<p>Posting this for a friend...</p>
<p>Student has SAT scores that show key strengths in one area and strong deficits in another. Child was diagnosed with a specific learning disability and parents are questioning whether to disclose this information on the college supplement (or in a separate letter) to explain why the scores are so varied or not to do so. What are the risks and are they such that this information could preclude college admission? Student will not be majoring in an area that will require academic strengths in the area of low scores. Any insights appreciated.</p>
<p>Some people just astound me. I’m not surprised no one has answered in two weeks.</p>
<p>My son has Asperger’s. We intend to disclose BEFORE application, because I want to see and talk to the support services people of every university we intend to apply to. I want to talk to students who use those services after we narrow down the list. Those schools deemed not worthy will not be applied to. They should be more concerned about the quality of services so their child will succeed. If they get in without disclosure, and find out the services suck, then what? </p>
<p>Trust me, they are NOT all the same. For example, I can tell you three different state universities within driving distance of Philadelphia all with different caliber services. On paper, the departments all look the same. BUT - The person in charge of one of them is a COMPLETE Ah*le. The person in charge of another is absolutely amazing. And the person in charge of the third is a PR person, a talking head with no action.</p>
<p>Not only that, why would I degrade my kid by hiding his disability? It’s not something to be ashamed of - we could do it fairly easily, except for his SAT scores. And things in the high school record can disclose the disability without actually saying, student has XYZ. Classes they take, etc. - and combine those with the SAT scores…the admissions people know how to do the math.</p>
<p>Colleges are used to having students with LDs. If they don’t want your child because of an LD, you don’t want that school. When the kid gets there, if the services suck, the kid will fail. And why on earth would anyone want to give their hard-earned money to a school that would penalize a kid’s admissions for having an LD?</p>
<p>We took an approach similar to what nclblows espouses and were quite open with our son’s Aspergers, the thought being that supports would be very important to his success at the school. Disability Services was the most important part of any visit we made.</p>
<p>That being said, just because Disability Services is enlightened doesn’t mean the admissions department is. Nor does it mean the faculty is. Still, I feel that your best chance to find an accepting atmosphere is one where the pieces you can make a determination about reflect what you want from a school. There’s some level of a crapshoot involved, but the more you can find out, the better your decision should be.</p>
<p>Now for the OP, if your student won’t be accessing Disability Services, and the vast majority of classes won’t be impacted greatly by the LD, then you’re taking a chance that the admissions department will not want to take on what they perceive as a headache (face it, schools are not knocking down doors to recruit our kids). The general consensus (which I tend to disagree with, at least for my kid) is not to reveal a disability unless there’s something on the application which requires an explanation of mitigating circumstances. That seems to fit this situation. If the student is likely to be admitted without revealing, then they could go that route. If an explanation of a shortfall (without making excuses) is needed to make the applicant competitive, that’s another story.</p>
<p>Really, I think it’s pretty specific to each family and the particular school. I hope they follow the path which gets them the best result!</p>
<p>OP, If the SAT scores (esp. the lower score) might keep the applicant out of the university, then the student has nothing to lose by disclosing the reason for the low score/score discrepancy. If the student will get in for sure with the current scores/GPA then the student has no reason to disclose. On the one hand, I understand why people will do whatever they can to get into a particular school but, on the other hand, I have to ask why a student would want to attend a school that wouldn’t want him/her if they had all of the facts. An LD is not like not disclosing a school suspension that happened once a long time ago; usually LD’s present long term, ongoing challenges that may affect the student’s ability to be successful at that particular university. The student should make sure he/she has all of the facts about what services are necessary and available before applying. Universities admit kids with LD’s all of the time. Call the DSP office of the school (or better yet, drop by) and see what they have to offer. When I was out school shopping, I could tell by looking at the bulletin boards at the DSP office how active the program was by what types of drop in programs and seminars they offered. And, of course, any school’s DSP office should be happy to discuss what they offer and how admissions are handled.</p>
<p>Hi, I am a noob, and am going to have the same problems…</p>
<p>One of the colleges I wanted to apply to has a lot of services, a lot of stuff listed online, but then when I go to call them, they don’t want to make an appointment to see anyone until they are admitted.</p>
<p>Why would that be? Any clues?</p>
<p>Pianomom12, my son is a college freshman this year. We had several experiences. First, if you are applying to highly selective schools, the Disabilities Services Office will likely give you generic information if you visit before you apply. You will get lots of conditional answers. They have too many answers to go into the details of your case unless you have connections (in one case, the university president is a friend and the DSO paid a lot more attention than they would have otherwise). That said, you can get a sense of whether they are predisposed to be more or less helpful. </p>
<p>After you are admitted, they are selling you and you can send them all of your neuropsychological testing, etc., and meet with them to say, “I believe I need X and Y for support. If I come here, based on what you received, will you offer X and Y?” You will sometimes get yes, sometimes “We’ll have to send it out to our consulting psychologists and can’t do that until you have accepted but based upon my reading it seems likely” or possibly no (we didn’t get no’s but different flavors of yes’s and maybes).</p>
<p>If we had a choice, my son would not have disclosed. At highly selective schools, they take 1 out of 8 or 10 kids, most of who are terrific. So, they are looking for reasons to reject a kid. But, as a highly gifted highly dyslexic/dysgraphic/“dysspeechic” kid, he didn’t study foreign language and we partially home-schooled him to get his writing up to where it would need to be to match his intellectual gifts (and believe me that was a lot of work). So, we needed to disclose to explain a) why he didn’t take certain subjects; and b) why we homeschooled, it was necessary to disclose.</p>
<p>Pianomom12, the one thing I would worry about is the fact that your son has deficits in the area in which he wants to major (rather than just tests poorly in those areas but is actually strong). I can see from my son that college is a big step up in demands from HS (although my son did very well in his first semester). He had to change his 2nd semester curriculum in part because he could see that he had signed up for a course with much heavier reading demands than he anticipated (it was an econ class for majors in the “I am strong at math” track) and in part because the professor explicitly said he didn’t want freshman in the class. He will need to pick his curriculum carefully so as not to blow up. But, he has to work around his deficits in choosing his courseload. That would be hard to do if he were choosing a major that played to his deficits. If I were a college, I’d be loath to admit a kid who read slowly and with great effort, for example, but wanted to major in a department whose courses routinely assign 400 pages of reading a week.</p>