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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Don’t think it is contradictory to say they deserve extra time and to question whether too much is given. I think that is a logical question. There are several open questions on extended time:
1. Abuse and how easy accomodations are given especially among the wealthy and private schools
2. The amount of time given - are too much been given in certain cases that it creates an unfair advantage over those without accomodations? There is also the cases where too little are given. Yes, we do not wish an SN child on anybody etc but the issue at hand is the fairness of the system
3. How can the tests be changed to be fair to every kid? Should tests give everyone an extra time or be changed to be less on speed but test more on knowledge?[/quote]

I agree with the above post as far as it goes (see below) but that was not the assertion in 15:31.  That statement asserted that because of a lack of precision in estimating needed extra time, all kids essentially get too much (including my child). Such emotional broad based anonymous assertions do not promote constructive dialogue.   I do agree with another prior poster that kids who do need extra time have to make a strategic decision as to whether they want to be at a schools where the academic demands may be more intense than others.  For example, if one assumes that the demands of the same STEM course at MIT is greater than at AU, the student who could be accepted at MIT has to decide if he/she wants to work that much harder than the other kids at MIT in college to do well, and whether they are willing to make that trade off (giving up even more free time or settling for lower grades if they don't give that up -- because college grades are often based not only on timed tests, but on problem sets in stem classes and papers in many non-stem classes).

As for point 3, there is no test that is perfectly "fair" to every person if time is varied.  For that matter, one of my kids is a morning person and consistently does better on tests administered its he a.m. than in the pm.  And I am sure there are kids who are the opposite.   And there are kids who take tests on days they are somewhat sick.  Or on days when they didn't get sleep because their parents had a fight, etc.  The idea that a "standardized" test can be made perfectly "fair" to every kid is not realistic.  Standardized tests began to try to have some leveler for smart kids were systematically excluded or subject to quotas in elite schools because they weren't from the right social, ethnic, religious, or racial class.  They are an improvement in admissions as one factor or merit, and as every college will tell you grades matter more. 
      
     If we go back to indicating that kids who take standardized tests had extra time, I guarantee their college essays will talk about how they overcame extraordinary obstacles to learning to nevertheless be competitive applicants (right now they don't need to do that).  By the way, our private school counselors have told us that they often include information about any learning issues in their recommendation letters and seek parental consent to do so.  And if parents object -- but its still an issue -- private schools have ways to legally get the point across anyway.   Now that may be different in public schools, but still let's take a deep breath and ask the question -- is there really a wide spread  fairness problem at all?  Yes, there is abuse and that should be weeded out -- prosecuted in extreme cases.   Again, I am coming form the perspective of a parent with one kid who did not have an extra time accommodation and was applying to the most selective schools, and another who did have extra time that was clearly obvious in late elementary /middle school forward.  For the first kid, I worried about all the fairness issues in admissions  -- legacy, athletics, diversity preferences etc -- but never once did I worry that my kid was disadvantaged because another kid may have gotten extra time for an ACT or SAT.   There are plenty of kids with very high scores who get rejected.   If some other kids got a bit higher than they should have because of extra time that they shouldn't have had, I'm not going to throw all the kids who justly needed extra time under the bus to weed out the fraud.

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