<p>I grew up in the 80s and when no one in high schools or universities was given special consideration because of a learning disability. Except for dyslexia, no one even ever mentioned any of the numerous learning disabilities that have now emerged, along with a booming industry both governmental and private to serve these disabilities. I did have a friend who was dyslexic, and she struggled mightily in school with all her classes, even math. She was never going to be admitted to an Ivy League. Now, I am seeing children in school with my own children who are being admitted into Ivy League schools while simultaneously being allotted extra time on all of their high school exams, as well as their SAT and ACT. To me, it defies logic and explanation that on the one hand a student is academically gifted enough that he or she can gain admittance to an Ivy League school, but on the other hand they have an academic "disability" that enables them to take tests with easier parameters than the so-called normal learners. Even more stunning to me is the newly formed consensus among the LD community that these learning disabilities should carry the same level of legal protection and community concern as those we afford to people who are genuinely struggling to see or to walk or to hear, particularly if the disabled person's only potentially life altering problem is that they may have to attend Vanderbilt because their disability kept them out of Harvard. </p>
<p>The LD kids who are being admitted to strong schools are creative and smart but get distracted or don’t do well under a stopwatch. The extra time is a leveling of the field. The outstanding LD kids do produce outstanding work with extra time, as outstanding non-LD kids do with regular time. Believe me, most non-LD students I have taught would not have produced better work if they had been given extra time on their assessments. The average kid leaves the final exam early or hands in a paper having done the bare minimum. There are brilliant LD kids who do not read or write well under time pressure but whose ideas leave the other kids in the dust. They are sometimes admitted to very selective schools and excel in their professions.</p>
<p>I’ve heard the point made many times that non-LD kids either wouldn’t use the time or they wouldn’t do better because of it. So why not give every student the option of more time? If they need it, they can use it.</p>
<p>In all honesty I don’t think the problem is with the truly LD student being given the time to show what they know (in essence putting them on par with other students), Rather it is with kids who are not truly LD figuring out how to game the tests and get extra time to use solely as an advantage. </p>
<p>Whatever else you may say about this issue, I personally would have benefited greatly from extra time on my tougher college exams. No one left these exams early. My daughter had a high school test last week which all the students were struggling to finish. Many did not. She managed to finish but lost points because she didn’t have any time to check her work. I don’t see how anyone can claim that “normal” students have plenty of time to complete exams and papers. This is a fiction. </p>
<p>Perhaps an “average” student doesn’t care enough to want to use all the time available to them. I rather doubt that the students attending the Ivy League schools mentioned by the OP were handing in exams early or sloppy minimalist papers because they really didn’t care about their grades and wanted to get on with the important business of texting their friends.</p>
<p>I agree with you. Every kid I know, whether they call themselves smart, average or not good at school would like extra time on exams – especially the SAT and the ACT. Currently, we have kids who are scoring in the top 1% on these standardized tests while they are also getting extra time to take them. And to me that is wrong – especially as the fact that they got extra time to take these tests is hidden from the universities.</p>
<p>What is the reasoning behind not giving everyone the same amount of time as the LD kids? If such timing doesn’t matter for colleges, why are we limiting anyone?</p>
<p>Remember that these LD students likely take much longer to complete their homework assignments. Most would trade away their LD “extra time” for being able to complete assignments in the same amount of time as neuro-typical students in a heartbeat. It isn’t like they just sail into a top school and then the playing field is level. They struggle every day in ways that I am sure you can’t imagine. My hat is off to any of these students who succeed in a tough environment – extra time on tests is a very small benefit compared to the difficulties they have on a day to day basis.</p>
<p>What about the kids who are not technically LD but need more time than the fastest kids? Aren’t they being disadvantaged by not getting more time too?</p>
<p>Possibly… but I have to say, I have one kid that you could have given all day to and all the prep classes in the world, and she was NEVER going to break a 650 in SAT Math. So extra time is only so much of a help… a kid who doesn’t have the horsepower to begin with isn’t going to get much out of it, and isn’t going to improve their admissions prospects much.</p>
<p>The human mind is a complete mystery. We have almost no idea why we act or think or do what we do. How can a psychologist spend time with a child and arbitrarily decide he needs twice the time as a supposedly normal child on tests when he is capable of scoring an almost perfect SAT score and the normal child is completely average? We are not talking about people who struggle in school here. We are talking about top students who have never, ever done poorly in school getting extra time on important tests while the kid sitting next to him (who may well have undiagnosed learning disabilities) gets less time – even if he or she would like to stay and work longer. At some elite prep schools 30% of the students get extra time on the SAT and school tests. Mark my words, that number is only going to climb once the other parents figure out what’s happening.</p>
<p>I agree. I don’t think it is ethical or legally fair for schools, or the SAT to give people extra time and then hide this from the universities. If you are blind or deaf or in a wheelchair, you do not try to hide this from your intended colleges, and yet LD students can hide the fact that they get extra time on tests from the elite schools they are applying to. Once they get into Princeton, they have even sued to get extra time there as well. They then use their wonderful grades to apply to Harvard Law School. All with a learning disability that has afforded them a much easier testing track than the so-called normal children.</p>
