Seeking to rework its purely merit-based testing of an individual’s academic knowledge and acumen, the College Board now plans to include a socioeconomic field or “adversity score” to its SAT admissions tests. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The College Board’s new adversity score will include 15 variables such as a student’s neighborhood crime rate, housing values and poverty. These variables will feed into an algorithm with weights assigned to each variable. Out will pop a score that students won’t be able to see or challenge before it goes to colleges.”

Students’ SAT scores will no longer be a focused reflection of their accumulated knowledge and academic ability. Rather the test results will now also include a subjective analysis of various external variables that necessarily diminish an accurate rendering an individual student’s actual academic abilities. In other words, the SAT will no longer be a test of academic ability.

The motivation behind this change is due to recent scandals in which top universities have been exposed for rigging their admissions in order to artificially impose racially based diversity on campus. By rigging the SAT to include what amounts to a racial-diversity bias, these schools seek to effectively claim that their admissions standards are merit-based with no racial preference considered. As the Journal observes, “Colleges want to get out in front of a possible legal ban on race-based preferences. California and Michigan prohibit colleges from considering race in admissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court could forbid racial preferences entirely in the next few years.”

To put it bluntly, by reworking the SAT, the College Board is cheating. This action is an embrace of the Left’s “fairness” paradigm of equality of outcome over and against the standard of actual fairness: equality of opportunity.