Overcoming the Confusion of the College Admissions Tests and Their Humanistic Goals

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By the Rev. Dr. Joe Renfro, EdD

Humanism’s goals are being sought through the altering the entrance test scores of certain classifications of high school students seeking to get into colleges, so as to provide a way to reach the ideological goal of the heaven of the classless society—“true equality in diversity” as they call it. 

Back in May of 2019 an article came out in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “SAT to Give students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Backgrounds” by Douglas Belkin.  This process of setting up new scores in respect to this created a lot of scrutiny from both sides, those who approved of it and those who disapproved.

The College Board planned to assign the adversity score to every student who would take the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.

This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, was calculated using fifteen factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications. This was nothing but Humanism’s social engineering through the Adversity Scores on the tests and displayed the fallacy of categorization by placing individuals into racial classifications, cultural classifications, sexual classifications, age classifications.  Students should be seen as individuals, not as classifications!

Fifty colleges used the score last year, 2018, as part of a beta test. The College Board planned to expand it to 150 institutions this fall of 2019, and then use it broadly the following year.  An adversity score average is fifty. Anything above fifty designates hardship, below fifty, privilege.

The fifteen factors were made up of things like their high school’s average senior class size, percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-cost lunches, and academic achievement in Advanced Placement classes. A student’s environment at home and in his or her neighborhood, like the crime level, the median family income and family stability were factors as well.  But how on earth can something like this be measured, and furthermore it really contradicts in many ways the premise of “diversity” that humanistic thinking wishes to submit as their goal—how do you maintain difference when you artificially level it?

Needless to say, because of all the adverse criticism the Adversity Score plan had to be modified. In August of 2019 Alex Brandon of the Associated Press wrote an article. “College Board abandoning SAT ‘adversity score’ after criticism,” where he wrote that “ The company that administers the SAT college admissions test is replacing the so-called adversity score with a tool that will no longer reduce an applicant’s background to a single number, an idea that the College Board’s chief executive now says was a mistake…But critics called it an overreach for the College Board to score adversity the way it does academics.”

David Coleman, College Board’s chief executive, said in an interview with The Associated Press that some also wrongly worried the tool would alter the SAT results. The College Board announced several changes, including the decision to give students access to the information about their schools and neighborhood starting in the 2020-2021 school year.  It was now to be renamed “Landscape,” and the revised tool will provide a series of data points from government sources.

Another change, more recently, described on September 11, 2019, in an article in Forbes Magazine by Christi Rim entitled “The SAT ‘Adversity Score’ Is Still Happening…”  brings out:

Earlier this year, the College Board (the nonprofit behind the SATs and AP classes/exams) announced a new program that faced immediate backlash. They planned, starting this college application cycle, to offer colleges information on students’ neighborhoods and schools (including crime rates, average family incomes, etc.), to assign these students what quickly became called an “adversity score.” The idea of this score was to help colleges evaluate students in context, mitigating the impact wealth and other advantages have on metrics like GPA and test scores. Two weeks ago, the College Board announced that the proffered admissions tool would not be a single number, but a ‘dashboard’ of metrics. Although this announcement was characterized by headlines as “abandoning” the adversity    score, the ‘Environmental Context Dashboard’ will still be made available to colleges this year—and the impact may not be as positive as the College Board hopes.

Yes, it is the same old story, but it is just under a different title! By hook and crook they still want it.

Colleges and universities have for several years been acting on the concerns, with an increasing number no longer demanding SAT or rival ACT scores from applicants. More than 1,000 schools, including elite liberal arts colleges as well as research universities and for-profit schools, are test-optional, according to the nonprofit group Fair Test, which argues standardized tests are biased against minority groups.

The questions comes to me, “Why on earth do we constantly have to divide people into groups in the educational domain?” Social engineering creates way more problems than it solves, and in America right now most of the division and chaos rampantly developing is the progressive thinking so dominant in our educational institutions.

The Bible gives some great guidelines.  In Acts 10:34-35 it says, “So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but every one who fears him and does what is right and acceptable to him.”  Acts 17:26 says that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. Some ask, “What color was Adam?”  The name “Adam” means mankind, and we are all part of that, so that is really a stupid question! 

Ephesians 2:11-14 points to a great truth when it says: “ Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the circumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. We need Christ-centered education and the confusion of the progressive thinking will go out the window!

There are individuals from all classes of people who excel, and races are all mixed up as the majority of America is a mixture of all in various degrees, although they may classify themselves as one or the other. What really is white, black, or tan—so what.  There is all this harping about “white privilege” in education, where when you look at the fact that Asian student excel them all on test scores.  The reason for this is the family values and the discipline cultivated in the children, especially academic discipline, something that was once part of the American Judo-Christian scene, but something that went out the window in our new age of progressive thinking. Look at families and the percentage of single parent families in the various groups–racial, socioeconomic, single, blended or nuclear families, and see how the various categories compare and then consider the effects it can have on education. 

In respect to the SAT scores, white students scored an average of 177 points higher than black students and 133 points higher than Hispanic students in 2018 results. Asian students scored 100 points higher than white students. The children of wealthy and college-educated parents outperformed their classmates.  But motivation is something that test scores don’t measure, and increasingly colleges are finding other ways to allow college admission, which is good.

The SAT, which includes math and verbal sections and is still taken with No. 2 pencils, is facing challenges. Federal prosecutors revealed this spring that students cheated on both the SAT and ACT for years as part of a far-reaching college admissions cheating scheme. In Asia and the Middle East, both the ACT and The SAT exams have experienced security breaches of various types. Many have observed the news coverage that some parents were found to have paid bribes to have the SAT taken by others for their children. Not all the students were aware of the cheating arranged by their parents, according to the criminal affidavit in the case, although no students have face charges in these scandals.

