<p>My daughter is twice exceptional, dyslexic with high IQ. She has been approved by College Board for extended time. Can a student still qualify for National Merit Scholar with extended time? Does anyone have experience with this? Thank you.</p>
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<p>I’ve never been asked this specific question, but based on experience I’d assume that she would qualify for National Merit. The PSAT score reports don’t state whether the test was administered with accommodations. Since the National Merit program is run separately from the College Board, I’d assume that the National Merit people would have access only to the score reports, not accommodations records. Best of luck to your daughter!</p>
<p>Thank you swans004. I noticed as well that her score report did not show in a way that I could discern as to whether or not she received extended time. </p>
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<p>This is such an Interesting question.<br>
Usually people find the areas they succeed at and compete in those arenas. It wouldn’t be fair to all students if some are given more time. </p>
<p>Since in the real world people generally work in “real time” it would be odd that a student would be given the opportunity to compete for NM if that student needed more time and therefore had an advantage over other students who ARE working in real time. That just doesn’t seem fair.
Isn’t it a test of the student’s abilities RIGHT THEN? Does my clumsy-on-land child get “more time” (aka a head start) to run in a timed race during track season? Not last time I checked. That’s why my clumsy child doesn’t run track. She’s not equipped to compete. Instead she swims, where she is a graceful fish and wins consistently.</p>
<p>When kids grow up and get jobs, is their boss going to give them more time to complete assignments? (“The software is going live on March 5th, but Bob…you don’t have to finish and test and integrate your software until March 9th!”) That just doesn’t make any sense! I hope people who need more time don’t go into a field where instantaneous decisions about life/death happen (medical, military, law enforcement, transportation, law, etc etc). Getting the right answer “eventually” isn’t exceptional. Getting the right answer in a time-crunch crisis is exceptional.</p>
<p>When you think about it, most people perform better with more accurate results if they’re given more time, so why not give everyone the whole weekend (48 hours) to take the test and then it would be more fair and equal?!</p>
<p>Without more information, I would have to say that NM should NOT allow people with time extensions the opportunity to compete.
Given enough time, most people can achieve things that are otherwise unattainable if there is a time constraint. ie: with enough time devoted to ballet every day, eventually I could become a prima ballerina. That would be a great accomplishment, but not exceptional. It IS exceptional if I can achieve it in the first 15 years of my life, instead of grinding on till you’re in your 30’s. </p>
<p>It seems that exceptional achievements should only be acknowledged when there is a level playing field.
Since money (cash) and money (scholarships) are the end result of a competition like NM, it ought to be a fair contest.</p>
<p>Ok let me tag on to this-- my husband will tell you that very accomplish people have learning differences. Most students including mine perform; my child who is dyslexic takes longer to read and yes she takes longer on test but let me re assure that she SPENDs longer on assignments than others at night PREPARING for the next day, so others would not know about her LD.
She knows that she will need to work harder than others the rest of her life–not just in school.
Most students with an LD will score what they would score whether they have extra time or not. Extra time does not give a leg up it just gives even playing field.
Oh by the way my dear husband works with dead lines all the time–including giving them to his team members. But I guess a PHD in Statistics and Bio-Stats was a profession made for those who takes longer to do a job.</p>
<p>@newcrew42 I can assure you that accommodations on PSAT (or subsequent SAT) do NOT affect chances at NMSF.</p>
<p>@CollegeBoundCA I guess that kids with glasses shouldn’t wear them, or it might give them extra help on the test. Accommodations level the playing field. </p>
<p>The PSAT isn’t a vision test. It’s a test of academic skills, which includes things such as reading ability and computation ability. If you have difficulty with vision, it makes sense to provide accommodations. Colleges can require a vision test if they want to know your vision acuity (and I assume the service academies will do this). If you can’t record your answers because your arm is paralyzed, it makes sense to provide accommodations. The PSAT isn’t a physical test. But if you have difficulty with <em>academic</em> skills, then accommodations are defeating the point of this test of <em>academic</em> skills and not fair to other test takers. That doesn’t mean that people with LD’s can’t perform at a high level and be very successful in many careers. But the PSAT/SAT tests are by design very time-limited even for the best test-takers. A large part of what they are testing is the ability to work quickly and accurately under significant time pressure. In this case, extra time is a huge advantage.</p>
<p>People who don’t realize that the only point of accommodations IS to level the playing field are ignorant. Does that mean there aren’t people who fake disability? Of course not. But someone with a well-documented and doctor-confirmed diagnosis that requires accommodations is NOT gaming the system.
