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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is no level playing field and never will be. My kid who tested at 65th percentile for processing speed, 60th for working memory, and 99.9th for both verbal and quantitative reasoning doesn’t get accomodations. Do you think his processing speed and working memory slow down his exceptional abilities? They most definitely do. He struggles to get Bs. He can’t finish any single section on the ACT within the time constraints, but when he has a 3.3 and a 28 on the ACT I am proud. Could he be the next Einstein if his 99.9s were across the board? Maybe, but everyone has imperfections and I don’t see him taking an extra minute to figure out a math problem accurately as a disability. It only concerns me when I consider the fact that he will always look less intelligent on paper than  those who scored lower than he did and have accomodations. [/quote]

Your kid does not have a disability and does not qualify for accommodations because even his lower scores are ABOVE AVERAGE. My kid has dyslexia, and has verbal and quantitative reasoning skills in the 95th to the 99th percentile, similar to your kid. But processing speed is in the 30-something percentile and working memory in the single digit percentiles. He isn't considered to have a processing speed deficit! Because the range of "normal" or "average" starts from the 25th percentile, I think. It is only the long tails of the curve on these diagnostic tests that are considered not-average. So that is what we are looking at when we are talking about kids with disabilities that get accommodations. Kids with below average scores across the board aren't going to in-demand colleges, if they go to college at all. Your kid is not competing against them. What you aren't seeing is that kid with ADHD or dyslexia accommodations has a mix of above average skills (like your kid) along with below-average skills (unlike your kid), and the below average skills really are impediments to letting kids show what they know, so that colleges can chose them...or not. I actually think it would be great if the college board changed the testing format so that it was virtually untimed for all kids - maybe the kind of adaptable computerized test that aims to find the end point of a kid's knowledge, and then stops. That wouldn't benefit or disadvantage any one kid. And anyone could chose to read the questions by eye or ear or finger (via text to speech over headphones or braille). If colleges and the college board wanted to test processing speed and working memory, there are much better methods than the ACT and SAT![/quote]

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