Reply to Atlantic article on college admissions

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Atlantic article on college admissions"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, this is what they should do.  They should allow everyone a set time to take the test--a LONG set time, so it stops being a speed test and becomes a test about what they know and how they reason.

I've come full circle on this.  My DD has a genetic eye condition, and she has to strain to see.  Her eye muscles give out after focusing close for long periods of time.  I used to not want her to have any accomodations because "life doesn't give you extra time."  A doctor finally convinced me that that is the wrong thought process..."life is not a speed test where you must keep your eyes focused for 3 hours straight" is more like it.

So let's test what the kids know and how they think, not how fast they can squiggle it into a bubble.[/quote]

Some poster keeps suggesting this. But I keep coming back to, do you really want your kid to have the same—albeit long—testing time as my magnet kid? Make no mistake, the magnet kids are driven and they’ll stay to the bitter end. As will any kid who is shooting for a somewhat competitive college, just because they worry that others applying to the same college are taking the test over the same day/days. We shouldn’t underestimate the drive that hits kids mid-junior year. Such long tests probably couldn’t be held on a Saturday morning like they are now, and might therefore be held during the school week, so that everybody gets time off to take the test all day. And kids from backgrounds where applying to college isn’t the norm will see a really long test as an even huger hurdle.

Pretty soon, the tests will become an all-day, or multiple days, grueling ordeal that even somewhat ambitious kids think they have to tough out. Staying to the end will become the norm for any somewhat ambitious kid.

Most kids will do really well with the extra time. So to tease out differences among the hundreds of thousands of nearly perfect scores, the folks at the College Board will have to make the test tougher.

Meanwhile, your child, who I agree deserves accommodations, will have list the advantage of extra time.

I can’t see anyone who would benefit from this (besides the College Board which could charge more for longer tests), and I think most kids would be a lot worse off.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics