The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the popular college entrance examination, included 50 schools in a beta test of this addition in 2018; those schools and 150 more will be the first 200 to implement the new score later this year. The program began in 2015. College Board officials said that the goal of including the adversity score was to offset a perceived advantage enjoyed by students from higher economic backgrounds and that the results of that beta test helped disadvantaged students achieve that goal.

The addition of the adversity score was the latest high-level change in the past five years to the iconic exam, which began in 1926 as the Scholastic Aptitude Test and is now known as the Scholastic Assessment Test. The College Board added an essay section in 2014 and, in 2016, removed a much-aligned vocabulary section and also introduced an option for students to take the exam on a computer.

To determine the score, the College Board will use a total of 15 factors that incorporate a student's economic and social background. Among those factors are these:

• median income of where the student's family lives
• educational level of the student's parents
• whether the student is from a single-parent household
• whether English is a second language from parent(s) or student
• AP class opportunities
• curriculum rigor
• rate of free lunch
• crime rate in student's neighborhood
• housing values in student's neighborhood
• poverty rate in student's neighborhood.

The adversity score, officially the Environmental Context Dashboard, will sit alongside the student's other scores. The SAT exam has two sections, verbal and math, each of which has a score of range of 400 to 1600. The essay section offers a score of 2 to 8. Only the universities to which the student is applying will have access to the adversity score; in other words, neither students nor their parent(s) will be able to see those scores.