While SAT scores are far more a measure of how white and rich someone's parents are than any academic ability, adding an adversity score on top of that will make it a measure of how white and rich someone's parents are, plus how many minority-indicator check boxes they can simultaneously fill.
They should probably dispense with the SAT/ACT and similar tests all together. Then again, how white and rich someone's parents are, and now how many minority-indicator check boxes they can fill, rather than true scholastic aptitude, are probably of prime concern to university bean counters and marketing committees.
Edit:
That is just silly. It will not improve the intelligence of the people; just massage the figures. It is a form of positive discrimination; just for the sake of it.
The goal isn't to improve education, the goal is to make more money. You need to attract students that look good on paper and you need to appear to embrace diversity while doing it.
The problem is that most of these standardized tests are of demonstrably dubious utility and instead of tossing them, which would deprive them of a simple figure to bandy about, they revise them incessantly, covering old loopholes and problems with new ones.
One of the earlier changes I recall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/sat-essay-test-rewards-length-and-ignores-errors.html
Students, even ones with very high SAT scores, are getting into universities with writing skills that wouldn't pass muster on a video game forum, precsisely because of inane tests like the above. It should have been obvious that graders were just going to gloss over stuff and mostly grade on length and flourish, so that's what's taught...objectively poor writing habits engineered to maximize grades on standardized tests.
I think this will go the same way...no improvement to any underlying issue and people will quickly find ways to game the system to maximize there adversity score.
If I were a wealthy parent trying to get my kid into a prestigious school, I'd enroll them in crappiest public high-school I could find (they are going to get tutored anyway and will have an easier time there academically than at a good school), and rent some crack den in a similarly poor neighborhood and make it our legal residence without actually living there. Not much I could do about some criteria, but I could probably manage a higher 'adversity score' for my kid than many of those actually suffering adversity would be able to manage.
Anyway, every time someone brings up a point that threatens to make the SAT/ACT less valid to colleges, which would complicate things, they may just enough changes to satisfy that specific criticism, without addressing the underlying problem.
Unlike in this country; where they just pay for, extra private tutoring, instead.
People do this here too. However, SAT tutoring being so targeted is one of the prime reasons why the scores aren't indicators of much other than who could afford a tutor. Any idiot can be be trained to ace a formulaic standardized test, even ones with some math and small amounts of writing, without needing a firm grasp of the application of the material ostensibly being tested and certainly without having to be a good student.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Affirmative action to make SAT scores a much less important criteria than social circumstance.
SAT scores are mostly an indicator of social circumstance. This is affirmative action to make them an indicator of essentially nothing.
Edit2: Since the base score isn't altered, I suppose it includes the same indicators as before, with the new roundabout diversity indicator a long side. Still doesn't live up to the name or ostensible purpose of identifying scholastic aptitude, nor would any three hour long standardized test.
Standardized testing has it's place, but 'scholastic aptitude' is way too broad a thing for such tests to gauge to any meaningful degree. That's where the criticisms come from.
