Very fair question, and that cartoon is perfect.
A quick query provides this response to your question:
“Both the ACT and SAT strictly time their tests for several reasons, all tied to fairness, standardization, and the skills they’re designed to measure. Here’s the breakdown:
To Standardize the Testing Experience
Everyone taking the test—no matter where or when—must be evaluated under the same conditions.
Timing ensures:
• Questions measure the same skills for all students.
• Scores are comparable across test dates and locations.
To Measure Speed + Accuracy (a college-readiness skill)
The SAT and ACT aren’t just testing knowledge; they’re testing how well students can:
• Read and process information quickly
• Analyze and solve problems under time pressure
• Make decisions efficiently
Colleges use these scores to predict how students might handle timed exams and workloads in college.
To Maintain Test Security
Strict timing helps:
• Prevent cheating (e.g., one group getting extra time).
• Ensure test sections don’t leak to other test-takers.
To Keep the Test Length Manageable
Without timing limits, exams could take all day.
Timing ensures:
• Reasonable total test duration
• Predictable scheduling for test centers
To Create Score Differentiation
If unlimited time were allowed:
• Many more students would answer most questions correctly.
• Scores would cluster together, making it harder to distinguish skill levels.
Thanks for this. I won’t belabor this since it’s off-topic. Just to note that:
1 can be easily solved by giving everyone more time to “standardize” the test experience.
2 seems like it might not be a college-readiness skill if many students are receiving additional time for exams in college.
3 is very wrong, in my opinion, since test security would not diminish with just getting more time for all.
4 also doesn’t make much sense to me since, again, you might give more time to all students in the same way.
5 is the clincher for me. They’re simply looking for a way to find differences. That difference is not in knowledge of the material - it’s in speed of recall and application. Again, I might ask “who cares?” The real world implication seems minimal with some exceptions for fields that require it (emergency medicine, for example).
If I were to take a standardized test in Cantonese, Hindi, or Greek, I would get a zero or whatever would be likely to be the percentage correct if one just randomly guesses. I could get time and a half, or double time, or quadruple time…my score would not change.
Getting extra time doesn’t all of a sudden mean that kids get time to go and refresh their memories on a concept or to research an answer. If they didn’t know how to respond to a question before they stepped in the room, an extra time accommodation is not going to get them to the right answer. Students with high (or low) scores with extra time earn their scores.
I spent well over a decade in the classroom and have administered our state’s high-stakes standardized tests to students. I’ve had testing groups where nobody received accommodations, and then I’ve had testing groups where students received extra time. In the non-accommodation testing groups, most students finished with plenty of time prior to the end of a test session. Rarely would I have a student who was working right up to the time limit. It would happen occasionally, but it was definitely rare.
When testing groups that receive extended time, there was frequently a range of speeds in which students would finish. Some would have definitely finished in the amount of time that non-accommodation groups received, some needed a little more, and then some needed significantly more time. The thing with being in a testing group that receives extended time for accommodations, is that the group can’t go on to the next section of the test until everyone in the room has finished the current section. So there might be students who had been finished for an hour or more while there was one student still testing. And then imagine the stamina in takes for students who take two hours for a section that might otherwise have taken one hour. Whereas the regular testing group might finish with all of their testing in 3 hours for the day, the extended time session group might end up being in the testing environment for 6 hours. Testing stamina definitely can become a factor in situations like those, which is a different burden than that faced by groups without accommodations.
As an educator, I am one of those who feel that there are very few instances where timed tests are necessary (basic math facts like 2+2 or 6x8 being one of the few exceptions). So long as the kid is willing and able to sit and try their best to show what they know, I’m in favor of giving them that time. Additionally, when a situation isn’t fair (i.e. everyone should get extended time), to me it’s not right to take away someone’s rights (i.e. those who have a documented need for extended time). Instead, the emphasis should be placed on bringing justice for all.
If you only look at students who don’t need any accommodations, different students will prefer different tests, and may perform better on one than the other. The ACT favors speed. It’s a race-the-clock test. The SAT isn’t.
My kids both had IEPs when they were young, and when one was being updated for K, her therapist put in that she should get extra time on test. D had never taken a test of any kind but the people writing the IEPs had standard things they asked for. She said it was easy to put the ‘extra time’ or ‘sitting in the front row’ in the IEP at that time, but adding it later would require more justification so they just put it all into the IEP at the beginning.