Because all US colleges and universities accept scores from either the ACT or SAT, there’s no advantage in taking one test over the other. This means you can apply to the same schools, regardless of which test a student desires to take.

It is to be noted that the College Board tried a similar effort two decades ago but quickly dropped it amid push-back from colleges. Back in 1999, after California and Washington voted to ban affirmative-action preferences in public education, the College Board created a program it called Strivers.

The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race. Students who scored at least 200 points more on the SAT than predicted were called Strivers. Because minorities often had lower predicted scores, they were more likely to be Strivers.

However. it creates one of the major fallacies in contemporary education of American schooling, which can be seen as a type of categorizing which really is just a type of stereotyping under the veil of a bias, which is just the other side of the coin of prejudice. Yes, it ultimately hinders individual motivation and achievement and is unfair to others, so that it lowers their scores compared to the group judged as having to cope with adversity.  Education in America has increasingly become determined by the top down methods, rather than from the bottom up methods, as our sociopolitical elite seemingly can’t or won’t recognize it.

Look at the situation!

Jonathan Rothwell back in 2016 observed that “College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times in 2015 than in 1980, dramatically higher than the 2.5 increase in overall personal consumption over the period. For private education, from pre-K through secondary, prices are 8.5 times higher now than in 1980. For public schools, the rise is lower—4.7 from 1980 ti 2013—but still far above general inflation. (“The declining productivity of education,” by Jonathan Rothwell, Brookings, December 23, 2016.)

Rothwell went on to observe that despite all this extra expense the learning has stagnated, observing that: “For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy, since the Assessment of Educational Progress measurement began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s,” and he observed that “The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. Population.” (Ibid)..  

The article by Brookings concluded that: “Over the last 30 to 40 years, the United States has invested heavily in education, with little to show for it. The result is a society with more inequality and less economic growth; a high price.”  The attempt to find this so-called “equality through diversity” in the same way misses the point, as it it only divides and lessens the call to academic responsibility in every socioeconomic status, placing individual people in racial classifications, cultural classifications, sexual classifications, age classifications, or whatever category or classification, and this is what the altering of the college SATs or Advanced Placement exams can do.

But our political correct educational establishment keeps focusing on things like this rather than seeking to cultivate responsible parenthood to promote true student academic responsibility, true parenthood, something that was much more part of our culture before Bible reading and prayer together with the Judo-Christian values which were once very much central to our culture. It was very much a vital a part of education in our land and culture before the shift escalated most thoroughly toward the humanistic world views, escalating particularly since the new religion of “diversity” undermined it.

There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less [on the SAT] but have accomplished more,” said David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board.  He said as well, “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”  This might be true, but discipline and responsibility are certainly helpful in acquiring a certain degree of wealth.

R.H. Tawney in a book written in 1926 entitled Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that I bought at the University of North Carolina back in 1964, which only cost in paperback 50 cents brand new, mentions how that Calvinism, which was once dominant in our land called for discipline in the society, something that has truly faded in our time.  Tawney wrote: “For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live to that end.  His task is at once to discipline his individual life, and to create a sanctified society…and the whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing discipline.” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R.H. Tawney, Mentor Book, pp 96 & 97) Our society and our schools have lost to a great degree this discipline!

One critic of  this movement in our nation to try to equalize achievement wrote although it applies basically to secondary schooling in his critique, can apply well to thinking behind the Adversary Score:  “Instead of having groups of students working in separate environments to improve what they needed to improve upon, lower achieving students were thrust into the mix with the higher achieving students and the results were nothing less than predictable. The only real effect was that teachers had to alter their teaching methods to accommodate those who wouldn’t have been able to keep up while ignoring the needs of those who were ready to move on. Thus, the only real accomplishment was the lowering of the standard.” This would well apply to the Adversary Score or whatever they choose to call it.  (“Socially Engineered Equality will Cost Us Our Freedom,” by David Risselada, Patriot Update, January 13, 2014)

There was a time in America when discipline was greatly stressed in our families and in our schools before the avalanche of the 60s and the generation gap with the focus shifted from teaching about responsibilities to rather than constantly harping on rights. What is the government going to give me!

But how do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that US students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations, where we were once at the top. U.S. students’ academic achievement lag behind that of their peers in many other countries despite all the great expenses. Drew DeSiler in an article entitled, “U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries” observed back in February of 2017 in an article from the Pew Research Center that “internationally the United States stands around the middle of the pack on science, math, and reading scores.” The thinking and focus of humanistic philosophy is not doing the job!

True “unity in diversity” is innate in Christianity, but this is not politically correct in our society, although the Bible affirms in Galatians 3:28 that in Jesus Christ “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Acts 10:34 in Peter’s address to the Gentiles that he started: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality.”   Matthew 28:19-20 in the closing of Matthew’s gospel affirms the true way to realize a valid type of true equality in diversity as says:  “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Humanistic, progressive, socialistic thinking fails to teach in our schools that America cannot afford the steep costs of socialism, that socialism undermines faith and religious liberty, that it is the enemy of economic freedom and opportunity, that it undermines responsibility and encourages dependence, that it destroys prosperity and brings misery wherever it is tried, that once imposed, and that socialism is almost impossible to undo, and wherever it is called—the Strivers, the Adversity Score, the Landscape Score, or the Environment Context Score. Furthermore, it fails to instill into learning, the breath of God, the Centrality of the true quest for learning to realize the centrality of Christ in all.

It is not just that the Bible says it, but history has proven it.  This is the right way to achieve the goal, not through the social manipulation by humanistic thinking. The Bible contains the methods and focus to overcome the continual adjustment and faulty reason of progressive thinking!