I don’t think you guys get how many people get accommodations, even at Ivy League schools. To try to ghettoize people with disabilities because they take “twice as much time” due to a very clearly defined condition is alarming.</p>
<p>Extra time levels the playing field, it is not a huge advantage. My children have other accommodations, one for example does not take morning exams. Mathyone might argue that he has an advantage because every kid is tired taking a 7:30 am test. Yeah, but every kid doesn’t have a chronic health condition and sleep disorder diagnosed and confirmed by testing by multiple doctors including the top children’s hospital in the country.</p>
<p>I always tell my college students that within reason, there are deadlines when you get a real job, but they are NOT the same as taking a standardized test in a few hours. If you don’t get your work done in eight hours, you stay a few extra hours. If you don’t remember the answer, you freaking look it up. Why do people think that standardized test relate directly to real life?</p>
<p>And I am a very good standardized test taker, but it does not relate directly to career performance. </p>
<p>Maybe y’all should move if you think that disabled people should only get accommodations if you feel they are fair, not if multiple medical professionals, the children’s schools, and the College Board feel they are fair.</p>
<p>I’ve told my daughters to only worry about their accomplishments and not others. Whether a person has more time or not isn’t their concern. Otherwise, they would worry about the kids who might have unfair advantages because they had tutors, review classes, families with higher incomes, etc. They can go on and on. But doing so avoids their number one concern, their own accomplishments. Those learning disabled kids may have extra time but their education are rife with obstacles that “normal” children never have to encounter. </p>
<p>So, if two kids score 50 on a PSAT section, and one kid can say, “I scored 50 but on a totally different test of academic skills I scored well in some sections and poorly in others” and the other kid says “I scored 50 but on that same other totally different test, my scores were more even”, how is it fair to say the first kid deserves to retake it with extra time and the second kid doesn’t? Even though the second kid will also improve with more time? I just don’t see that as “leveling” anything. </p>
<p>The PSAT/SAT is clearly intended to include reading and processing speed in the package of academic skills it tests. If they weren’t testing for speed, then they wouldn’t have made the tests so very time-limited. It’s been that way for decades, and this property of the exam has survived major revisions to the SAT format, so clearly this isn’t some kind of oversight. It’s something they want to test. Whether or not we think this is the best thing to test is another question. That is the system which is in place. The intent of the test, whose middle name is Aptitude, was to try to assess kids’ ability to learn and predict how successful kids would be in college. Since college requires a lot of high-level reading and it requires rapid assimilation of information, this does have some bearing. </p>
<p>I believe that all students should get the same amount of time. I wouldn’t mind if they wanted to give a lot more time, so that everyone has plenty of time. I just think it should be fair. And if they did give a lot more time, they would also have to make the test a lot harder. The problems are too easy to let kids have all the time they need.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with you that the LD kids face many obstacles, but that in itself isn’t justification for getting extra time on a time-limited test. I’m not opposed to extra time on content-based testing, where the purpose of the test is to see what the kids know, rather than how quickly they can read and answer questions about something.</p>
<p>FWIW, I have a kid who would qualify for extended time, but we didn’t want to go through the hassle of petitioning for an accommodation. She did very well on the 2013 PSAT (well over last year’s NMSF cut-off for our region), and in my opinion, more time would have been an unfair advantage for her.</p>
<p>I’ve seen people saying that some LD kids are granted extra time and some aren’t. Some may get it for the SAT or the ACT but not both. Any time you start making exceptions you are going to create a situation that is even less fair to someone. Also, I have to wonder how they determine how much extra time you get. If your processing speed or reading ability puts you at 65% of normal, do they calculate how much time would be fair to compensate? Or do they just slap 50% extra time on every case? How is this fair to another kid whose processing speed/reading ability is only 45% of normal? And how accurate would those measures of disability be? </p>
<p>I think it’s actually quite uncommon for people to have evenly distributed intellectual strengths. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some are more extreme than others. Any lines you start drawing are going to be somewhat arbitrary.</p>
<p>I also find it a little odd that if you can put a label on the disability (eg. “processing speed”), then it’s a disability, but if you simply get the same mediocre score with no identifiable explanation that some psychologist has developed a test for, it’s not. Whether or not we can identify a piece of the black box inside their head doesn’t function as well as a high scoring kid seems irrelevant to me for the purpose of SAT testing.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to say that accommodations make no sense in schools. The point is to help everyone to learn to their best ability. Most testing in schools is for the purpose of demonstrating what you know. To assess what an LD student knows, you may have to give extra time. But I don’t think it’s logical to take policies that were put into place to aid learning and insist on extrapolating them to what is meant to be a highly standardized assessment of, among other things, reading speed and ability to quickly assimilate information. Especially when it’s a competitive situation, as for the national merit scholarships, there is no objectively fair way to award extra time, and for every kid whose “playing field” you say is “leveled” there’s another kid who would have outscored them on a truly level playing field who misses out on that scholarship or admittance.</p>
