The Association of Imaginary Schools has prepared a report on a recent trend: privileged parents attempting to manipulate their child’s “Adversity Score” on the SAT.
The confidential Adversity Score is supposed to represent the student’s environmental context and degree of disadvantage. Hoping to make it appear that their children are facing the extra challenges of growing up in poverty, rich parents are acquiring mailboxes in poor neighborhoods to create a fake home address for their children to register for the SAT.
Consultants have suggested an exchange program, whereby poor children can provide their skid row mailing addresses for the SAT, and in return can use the addresses of rich children to gain entrance into the superior public schools to be found in wealthy areas. This scheme has been met with considerable resistance, as rich parents point out that using a false address to gain admission to a good public school is a crime punishable with jail time. Instead, rich parents increasingly prefer to buy up derelict properties at nominal expense and take a tax credit on further depreciation.
Now that the College Board has suspended the Adversity Score program, The Association of Imaginary Schools has expressed concern that this new phenomenon could result in zombie neighborhoods owned by absentee rich parents creating dystopic “SAT Slums”. While the fate of the Adversity Score program is decided, poor neighborhoods suffer.