What to Know About the SAT Environmental Context Dashboard

When the varsity Board undraped plans last month to feature a special Environmental Context Dashboard to the Sat, reactions were mixed withal sturdy. Some education specialists hailed the conception as the simplest way to level the collaborating in field for low-income faculty candidates, whereas others blasted it for reducing high students to a score.



Deemed Associate in Nursing "adversity score" in early news coverage – a characterization that the varsity Board has known as inaccurate – the new tool aims to produce colleges with additional information on high colleges and neighborhoods. The idea, per board officers, is to assist admissions officers perceive the challenges that students face wherever they live and learn. Or, primarily, to produce context once reviewing faculty applications.




"That information provides you a rough sense of the neighborhood, the resources may|that may|that will} possibly|it'd|it would} afford and together the extent of challenge that a student would possibly face," says David Coleman, govt of the varsity Board, the noncommercial organization that administers the Sat and utterly completely different exams.



While fifty colleges used the new tool as an area of a pilot program last year, that may increase to up to a hundred and fifty establishments this fall. The tool can then be created "broadly on the market to varsities for complimentary of charge," per a tweet from the varsity Board.

 What the Environmental Context Dashboard Provides

The Environmental Context Dashboard is visible to admissions officers, Associate in Nursingd weekday test-takers unit each given AN overall disadvantage level score on a scale from one to 1 hundred. the higher the amount, the larger adversity a student has two-faced, in line with the college Board. The supposed adversity score is comprised of three components.


First, weekday results unit placed in context of the twenty fifth, fiftieth and seventy fifth grade of scores from a student's middle school supported a three-year average.


The second part provides details on the middle school a student attended, like category size, status levels, Advanced Placement offerings, AP communication scores and tons of.


Finally, neighborhood data includes factors like median family gain, status rates, proportion of single-parent homes, homeownership rates, housing vacancies, housing costs and so the prospect of being the victim of a criminal offense. This data comes from a mix of knowledge from the college Board, the U.S. office and so the National Center for Education Statistics.


For students inside a similar neighborhoods and schools, the assigned selection ar constant. For this reason, some admissions officers and faculty Board officers don't see it as a non-public score as a results of it's applied en masse to any or all or any students throughout a school or neighborhood.