Reply to Wall Street Journal on rampant growth in percentage of college students with “disabilities”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading this thread, it feels like people thing that parents can take their kid to the pediatrician, say their kid has ADHD, get a note, and get SAT/ ACT accommodations. That is just. It the way it works.  You are talking about needing extensive, objective testing documenting a disability and a long history of needing and using disability services. It is an expensive, difficult, time consuming process spanning years.  Sure, my kid gets extended time on tests in some subjects. But that doesn’t make the class period longer. He gets the test one page at a time, and has to schedule with the teacher to use the extended time during lunch or after school.  And needs a paper trail of having done that back through middle school.

The college board is especially harsh on kids who are not diagnosed until high school. We were lucky enough to have a paper trail going back to ES, with annual meetings and regular accommodations usage and testing updated every three years and a school testing coordinator who knew what they were doing. So we got through the process relatively easily.  I know kids with a legitimate academic need for testing accommodations who have not been able to get them because they did informal accommodations with no real paperwork until their kid had to be medicated in high school.

Schools vary on how hard they push back on accommodations. I’m sure colleges do too. But the idea that everyone who decides they want SAT/ ACT accommodations gets them is wrong. [/quote]

+1 on this. My niece has had her reading-associated disability documented since early middle school. She gets testing accommodations for some in-school exams and most standardized testing.  I have no idea if its true but my sister said College Board's extra time bar is hard to clear that they are not even bothering; instead my niece will just prep for the ACT. I didnt ask if ACT is easier than SAT or if its the burden of satisfying two sets of paperwork (i would think there are efficiencies).  Anyway, the $$ my sister has spent over the years would have paid for extensive one-on-one SAT/ACT prep many times over; that would have been a much easier path.  
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