Admission to these schools is a zero-sum game, and there’s just no agreement as to who should get these slots.” In a statement on its website in May, the ACT said that it is transforming itself from an “assessment company” into “an organization providing learning, measurement, and navigation support to learners.” The group is increasingly stressing what it calls a “holistic framework” it developed to help students prepare for college, and has added new tools including a test for social-emotional skills. Meanwhile, the SAT’s largest competitor, the ACT, has been working to rebrand itself as well, moving away from a focus on scoring students. In this new era, the College Board is testing a controversial new metric that has been labeled as an “ adversity score.” The group calls the new tool the Environmental Context Dashboard, and its goal is to help college admissions officials put an applicant’s SAT score in perspective by showing whether the students come from a place of hardship or relative advantage. It only says something about whether students have yet attained the reading, writing, and math skills they will use to gain knowledge in college or career training it makes no statement about what they are capable of learning.” “The new SAT does not tell students or anyone else how smart students are, or how capable they are of learning new things.
“The era of trying to measure aptitude is finally over,” wrote the College Board’s president, David Coleman, in an essay in The Atlantic earlier this summer, referring to the version of the test that has been in place since 2014, when the SAT was last revised.
Or, at least, that SAT scores should be considered as just one factor among many in judging whether a student is ready for college, or a fit for a highly-selective campus. These days the leaders of the College Board, which runs the SAT, have been making a surprising argument-that colleges and parents should stop taking the scores of its signature test so seriously.