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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
We can go back and forth about individual cases but here is how I think about it on a systemic level.  Let's take the example of a kid that scores in the 95 percentile in a bunch of metrics but the 20 percentile in one and thus qualifies as disabled.

There are some people who seem to think that this kid is really a 95 percentile kid with just some sort of issue preventing his ability from being truly recognized.  That's not really accurate.  Their kid is a kid with many strengths but also clear weaknesses.

it is unfair for the weaknesses to hamper the kid to such an extent that he is not able to display his strengths.  So if he was getting a 30 percentile score on the test I would take that as evidence that the test did not truly reflect his ability.

Giving accommodations so that the kid ends up with a 95 percentile score is also not fair to all the other kids who also are hard working, who also want to go to good colleges, who also have their own strengths and weaknesses, because a 95 percentile score is ALSO not actually reflective of his abilities.  Because his abilities are in fact limited, just like everyone else's, it's just they are limited in a way that we can better measure and try to address with novel learning techniques now that we know more about the human brain.  But they still exist.  The reality is this is probably a 70 percentile kid when all these factors are considered.

And then to get on the internet and brag about how your "gifted" kid smoked all the other kids is really both myopic and cruel.  And if done on a mass scale will limit (and has limited) the enthusiasm of parents whose kids don't get extra time or a calculator but sure as shit could get higher scores with it to put up with the system you are trying to create.   [/quote]

Here is what you do not understand.  An average kid without a documented disability who gets extra time will not [b]significantly[/b] improve his or her score.  That is because the average kid does not have the intellectual capacity to answer the questions correctly.  People keep saying to give extra time across the board, but the truth is that you will be disappointed with your average kid's results.  A kid with a documented disability like dyslexia or ADHD would improve their score significantly with the extra time because that is the biggest factor holding them back.  Unlike your average, some of these kids are brilliant and are able to demonstrate that with the extended time.   If you really want to improve your average kid's score, why don't you just get him some tutoring or have him do more practice tests on his own.[/quote]

No one is talking about average kids. The debate topic is high performing students. Both high performing students with and WITHOUT disabilities score higher when given extra time. No one is talking about the kids who without any accommodations score 1000 on the SAT or an ACT score of 20. Students who are scoring in the 80th or 90th percentile rank are panicking because that's not good enough for top colleges. If you can score better than 90% of the population without any accommodations, is it fair to get extra time to score in the 98th percentile rank? You just aren't that disabled to begin with if are doing better than 9 out if 10 students. Affluent parents realize this and have increasingly shopped around for sympathetic psychologists. If a psychologist who has a business privately testing has a reputation of not recommending extra time and being conservative with a diagnosis, they aren't going to stay in business. [/quote]

I was a high performing student. Extra time would have bored me stiff. I got a perfect score on the ACT without extra time. I did not get a perfect score on the SAT, and while I was close, it wasn't lack of time that prevented it. I just wasn't smart enough.

I know it's hard for many of us to think that about our children. But honestly. If you have a high performing student who does not have a learning disability, they not only don't need extra time, they'd probably hate it. I have never taken a standardized test I didn't finish "early" and score extremely well on. Including the LSAT and GRE. Did so many of you really feel a time crunch?

I could understand people arguing that perfectly average children might benefit (a small amount) with extra time. But here's the thing. My dyslexic child doesn't just improve a bit with extra time. He goes from essentially failing to doing extremely well, because he's a bright kid. An average kid with dyslexia might go from essentially failing to doing around average. That's the point of accommodations, to allow the abilities of the children to show through.

Is it fair for children without disabilities to score in the 98th percentile? If your answer is yes, then your answer also needs to be yes that it is fair for children with disabilities to score in the 98th percentile.

Culturally, we're not willing to write these kids off as dumb anymore. Sorry that pains you.[/quote]

As long as you ask, I got a 1600 on my PSAT but only a 1550 on the SAT because I ran out of time on one of the math sections.

With five extra minutes, I am pretty sure I would have gotten a perfect score or maybe a point or two off.

Virtually everyone I know, if offered more time on the SAT, would have taken it and would have seen their scores rise.

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More context:

I feel strongly about this issue because I was a middle / upper-middle class kid with immigrant parents who did not have alumni status, donation money, sports or any other hook to an elite college.  I did get into an elite college.

Straight A's and knocking the SAT out of the parent were the only way I was ever going to be able to pull that off.

I care about the fundamental integrity of the testing system so that as many whip-smart kids without connections or games can get into the best schools possible.  I think that is the fairest system, and the best for them, and the best for society.

There are an extremely limited number of spots at these schools for kids without a "hook."  It's terribly unfair in all sorts of ways.  For many kids, an objective four hour test is the only way THEY are going to be able to level the playing field and now you are trying to take that away from them.  [/quote]

Would you feel the same way if it took you two to four times as long to read every question and to fill in every bubble as it did other kids with your same general IQ level and knowledge base?  Then you'd have way more than one question you didn't get to, but oh well, that's fair, right?

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Asked and answered.  We need to make sure the testing system properly accounts for their strengths AND their weaknesses.

Part of the purpose of the reading comprehension section of the SAT is literally to test reading comprehension.  If we decide to exempt some (but not all) children who literally have trouble comprehending reading, we are distorting at least one of the purposes of the test, which is to test for reading comprehension.

I am all for discussing ways to make sure the test fairly measures what we are trying to measure.  Maybe we should also have submit an IQ test.  Or an untimed writing sample done closed-book environment and demonstrating their general knowledge.  Maybe those things should be in addition to or in lieu of the SAT.

I don't want a system where a high-IQ dsylexic kid gets a 700 on the SAT because of his dyslexia because that is not accurate or fair.  I also do not want a system a high IQ dsylexid kid gets 1600 because that is not accurate and fair.

It is fundamentally not fair to make one kid suffer by losing points due to that kid's failure to comprehend a reading question while at the same time designing a scheme where another kid does not lose points despite the fact that he has even more trouble comprehending reading.

Anyways, I'm all for discussing options but the current system is broken.  This matters because EVERYONE has an interest in making the system as fair as it can be for EVERYONE.  Part of this is making sure we are accurately testing students on the things that we trying to test them for.

I've said my piece, I'll hang up my mic now, I'm done.

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In other words you have no clue what dyslexia is.  It has nothing to do with reading comprehension.  Dyslexia means that the parts of the brain that form a word memory and tie it to the word on the page aren't connected in the same way as in the majority of the population.  Interestingly people with this type of brain seem to be better at some visio-spatial activities (that are not tested for obvs).  It has no bearing on test taking other than taking longer to decode the words on the page, which has nothing to do with comprehension.  They are also notoriously bad at spelling as in can't even get into the ballpark bad unless they've had structured language literacy instruction ... which isn't taught in schools.  Penalizing someone for having dyslexia makes as much sense as penalizing someone for having bad eyesight and requiring the use of text enlargement.  So far as I'm aware, none of these tests are designed to be tests of reading speed.
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