<p>I don’t know what it means for a student to be able to qualify for extra time, but not need it. Our son’s neuropsych test is within the last year, and he is seen every six months for his illness which causes his disability, and undergoes multiple lab tests at that frequency. He did okay on the PSAT, commended level, but it is likely he would have done at his ability level if he had an accommodation (not extra time though, different setting).</p>
<p>If someone is blind, clearly they cannot take any standardized test in its original format as other students do. Period. End of sentence. Do you mean to say that therefore blind students should not be allowed to take standardized tests at all?</p>
<p>It cost about $3,000 for a neuropsych exam. They do hours and hours of testing, and compare results based on standard norms. More than 25 percentile off in related areas indicates a learning disability. Processing speed is estimated based on multiple tests of different areas, and can be related to reading, writing, or math (among other subdivisions).</p>
<p>As you say, no blind person can take the PSAT. No deaf person can either, because there are verbal directions. No one who is hospital-bound can take the PSAT, because it is offered in groups.</p>
<p>I do not care if someone thinks my children’s, or my for that matter, accommodations are “unfair” or “make the playing field uneven”. If their child has a problem, get it diagnosed. If they don’t have a problem, they do as they are able. Why can’t you see the logic in that?</p>
<p>I am not saying that there aren’t abuses, but I’ve got five doctors who attest to my son’s LD. It’s good enough for the school district. It’s good enough for the College Board. I’d like to think that as a lay person, it would be good enough for you.</p>
<p>Why does it feel like the average US citizen feels that if someone is getting something, it is at their expense? Couldn’t we all be compared on an individual basis? Don’t you think that colleges and employers realize that those who are disabled might have or need accommodations, but because we are so underrepresented in many areas, including higher education and employment, we just <em>might</em> need our accommodations to compete on the same level?</p>
<p>Oy vey! how often does this thread keep happening?!</p>
<p>Accomodations are ok, as long as they are reported to institutions reviewing the scores. As long as people reviewing the scores understand the LD and the accomodations made to the student, they can make accurate judgments about the overall ability of the student.</p>
<p>@immasenior, the accommodations are not reported to the institutions reviewing the scores or to the scholarship-granting agencies.</p>
<p>Blind and deaf students are irrelevant to this argument, because their disabilities are not among the skills being tested. “For us the greatest barrier is turning the printed word into a medium that we can read for ourselves. This can easily be accomplished through the use of Braille, a competent reader, large print, or recorded text. Once we have our exam in an accessible format, the way we take the test is little different than the way sighted persons take the test.” Deaf people can read the written instructions in advance (you’re really grasping at straws here–those instructions are provided in print to all students in the registration booklet and all students are advised to do so). I assume they can arrange for someone in the testing center to alert them when the time is up. </p>
<p>These tests are are testing academic skills and just because you can pick out some particular area of relative weakness in your skill-set and maybe the next person can’t do that but still gets the same score, I don’t see why you would be able to get extra time. It’s kind of like saying, I need extra time on my essay because I’m a really terrible speller. And I get to use a spell-checker. Well, if spelling is one of the things they are testing you on, why should you get that? It defeats the purpose of the test.</p>
<p>I wonder what would society (in the long-run) loose out on if some kids did not get accommodations. </p>
<p>these tests are hardly testing useful academic skills. Honestly.</p>
<p>Most tests anymore, with their silly restrictions, hardly test anything useful anymore anyway. I mean, when is the last time someone was stuck in a lab without access to the formulas on their iphone? When was the last time you couldn’t quickly check a date or historical place on the same? Education hasn’t caught up to technology. We are practically in a post literary world and NOW they install writing accross the curriculum instead of adding computer literacy class requirements at most colleges. For all of this cutting edge thinking, they want a mere quarter of a million dollars. </p>
<p>Anyone who thinks extra time for a dyslexic is an advantage should try to take their SAT with distortion glasses on and partially orally. If you think being able to read faster than someone else is going to determine your level of academic success? You probably think the SATs are a great and unbiased measure of intellect. I’d say, I’d like to see a test of your critical thinking ability before admissions, since you seem to like kool aid so much.</p>