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College Board Drops Plans for SAT Student Adversity Scores
By Douglas Belkin
Wall Street Journal
Aug. 27, 2019 1:49 pm ET
The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT college admissions test, after facing criticism from educators and parents.

Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score.

The original tool, called the “environmental context dashboard,” combined about 15 socio-economic metrics from a student’s high school and neighborhood to create something college admission officers called an “adversity score.”

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previous thread on adversity scores

While not being the creator of a "score," they still intend to be the curators and presenters of data, with the same goals and aims in mind.

The rampant collection of data, and automation of its dissemination, are both prone to error. Greater pushback is needed.

The 2009 DOE factsheet calling for the development of longitudinal databases has as one of its requirements: A system of auditing data for quality, validity, and reliability. More than a decade later, those who've inquired have found no such system, process, or procedure in place.

Somewhat related, Ancestry.com is offering free yearbook searches for about the next week... until September 2, 2019.
Various searches there have yield erroneous results, including:
- The wrong photo is identified as the person being sought.
- There are duplicates (whole pages attributed to more than 1 high school).
- Results may say "not found" when the data clearly exists.
These types of student identification errors may seem inconsequential when one is browsing high school year books for family trees and funeral tributes. One can simply bypass what one knows to be incorrect. But when the purpose of collecting and presenting data is specifically to empower and encourage others to use what is presented as input for making crucial college admissions decisions... there should be transparency and accountability for collecting, storing, and presenting data which is erroneous.