Adding ‘adversity score’ to SATs

When I first heard about the College Board’s introduction of an “adversity score” for students taking the SAT (originally known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test), I thought it was a joke.

Turns out the College Board really is rolling out a new metric for standardized-test takers who are hoping to get into college that’s meant to capture their “disadvantage level.”

The board is measuring a number of socioeconomic and environmental factors that affect a student’s academic performance. The factors it is measuring are based on census data and include crime rates, home values and poverty levels in a student’s neighborhood as well as their communities’ average educational attainment.

Students will be graded on a scale from 0 to 100, with 50 being average and 100 being what the College Board considers superhero levels of adversity, I guess.

Not only is the metric real, but 150 colleges are planning to start using it this fall. Some have already put it into practice — Yale University, for example, was an early tester of the score, and its dean of admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, told the Wall Street Journal that it is “literally affecting every application we look at.”

Putting aside the obviously ridiculous name of this metric — human beings do not have “disadvantage levels”; some of them face obstacles in a society that is designed to disadvantage them — it is so poorly designed, so easy to game, that I wonder how on earth the College Board believes it will lead to more diversity within higher education.

Take “home values,” for instance. Every child in San Francisco today lives in a neighborhood with high home values. That includes children who live in public housing. Unfortunately for these children, the “high home values” in their neighborhood have not had the result the College Board is looking for — high home values, like most other elements of community wealth, have a strong correlation with high test scores — because there has been so little investment in their communities and their own possibilities for achievement.

Instead, these children find themselves living in a neighborhood with “high home values” because runaway gentrification is squeezing them from all sides. They won’t benefit from this metric — but Juniper and Cleo, whose parents displaced their community, will benefit from their close proximity to “disadvantaged” housing scores.

Since the “adversity score” is designed to fail, why did the College Board decide it was a good idea?

One obvious reason is that the board is trying to shore up its own survival.

There are piles of educational research showing that the SAT is only a proxy for a student’s wealth, not a measure of his or her academic achievement or potential. As this research has stacked up, colleges have backed away from the test. As of January, 1,000 colleges and universities had made it optional for application.

It’s not a coincidence, either, that SAT cheating played such a big role in this year’s infamous “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal.

The shocking thing about the scandal was that a few of them were so desperately hungry for their children to get the right degree, they broke the unspoken code.

Instead of sending Blythe and Quinn to volunteer abroad as a way of burnishing their “adversity levels,” instead of forcing them to march through the charade of applications and Princeton Review courses and ill-gotten learning disabilities, instead of making years’ worth of tax-deductible donations to the expensive colleges of their choice, these parents tried the gauche shortcut of a direct bribe.

Their crime isn’t really a breach of contemporary ethics because no one believes in the fiction of American meritocracy anymore. (Judging by the startling number of local parents who have been charged in the crime, the Bay Area certainly knows what time it is.)

Instead, their crime was a breach of protocol. And they knew that the SAT was the best vehicle for fraud around.

So what do the colleges get for buying into the fantasy of this new score?

I keep returning to Yale, one of the schools that was smeared in the admissions scandal.

The “adversity score” contains no information about a student’s race or ethnicity. It’s not coincidental that the university has embraced this bogus metric during a time when elite universities are facing legal action from reactionary anti-affirmative action forces.

That makes the score a capitulation to yet another fantasy — the fiction that the U.S., following centuries of race-based oppression, has suddenly become a color-blind place. It’s another one of those tall tales that no one believes in if they have any understanding of this country. It’s particularly ridiculous under the Trump administration.

But as I said, there’s a joke in this “adversity score.” The problem is, the joke is on us.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@caillemillner