime and average educational attainment. The College Board is dropping its plan to give SAT-takers a single score that captures a student's economic hardship. David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced on Tuesday that the company's "adversity score" was being abandoned and replaced by a new tool that provides information about a student's socioeconomic background.
