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]

You are ignoring the data and facts: if no one was gaming and extended time did not matter, then the curve of the results sb bell curve. My DCs go to a prep school when’re the annual cost is over $45k and there are many many wealthy families who have connections and the money to get the accomodations needed.

http://pointsandfigures.com/2011/06/21/gaming-the-...tandardized-tests-for-college/

“Hypothetically, if you distributed the scores of all students sitting for the SAT on a curve, with or without accommodation, it should approximate the normal curve (a.k.a. the “bell-curve”). When the College Board plotted the 2005 results of students taking the test with accommodations, the results yielded not a bell-curve but rather a bi-modal distribution (meaning the distribution was top and bottom heavy with a disproportionate number of low scoring and high scoring students rather than a tendency toward the mean). This greatly alarmed the College Board that the population of students receiving accommodation did not mirror the rest of the population.”[/quote]

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