I work in LSAT prep, and have taught the SAT as well. Whether this makes a different will depend on whether it's added as a ranking factor for schools.

If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private.

A few key points:

* First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in

* Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material.

* What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition.

* But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight.

* Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through

* Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that

* These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through.

* Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox applied.

This might be good, this might be bad, it's really too soon to tell and depends entirely on the implementation and how it's used. But the issue of over restrictive categories could certainly use fixing.