The Reasoning Behind the SAT’s New ‘Disadvantage’ Score

Updated at 3:52 p.m. ET on May 17, 2019.

Most students’ paths to higher education are shaped by numbers: grade-point averages, class rankings, and infamously, standardized-test scores. Now students taking the College Board’s SAT will have another number thrown into the mix: a “disadvantage level.”

This fall, 150 colleges will start using this new metric, designed to capture students’ socioeconomic status and give context to test scores, according to . The College Board is using a number of environmental factors that influence a student’s home and school life—including neighborhood crime rates, housing values and vacancies, the community’s average educational attainment, and poverty levels—to calculate this disadvantage level, which is scaled from 0 to 100 and is based on census data from each student’s neighborhood. Scores above 50 points indicate that the student has had to navigate more obstacles than average to get an