Scored ~ Lauren McLaughlin

Scored is the next generation 1984. This is a near future in which economic collapse has left the world divided into a small elite and everyone else. The have-nots. The world is plagued with poverty. There are no jobs. Educational opportunities are rare and limited to the elite. There is no upward mobility.

Enter the brain-child of two well-meaning engineers — the score. It is a monitoring system with a data-crunching software backbone that will determine societal fitness. Good decisions, good character traits, good attitude all earn high scores, and the inverse is also true. A composite score of 90 or higher earns scholarships, putting education in reach of even the poorest kids. Score below 40 and you are doomed to a life without opportunity. Employers will not hire you, and there is no chance of improving your skill set or knowledge base.

This scoring system has the effect of grouping like with like because association affects the score. High scorers cannot afford the risk of associating with low scorers. And being with the unscored — those who choose to opt out of the system either because they do not believe in it or because they are wealthy enough to ignore it — is the kiss death to the scored.

Amani is a high scorer. At the outset she is above 90. She will earn a scholarship to any university, the only way she will fulfill her dreams of becoming a marine biologist. (Her parents can barely afford daily life; college is right out.) She has one more year of high school, and the future is bright.

Amani's best friend, Cady, used to be a 90 also, but she has slipped. She and Amani have a pact to remain friends regardless, but then the scoring software discovers that Cady is in a relationship with an unscored boy. Cady's score (a 70 at the beginning) does a nose-dive and, by association, so does Amani's. Now Amani has no chance of staying in her beloved hometown and getting a job, and she can forget marine biology entirely.

Urged by Cady, Amani drops their friendship and begins damage control. But then she becomes mixed up with an unscored boy in her history class, Diego. Their history teacher assigns them the task of writing an essay that will double as an application to one of the rare scholarships that is not score-based. To further complicate the assignment, the students must argue for the score if they are unscored and against it if they are scored.

Amani is actually urged into teaming up with Diego by her principal who believes that he is in her school as a spy for his score-fighting attorney mother and her ilk. So Diego and Amani research the origins and philosophy of the score and its social ramifications.

This is where Scored stands out. This is well-reasoned analysis of the benefits and liabilities of a technology-based meritocracy. Obvious references to Big Brother aside, there is ample evidence that humans do better when an impartial judge determines our standing in society, and we tend to view a computer program as impartial as it gets.

However, Amani's final analysis is as elegant and awesome as the best logic can be: The score's intent is to allow those who show merit to succeed. In application, the score creates an unbreakable caste system of a few highbies and many lowbies — unbreakable because it removes the impetus to break out by destroying solidarity. A bug in the software, not its intent.

She decides that friendship — solidarity — trumps social standing, no matter where you stand. When she arrives at this conclusion, she immediately throws off the yoke of the score and acts to undo much of what she has done throughout the book.

The conclusion is somewhat hasty. . . or maybe an editor thought the book was getting long in the tooth. It might have been better to flesh out the results of Amani's actions just a bit more. Or resolve the disappearance and "final interview" of one of the score's inventors. But maybe young readers aren't interested.

Scored has great classroom potential. Discussion-provoking rhetoric. A future that already feels like it's here in many ways. A tale that explores the differences between human and machine and finds strengths and weaknesses in both. And I suspect kids will empathize with Amani, Cady and Diego far more than with poor Winston Smith.