Is the College Board #woke now? Formed over a century ago with the mission of expanding college access, the Board is today best known as the developer of standardized tests—the most famous of which is the SAT. But now, implicated in recent college admissions scandals as a corruptible way to gain entrée to selective schools, the SAT’s integrity and utility are under fire. The College Board’s latest initiative, the “adversity score,” is ostensibly an effort to level the playing field for disadvantaged students by providing context for SAT scores.

The adversity score is a number on a 100-point scale that amalgamates 31 factors about a student’s school, like rigor of coursework, neighborhood, poverty levels, and crime rates. The higher the number, the more adversity a student has faced. Fifty signals “average” adversity. It’s part of a product called the “Environmental Context Dashboard” that gives admissions officers context for understanding SAT scores. Many colleges already do the work of evaluating these factors independently, but the College Board is hoping to standardize the process.

Attention to the intellectual tradition behind the exam, however, reveals its true political and cultural implications, and those of the adversity score. “Remember,” said College Board CEO David Coleman in an interview last month with WBUR, “adversity is all too common. Resourcefulness is rare. The real point of the dashboard is to show those students who defy their situations and perform at a very high level.” Coleman’s description of the philosophy underpinning the adversity score echoes Thomas Jefferson. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson planned for a system of education in which “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” Coleman’s iteration is more tactful, but the idea is similar: Students who demonstrate their intellectual ability, in this case by performing well on a flawed test, deserve to transcend their rough circumstances through education.

The SAT’s widespread use was fueled in part by Harvard president James Conant’s mid-20th-century hope that it would protect democracy from the Communist threat by facilitating a distinctly American, classless society. As Nicholas Lemann explains in The Big Test, Conant was inspired by Jefferson’s vision. A clean, objective measure of scholastic aptitude would untether gifted students from the context assigned to them by the accidents of their births. The exam would give students equal footing in the national contest over access to a scarce resource—high-quality college education. Conant hoped that by setting a dispassionate standard for academic potential and opening access to educational opportunity across classes and regions, an intellectual governing elite would arise.

But in this broader moment of reckoning with the complexity of national myths, the narrative of the SAT and its parent company, the College Board, deserves scrutiny. It is not that we need to “admit that learning is often painful,” as Coleman asserts in a recent Atlantic piece that reads more like an advertisement than an “Ideas” column. Nor is it that “a real love of ideas” only comes through “practice”—an interesting plea from the head of a company with a big stake in testing and test prep.