I’ve thought about a lot of these issues long and hard. I don’t have any LDs but married an extremely bright woman who, along with her father and two of her siblings, was dyslexic (and probably ADHD). I have one son who is severely dyslexic and probably ADHD and a daughter who is ADHD. My father-in-law was told he was stupid. My wife was told that she had a very high IQ but was lazy. Her brother would have to study so hard at university that he would come home sick and sleep for a week after finals. (He is now a Dean at a very good university). I come from an academically strong family – my dad was a brilliant theoretical physicist and I attended three of HYPMS and taught at one – and while both my kids were quite bright (and IQ tests as part of LD testing confirmed this), it was evident from age 2 or 3 that my son was intellectually gifted. I negotiated long and hard with school systems on both their behalfs but especially his. It turned out that reading and writing were actually physically painful to him for years. They are now just fatiguing. Anyway, his record looked pretty much like @Gandhi21’s but it was a struggle getting there as it probably is for @Gandhi21.
This is a topic that had been covered repeatedly, so I’m just going to pull from a previous post.
- In general, as a society, we tend to conflate smart and quick. In common vernacular, a "slow student" is a poor student who doesn't get the ideas. That is usually true. But not always. For folks with certain kinds of learning disabilities, speed of input and output mask speed of processing. I had never experienced this until I meet my wife and especially my son. I liken my son's situation to having a supercomputer chip and dial-up input and output. If he gets the same test time as a typical kid, he actually has less time to think than they do because he's got to go through a fuzzy I/O filter and work hard at doing that. So, if your objective was to accurately test the processing capability, you'd need to allot more time. Some people actually do the processing more slowly (I think this may be what dyscalculia is, though I'm not sure) and need more time for the processing to provide the same output. In many subjects, math especially, I see no obvious reason why we need to have tight time limits (other than to protect students from harming their other subjects). In an earlier post in this thread, I gave my favorite example:
My father worked with a guy and said that if you asked his co-worker a question, even a relatively simple question, he just could not answer quickly, although he often came back the NEXT DAY with an unusually deep and thoughtful answer. Did his slow processing speed handicap him? Probably from a job as a litigator or as a manager in many organizations. Had the co-worker been judged based solely upon timed tests without accommodations, he would have fared poorly. Was he unintelligent or undeserving of a spot at one of the best schools? By some of your I’d hours the OP would say so. But, his name was John Bardeen and he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, without which we wouldn’t have high speed computers let alone the internet or, heaven forbid, CC, and again in 1972, for a well-developed theory of superconductivity. Extraordinary – one Nobel for a practical device and another for deep theory.
I’d venture to guess that Bardeen was smarter than anyone who has ever posted on CC who is highly confident of the value of speed in math tests [maybe anyone who has ever posted on CC] and yet he was really, really slow. So, be aware that you are likely unknowingly conflating notions of intelligence and speed and that sometimes that conflation is incorrect.
- When is speed a useful criterion? Short, timed tests are, frankly, a lot more convenient for professors and universities (and school teachers and schools). Proctoring is easier. Less worries about cheating, or if only some kids get longer tests, logistics. Let's discount the convenience of schools systems. Let's assume that the reason to go to school is primarily to educate and not to sort (many CC folks get that confused as well and focus largely on the sorting effect of education, which is for the benefit of employers, grad schools, etc.). Are there any reasons to have timed tests (with tight time limits relative to the material)? I'm open to hearing them, but I can't think of any.
The College Board has studies showing that extra time results in a statistically significant improvement for kids with LDs but no statistically significant increase for those without LDs. I also found a doctoral dissertation with the same findings for the ACT. As such, I don’t see any reason not to give people the right to replace timed tests in many subjects.
Other than convenience, we’re thus left with the sorting function of colleges as the reason for timed tests. For example, someone else wondered if someone who needed extra time on tests could be a brain surgeon. If kids couldn’t do well on timed tests and HYPMS didn’t use its grading system to downgrade them for this inadequacy, would medical schools unwittingly take unqualified candidates? That’s tricky. For one thing, there are different kinds of LDs that affect different kinds of speed. Speed in reading and writing, or speed in doing calculations, is very different from speed in surgery. A dyslexic with great spatial sense might be superb as a surgeon – they can just “see” how to do things. They might, however, need longer to read charts. Dyslexia might not be a bar at all to someone who wanted to use complex math models to trade fixed income securities for Goldman Sachs but might be a bar to them become in lawyer.
Disclosure is the next issue raised. That was the subject of a class action lawsuit that ETS/The College Board settled to avoid losing, I think. High end universities review 10-20 kids per slot. Many are qualified and they are just looking for reasons to reject people who all seem really good. The disclosure of extra time could lead to a “Well, she may have done very well in HS but can she really cut it at Seriously Self-Impressed university where we have the best of the best and the competition can be intense.” I suspect that, given the data cited above, disclosing confers an unfair disadvantage on kids with LDs.
The good news is for the OP is that it can work out well. My son got into elite colleges, attended one, did better in college than in HS, started a company (a good things for dyslexics to do) while in college, and now is in the best graduate programs in the world in his chosen field. But, none of that would have happened without extra time.