<p>This is a topic that had been covered repeatedly, so I’m just going to pull from a previous post. </p>
<ol>
<li>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 who is gifted with LDs. 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 subject, 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:</li>
</ol>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<ol>
<li>When is speed a useful criterion? Short, timed tests are, frankly, a lot more convenient for professors and universities (and school teachers and schools). Procotoring 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.</li>
</ol>
<p>IIRC, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>If you are not giving everyone the same amount of extra time to use or not, then you are going to miss a lot of the Bardeen Nobel Prize winners who have never been diagnosed. And I am going to guess that that is most of them.</p>
<p>OP,</p>
<p>There are plenty of reasons why kids in the top 2% receive extra time on exams. My kid is one of them. He had a vision disability (convergence insufficiency) that made reading tiring and painful. We accommodated him at home by either reading to him, (though he’s an excellent reader) or getting him books on tape. To read anything long, he read with one eye. It was tiring and took much longer than normal.</p>
<p>He finally had surgery in Dec. of his junior year to correct it. The difference is night and day. He can now read a textbook, a 1000 page novel, and small print. The extra time was very necessary. He will need surgery again in the future but for now, he’s doing great in that area.</p>
<p>He also has T1 diabetes, and getting breaks as needed is important for him in the event his sugars go super low or high or his pump malfunctions.</p>
<p>He also has a math disability, but has opted not to use accommodations at the community college. He works very, very hard in math. </p>
<p>I guess if he never got diagnosed and we never looked for answers to his issues, he might have been written off. I confess I was very surprised at how gifted he was (according to the tests he took), because it wasn’t showing up in output. Getting detailed testing was very helpful so that we could identify, remediate and/or accommodate problems, so as to allow him to be successful in school.</p>
<p>And I disagree that every kid would want extra time. Believe me, before my son’s eye surgery, he got extra time and, while it may have been helpful in one way, in another way, it was incredibly tiring to take a test that lasted over five hours. </p>
<p>My son’s accommodation for extra exam time was based on a LONG test administered by a psychologist. On some tasks, he excelled - he put together a 3D block puzzle in a matter of seconds. The doctor said that he had never seen anyone do it as quickly. But on other tests, he really struggled. His processing time was measured as being in the bottom 5%! So his overall IQ came out as 100, which makes his high college GPA even more incredible.</p>
<p>Part of my son’s issue is that he hears voices, all of the time. He looks pretty normal. If you saw him getting extra time, you would probably be outraged. But watch this YouTube video to get a vague idea of what he goes through every day - <a href=“Anderson Cooper tries a schizophrenia simulator - YouTube”>Anderson Cooper tries a schizophrenia simulator - YouTube; It shows Anderson Cooper trying to get through ONE day hearing voices. It’s painful to watch.</p>
<p>If extra time allows him to get his BS in applied math and be a productive part of society, I think it’s OK.</p>
<p>I’m happy for your son. It sounds like he has endured a lot of difficulty in his young life and persevered. My experience with extra time has only been at an elite prep school where the time is given for attention disorders and processing speed issues. Some students really struggle in school, but others have always had perfect grades and test in the top 1% on the SAT. Even for the strugglers, I wonder why do the “normal” kids who struggle not get extra time? Why not give extra time to every kid who asks for it, not just those whose parents have invested in a diagnosis.</p>
<p>Read the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 for starters.</p>
<p>Fyi, colleges have a much tougher standard for accommodations than high schools, though there have been challenges in court over the years. And legally no one can ask for accommodations that are financially or administratively burdensome, or that change the academic program.</p>
<p>Noone with a disability has to disclose that disability to colleges when applying, including those you name such as blind and deaf students.</p>
<p>It is perfectly possible to be highly intelligent and also have a learning disability. The accommodations afforded on tests level the playing field so that the student with an LD can do work at the level of his or her ability. School, theoretically, is about learning, not competing.</p>
<p>If you don’t have a child with a disability (and mine do not have LD but have more obvious disabilities) then you may not understand, and the competitive nature of college admissions can sometimes create these unfortunate resentments.</p>
<p>Be grateful if you have children without LD’s or other disabilities. Anyone would give up extra time in exchange for no longer having those challenges.</p>
<p>The only reason that your kids have LDs and get extra time is because their conditions have been defined and recognized and diagnosed. As I already said, I’m going to guess that the majority of kids who are not learning “normal” have never been identified or diagnosed and don’t get any extra time and that is not fair. Why not give everyone the same amount of time? You haven’t answered that one.</p>
<p>Speed is an important factor in testing, and often the brightest people ruminate longer on things than the less intelligent. My problem with awarding high IQ people extra time for being slow processors is that it discriminates against normal processors who may have lower IQs, as if being smart and slow is a disability, but being not so smart is not. If you can’t take some tests fast enough, that may keep you out of Princeton, but it won’t keep you from being a lawyer or inventing a processor. Using some current LD testing criteria, every single student in a super smart class or a super slow class would get extra time, while all the so-called average kids just have to do what they can.</p>