<p>We have the choice of taking the test over several days, which would have to be after school or taking the test on a Saturday, which would mean going until mid-afternoon. Does anyone have any experience with either?</p>
<p>I think that the best way to do this is to have the student take the test at the same time as everybody else, but over the course of two days. This is what our kid did, taking the SAT exam on Saturday and Sunday mornings. (Especially if your school/center has a Sunday administration for kids who are Saturday sabbath observant, this would be a very reasonable request for you to make.) Our school set this up on our kid’s behalf, offering the same proctor and testing environment for both weekend mornings even though it was not a Sunday test center. It worked out great.</p>
<p>Asking the student to take a test for 3 hours a day after school when the student is already tired seems like a problem, and also unfair to the student since his peers don’t take the test after school, when they’re tired. The student will be called upon to provide intense concentration and speed at the end of a 9 or 10 hour day – this is not reasonable for the test center to propose. And taking the SAT for 7 or 8 hours on a Saturday doesn’t make a lot of sense either in terms of getting peak performance from the student unless he has superhuman stamina. (Imagine a non-LD kid taking the SAT in the morning and 3 or 4 subject tests in the afternoon – which is, of course, not allowed – and you get the general idea of how unreasonable this would be.) </p>
<p>Would the school/test center let the student miss class on two weekdays and administer the test two mornings in a row? This might be the best way to go if Sat and Sun mornings are refused. If you’re getting major resistance from the school/test center perhaps you could 1) get a letter from the testing psychologist explaining why taking the test for 8 hrs. straight on Saturday or at the end of a long school day is a bad idea that will adversely affect the student’s performance given the LD in question and 2.) offer to pay for the Sunday proctor selected by the center, assuming the cost is not exhorbitant.</p>
<p>Also, you should know (because neither our school nor I knew until it was too late) that even though special administration extended time SAT’s are automatically given over the course of two days, AP exams are not. You have to make a special request of the ETS way in advance. Otherwise, if your kid has an AP that is scheduled for the afternoon, he will end up taking it over the course of 7 or 8 hours starting at 12 or 1 p.m., finishing quite late at night. (The school is not allowed to begin an afternoon AP exam in the morning to accommodate.) And if breaks aren’t built into the accommodation, the test center will have to avert its gaze and wink and nod while the kid grabs a sandwich for dinner in the middle of all this. Don’t let this happen to your kid. Even though our school was stellar in its efforts to accommodate properly, AP’s were unnecessarily stressful.</p>
<p>Thanks, AnonyMom. I hadn’t thought about a Saturday and a Sunday.</p>
<p>My son took long tests over two days and would have been exhausted to take them all on one day. However, our school said they could not do Saturday/Sunday or Saturday/Tuesday so he did Monday/Tuesday. </p>
<p>You need to make sure that the school and the College Board both know that the test will be taken over two days as they will give a different test so that your son cannot be tipped off by others. Otherwise, they can each blame the other for not having the test and making the kid retake it.</p>