Giving Compass' Take:

• Natalie Escobar reports that the SAT will include a disadvantage score to highlight the achievements of students who overcame socioeconomic disadvantages. 

• Can this score adequately capture the lived experiences of students? Is this the best way to account for the disadvantages that students have experienced? 

• Learn how retaking the SAT helps low-income students. 

Most students’ paths to higher education are shaped by numbers: grade-point averages, class rankings, and infamously, standardized-test scores. Now students taking the College Board’s SAT will have another number thrown into the mix: a “disadvantage level.”

This fall, 150 colleges will start using this new metric, designed to capture students’ socioeconomic status and give context to test scores, according to The Wall Street Journal. The College Board is using a number of environmental factors that influence a student’s home and school life—including neighborhood crime rates, housing values and vacancies, the community’s average educational attainment, and poverty levels—to calculate this disadvantage level, which is scaled from 0 to 100 and is based on census data from each student’s neighborhood. Scores above 50 points indicate that the student has had to navigate more obstacles than average to get an education or have access to college, while scores below 50 signify students who have enjoyed more advantages than most of their peers. While students don’t see or know their score, admissions officers will be able to see an “environmental context dashboard,” which breaks down all the factors that go into the score.

Read the full article about factoring disadvantage into the equation by Natalie Escobar at The Atlantic.