In June 2019, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the College Board was about to introduce an “Adversity Index” or score that would sum up the socio-economic backgrounds of individual SAT-takers for admission offices, there has been an intense controversy over the ECD.
What the news reports called the “Adversity Index” is really an environmental contexts dashboard (ECD) tool that the College Board has test piloted since 2016.
Research has found that admissions officers are more likely to recommend low-income students for admission when they have access to more student background and context information for holistic review processes.
To address the uneven quality of information available to admission offices about individual applicants’ contexts of opportunity, the College Board’s solution was to offer the ECD tool through a program called Landscape, which has been reported as a single adversity index or score for all SAT takers, summarizing individual student socio-economic backgrounds.
The idea that a single numerical score could accurately describe any individual student’s context of opportunity and achievement offended many. The controversy has led the College Board to announce that it was abandoning the adversity score as it had been initially described by David Coleman in May 2019. However, Landscape will continue to offer consistent information about applicants’ school and community contexts, and continue the application of the ECD tool.
In the current system of college admissions, we agree more information about student background and context is better than less information. As a researcher and admissions profession leader for intersectional racial equity, we have long been concerned with the deep systemic inequalities found in admissions structures, and have advocated for robust holistic admissions practices to account for individual student contexts of opportunity and achievement for reliable and valid evaluations of college applicants. The purported numerical measure of adversity caused a righteous controversy.
But the real admissions scandal is that the system has always been rigged against those who are not rich and White.
