Adversity is the new diversity

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort.

Yet last week we learned from a consultant for the College Board, which administers the test, that in fact ‘the SAT was designed as a way of identifying disadvantaged students to enhance social mobility’, which is news to me. Because, alas, minority students have tended to earn lower SAT scores, this same consultant characterises the exam now as ‘a mechanism for preserving privilege’.