The year I turned eleven marked the beginning of my mother’s obsession with standardized tests. This was 1995, and my mother had recently discovered a strange and wondrous American phenomenon: élite private schools that, if you were sufficiently poor and academically promising, you might attend for free. The discovery led to a series of swift executive decisions about the course that my life should take, including a bleary-eyed drive early one morning, that May, to a town thirty miles from our home, where I took something called the ISEE, the Independent School Entrance Exam. That day, I learned for the first time how to darken bubbles, on a sheet dense with them, in order to spell out my name. Neither my mother nor I knew then that it was a test for which I could have and probably should have studied, but I did well enough to gain admission to the school of her choice. After that, she couldn’t wait for me to take the SSAT, the PSAT, and, finally, the SAT, which was still seven years in the offing but distilled, for her, the best thing about America: its meritocratic egalitarianism.

Since the SAT was first instituted, in 1926, it has been promoted as the meritocratic instrument that my mother imagined. For years, however, the test, which originally was designed by a committed eugenicist (who later rejected the belief) in order to reinforce a racial order, seemed to uphold a hierarchy: a robust correlation between family income and standardized-test scores became apparent. The test was substantially updated and revised, but, as time went on, particularly by the nineteen-sixties, the fact that college applicants of limited means were disproportionately people of color compounded the problem.

Earlier this month, the College Board rolled out a new amendment to the test: a metric formally called the Environmental Context Dashboard, but widely referred to as the adversity score, which takes note of a student’s socioeconomic background and may be used by college-admissions offices to contextualize the relevance of an SAT score. First piloted at fifteen colleges two years ago, it was rolled out to fifty more schools in 2018 (Yale, Florida State, and Trinity University in Texas are among the participants) and will be expanded to about a hundred and fifty this year. The index is calculated from some fifteen factors, organized into three categories—high school, neighborhood, and SAT performance—that the College Board has deemed pertinent to giving a diagnosis of a student’s environment. The factors, which are culled from publicly available data, include such things as the rigor of a student’s high-school curriculum, the crime rate of a student’s residential neighborhood, and the median family income in the area. Together, the factors yield a score of between one and a hundred points; scores above fifty points indicate that the student has had to contend with more obstacles than average. Students don’t know their scores, and neither do their families, but admissions officers do; they view the factors that go into the score, although it is up to them whether they use it.

Conspicuously missing from the dashboard is the consideration of race, an absence that is perhaps not accidental, given that race is perennially the most contentious subject when it comes to college admissions. Racism has informed the story of America since its founding, of course, but to attempt to isolate its significance as a single box on a matrix would fail to grasp the complicated shapes that it takes across broad, interconnected social categories. Although all minorities in America can be said to have been exposed to structural racism in some fashion, for too long having a particular shade of skin has been confused with possessing a predetermined quantity of advantages or disadvantages. Yet the experience of inhabiting that shade can be understood only in the context of its interaction with all the other identity markers of an individual. Each person processes the experience of color through a prism of her own identity.

At the heart of every attempt to reform higher education in America is the question of how to equitably distribute opportunities in an inherently unequal world. Twenty-five years ago, when my mother began trying to get us onto the élite-education conveyer belt, she was trying desperately to wrest for me the privileges to which someone like me would otherwise have no access. But she made the same mistake that various efforts at reform had made; she, too, believed that she could isolate the specific variables that might insure—or prevent—her daughter’s success.

If I look at my own personal history in terms of the environmental dashboard, a jagged portrait emerges; I feel as if I’m piecing together a collage, instead of a coherent narrative. In terms of high-school environment, I would have appeared to be among the country’s most privileged kids: thanks to my mother’s diligence, after I took the SSAT, I won a generous scholarship to a top-ranked boarding school that featured state-of-the-art facilities and an abundance of A.P. classes and extracurricular activities. But, along with all the wonders and benefits, I also remember the toothaches. During the academic year, the school paid for my health insurance, but my mother was never able to afford dental insurance. My tooth enamel was soft, and whenever a toothache would erupt, I would be hit by a fear—of my mother’s grimace, of our looming insolvency—that was strong enough, for a moment, to dull the pain.

As for neighborhood, when I was younger, my mother worked as a live-in housekeeper, and I lived with her. Once we became too much for the house, my mother took a job as a waitress, and, because it was all that we could afford on her salary, we rented the basement apartment of a dilapidated house where some fellow restaurant workers, all of them immigrants, lived. At the time, I didn’t know that the neighborhood was among the seediest in the city. In fact, what I remember most about living in that apartment, which flooded as often as it ran out of hot water, wasn’t its shabbiness, or the trash-strewn sidewalk that our windows looked out onto. It was a story that a classmate spread after she decided to look up my address. By the time the story got back to me, everyone had heard that I lived on a block so squalid that, some years earlier, someone had been murdered there. On the adversity index, there is no number for shame that festers into self-loathing.

Then, a family’s economic security: since my mother and I came to this country from China, when I was eight, she has been all the family I have. She had been a doctor there, but the fact that here she was a single mom earning poverty-line wages and spoke English too halting for teacher-parent conferences would undoubtedly have factored into the score. My mother believed that in America, which was, after all, a capitalist country, everything had its price. That the price of a seat in the finest classrooms should be steep—paid for in years of menial labor on her part and rough living for the both of us—seemed natural, almost fitting. The incorruptible nature of American meritocracy was a creed that my mother held onto. “Once you are in the classroom, you are as good as anyone else, and no one can tell you otherwise,” she was fond of repeating—to convince herself as much as me, I think. In the years since, I’ve often thought about her Gatsbyesque longing, a single, fevered ambition that came to acquire the strength of religious conviction.