The End of the SAT Adversity Score

As loyal readers of our college admissions blog know all too well, we’ve got a crystal ball at Ivy Coach. Its readings are highly accurate. Our crystal ball can predict if a student has no chance of admission to Harvard — even if the student’s mom and dad believe an education from Harvard is the student’s destiny. Our crystal ball doesn’t sugarcoat; it gives its readings candidly. We’d rather you hear the cold hard truth from our crystal ball. We don’t want you to hear the cold hard truth from Harvard after a student has wasted his Early card on the school. And we make no apologies for our crystal ball’s highly accurate readings. Heck, Ivy Coach’s crystal ball has even been cited on the pages of America’s oldest college newspaper, The Dartmouth.

Ivy Coach Boldly Predicted the Demise of the SAT Adversity Score

But if you’re still a skeptic of Ivy Coach’s famous crystal ball, well, did you happen to read today that College Board has eliminated their recently announced and very poorly thought out SAT Adversity Score? If so, might we remind you that Ivy Coach boldly predicted — against popular wisdom at the time — that the SAT Adversity Score wouldn’t last, even explicitly suggesting that it would be done away with within the year? We said as much on the pages of our college admissions blog. We said as much to press outlets. Heck, we said it wouldn’t last on camera for Business Insider Today.

The SAT Adversity Score Is No More

As Anemona Hartocollis reports for The New York Times in a piece entitled “SAT ‘Adversity Score’ Is Abandoned in Wake of Criticism,” “The College Board, the company that administers the SAT exam, said on Tuesday that it would withdraw its much-debated plan to include a so-called adversity score on student test results, saying it had erred in distilling the challenges faced by college applicants to a single number…The change was made after a storm of criticism from parents and educators followed the announcement of the plan last spring. Many of them said it falsely suggested that a student’s achievements and challenges could be quantified as the math and verbal scores on the SAT are.”

And why oh why would College Board bow to pressure — pressure we helped mount — and eliminate its poorly thought out, recently announced SAT Adversity Score? Well, that’s an easy one. College Board is a business. Its direct competitor is ACT. It is our belief that the SAT Adversity Score was created in large part to gain marketshare over ACT. But when College Board quickly realized such an index would only lead to a loss in marketshare, well, College Board’s swift action was not in the least bit surprising…