Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.
Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.
A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
All theoretical at this point I guess. I would prefer to let this play out a little bit more rather than race based quotas/scholarships which more often than not seem to go to kids with the same good backgrounds who just happen to be minorities.
They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.
Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.
The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
That goes both ways. If you've got a group of mostly upper middle class whites, Asians and Indians (i.e. your average tech company) the poor whites are going to hand out with the blacks, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Not having much in common with the majority group is the trait that ties the minority group together.
