Merit Ain’t What It Used To Be

The College Board, the organization that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test, has been in existence for just about a century and from its very start was dedicated to promoting meritocracy in the United States, particularly by providing ammunition for Ivy League schools to admit students with high achievement and abilities to gain admission to that exclusive club that would otherwise have been denied them. This week there has been quite a bit of bitching, moaning, and complaining about the addition of an “aversity score”. Michael Nietzel’s plaint at Forbes is one example of the genre:

The College Board has revealed that it will calculate an “adversity score” for every student taking the SAT. According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s an attempt to address evidence that children of wealthy, college-educated parents score higher on the SAT than less privileged students. At least in theory, the adjusted scores will help colleges more objectively evaluate the academic abilities of all applicants. The undergraduate admissions dean at Yale, one of 50 schools that participated in a test run of the new scoring system, told the Journal that it has already helped diversify the freshman class.

The adversity score will be a number ranging from 1 to 100, calculated from 15 factors such as neighborhood crime rates and poverty levels. A score of 50 will be the average; scores above 50 reflect increasing levels of hardship, and scores below indicate higher degrees of privilege. SAT officials indicated that students would not be informed of their adversity scores, but colleges will have access to them as they make admission decisions.

and

What should we make of the new SAT adversity score? Will it increase fairness in college admissions? Will it help increase the diversity of enrollments? Or will it backfire, adding to Americans’ skepticism about the fairness of college admissions? Will it be viewed as an algorithm for political correctness, or worse, a form of handicapping that brings students with high scores more harm than good in the long run?

I think that the critics of the adversity score fail to recognize what the College Board is trying to do. They’re trying to add a new category of merit that schools may use. Previously, there was scholastic achievement, scholastic aptitude, and the non-scholastic things that an individual student has accomplished. The adversity school will provide the opportunity to supplement those measures of individual merit with one of group merit or, said another way, they are promoting the tendency of “merit” to become an auto-antonym.