The SAT Will Start Assigning "Adversity Scores" To Account For Kids From Tough Neighborhoods, Bad Families, etc.

Remember in Friday Night Lights when Tami discovered that Luke Cafferty’s home address was just a mailbox on a vacant lot, used by the Panthers to make star players geographically eligible for their program? Something tells me we’re about to see a bunch of automated, perfumed Prada mailboxes pop up in Compton, South Chicago, West Philly, East New York, and all the other neighborhoods that rappers cite as proof of their toughness. Christ, we’re still in the thick of this whole Lori Loughlin-Ivy League recruiting scandal, where parents were paying hundreds of thousands to get their kids in to these schools. You think an adversity score is going to stand in the way of these psycho parents? Pretty soon, these Beverley Hills moms will be buying their daughters beat-to-shit bicycles and forcing them to ride to SAT test centers dressed in Goodwill clothes and blackface. They’ll inject their kids with smallpox vials and starve them on craisins for weeks just to bump those adversity scores up. If we learned anything over the past month, it’s that these parents will stop at NOTHING to get their kids in.

The point is, this is a lightspeed-stupid idea by the college board. Colleges have been moving away from the standardized tests for years, mainly because it’s so obvious that rich families can pay for top-level tutors to dope their kids’ brains and beat the system. Adding some mysteriously-derived adversity score isn’t going to change that.

I don’t exactly have a solution. Maybe place more emphasis on the high school teacher recommendation letters? Or on the students’ application interviews?  You can’t really fake the whole face-to-face interaction. Of course, even that can be biased in favor of kids whose parents hired an interview coach to drill them. Ughhhh! I give up. Sound off in the comments about how you’d solve the unfairness in college admissions!