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Adversity Score

The college admission process in America gets increasingly ludicrous by the day. This was a marquee year by all accounts.We learned among other things of the Adversity Score on the SAT that has already impacted kids during the pilot period. There are so many reasons why this is wrong and asinine that is hard to even enumerate. Kids are already trotting out all manner of sob stories in their college essays to edge out their competition - it always reminds me of the hapless beggars in India who have no choice but to fake a variety of disabilities to coax passers-by to give them some money. Now there will be a thriving business in how best to get the highest possible adversity score and game the system. 

It is so presumptuous of the College Board to quantify a child's environment context. How exactly are they accounting for domestic strife, violence and abuse that the kid may have had to endure behind closed doors of their expensive suburban home. How about the captain of the diving team that suffered from anorexia and had to be hospitalized in junior year? Nothing about her profile of all As, school leadership, community service and athletic excellence would point to any adversity. 

Are such kids not gritty and resourceful just because they did not live in a neighborhood where they heard gunshots outside their window every other night? Is the accident of their birth to family that can make ends meet comfortably a sin for which they must be punished? What if one generation ago their parents worked their way out of the crushing grind of poverty and established themselves well to provide for their family? The fact that they worked hard enough to do so will now hurt their children - their circumstances are not nearly adverse enough.

As always, the families in the middle with average everything will be punished the hardest by such a system. Their kids will fall in the twilight zone along with thousands of others - neither above or below the line. They will overwhelmingly fail to make the cut.

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