Potentially, there could be ways to game this too, such as parent's of private school students renting an apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, and using that address as the application address. Overall, it seems at least as an improvement over the dart on a dartboard approach colleges have taken to measure adversity or hardship.
The score will give admissions officers an objective, standardized view of applicants' environmental circumstances.
A 3.9 GPA and 1490 SAT score is one thing if the applicant is from Lake Forest or Greenwich, and quite another if they are from the South Side of Chicago or rural WV.
Did you mean quantitative? People have got to get over the idea that just because someone came up with a metric it somehow elides subjectivity and bias. A metric is a model; a model makes choices about representation.
Of course, any system has its problems. I'm sure that people will find a way to game this system when they don't deserve the advantage even though it sounds like a reasonably implemented idea. Just hiding the scores doesn't fix this, because someone corrupt enough to try to game this won't care if they're doing something immoral anyway. As someone who would have benefited a lot from this growing up, I think it's a great idea. We just have to hope the inherent good ideas here outweigh the immoral system-gamers.
Or maybe it isn't a helping hand. Maybe it's just a recognition that the kid, in getting to the level he/she is at through all that adversity, may be displaying more talent than the advantaged kid.
You can think of it as social justice, giving a helping hand to those who need it. Or you can think of it as trying to adjust measures of achievement in order to measure actual talent instead.
Too many people in the bubble don’t understand why “Rural America” was so easily led into populism. This is why.
Of course I don’t agree with the race baiting that has become part of the Right. It’s Willy Horton 2.0. But I do understand it.
(Of course, perhaps they did so dishonestly with the hope that raced-based affirmative action would get axed but that alternative race-blind alternative measures wouldn't materialize.)
Now, do they have racially disparate impact? Only insofar as actual adversity does.
I'm all for this. There is untapped genius in trailer parks and backwoods hollers and at the end of long and winding gravel driveways, just as there is in inner city black neighborhoods and the far more invisible rural black communities in the Deep South. All are absolutely deserving of a little extra help in breaking the cycle of systemic poverty, be it urban poverty or rural poverty.