College Board, the nonprofit company behind the SAT and AP exams, is retiring a tool that gave colleges detailed information about applicants’ neighborhoods and high schools—data critics said could be used as a proxy for race.
In a Sept. 2 statement, College Board said it will discontinue Landscape, a program built on the premise that admissions officers should be able to evaluate a student’s performance relative to the resources available to them.
Landscape provided dozens of data points about a student’s academic and socioeconomic circumstances. These included the number of AP courses offered at their high school, local SAT participation rates, the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, as well as the neighborhood’s income levels and crime rates. All of the data came from publicly available sources, typically from government websites….