My sister taught 4th grade for a number of years. One year she had 10 or 12 kids out of 24 with IEPs, and every one on them required a seat in the front row, extra time on tests, and several other things like notes in a file or being sent to the principal’s office. IMO, very unlikely all these kids would benefit from the exact same accommodations.
My daughter did not need extra time on tests in school as most weren’t timed. She could have used it on the SAT or ACT. Other D’s IEP was for speech, so she didn’t get extra time on tests but she really could have used it. She reads very slowly but understands everything if she has enough time.
Even without formal time restrictions on exam, some students do have their own time restrictions (e.g. they have another class to attend shortly after the exam time).
As mentioned by someone above, one method is to write the exam so that students can generally finish it in much less than the time period of the exam without feeling rushed, so that even students with disabilities needing extra time will not feel rushed. But that may require scheduling a special exam time rather than having the exam in a one hour regular class period if the instructor wants to test a lot of material on the exam.
Are you sure about that? Several students I know faced that and were overwhelmed trying to study for and take 2 in one day. Happens with midterms and finals. Many if not most college courses don’t have other “quizzes”. Just a paper or so, mid term and final.
I agree. My kids had many days with multiple exams, particularly midterms and finals. I do think my son had to reschedule one as he had 3 finals on one day and the university had a stated policy that you could reschedule if you had more than 2 on one day.
When I was in college, I had two finals in one day once. Other exams I had may have had multiple in the same week, but not on the same day. I can see multiple in the same week (not necessarily the same day) causing some students to feel overwhelmed or something like that.
Same day non-final exams are unlikely (but not impossible) because (a) a student may be taking only three to five courses at a time, (b) usually not all of them meet on the same days of the week, and (c) the instructors in different courses may choose different weeks and different days of the week to have exams.
For final exams, there was exam week for both myself in the stone ages and my D more recently. Up to 3 exams in one day was possible. Morning, afternoon and evening slots.
Every semester my d had multiple classes with exams in one day. She didn’t mind as she felt like she got them over with quicker. It was in no way unusual.
Many things have changed since we were in college!! Nowadays many schools give students the whole week off for Thanksgiving. Midterms are often crammed into the few days before.
Just thinking here. To simplify things, there are probably two explanations for the higher percentage of people getting accommodations at high-price/high-prestige schools.
The baseline rate of disabilities is higher but it requires parental resources (both skill to navigate the bureaucracy and money to pay for testing) and possibly school system receptivity (maybe greater in affluent school systems). Hence, a higher proportion of affluent kids with disabilities get the accommodations and a lower proportions of less affluent kids get the accommodations.
The baseline rate of disabilities is lower but affluent parents have figured out ways to game the system and get accommodations for kids without disabilities.
I suspect that the correct explanation is a combination of both. I definitely saw both back in the dark ages when my kids were in school. As @jym626 pointed out, it probably required more parental investment back thn, but today, to get colleges to sign on, the accommodations are not only supposed to be justified by testing but are also supposed to be used in the school. If that is the case, gaming the system may require a pretty big investment for a kid who does not have a disability.
The baseline rate of actual disabilities is similar (rather than higher or lower), but:
Higher parental resources means that students with actual disabilities are more likely to have those disabilities recognized and (if applicable) accommodated.
Higher parental resources are more likely to make cheaters successful.
let’s say we give the kids with diagnoses the benefit of the doubt and allow extra time for tests, which I think is probably the most common accommodation.
why not just give EVERY kid, with or without a diagnosis, the benefit of that extra time? that seems fair to me. Won’t actually help a lot of kids who don’t need the time, but might help some, and won’t hurt anyone.
That’s actually how a lot of exams at my older son’s school work. He frequently has take home finals, that you can do within a 24 hour period, from your room or the library or whatever environment works for you. I have no idea how they keep people from cheating, but it seems to work.
I think the main point is that a) students with disabilities but with lesser parental resources are probably not getting accommodations they should get and that similarly disabled affluent kids are more likely to be getting; and b) parents with resources are more likely to get accommodations for students without disabilities than students without disabilities but with lesser parental resources.
My own experience is that navigating the systems that existed at the elementary school, middle school and high school levels and again at the college level was not easy. I get paid pretty well to get organizations to do things they might otherwise not want to do and navigating the accommodations issue was real work for me. It may be somewhat easier now. But, in my (dated) experience, it would not be as simple as paying for testing with a pliable psychologist and then getting SAT/ACT accommodations and then college accommodations for kids. The schools and colleges with whom I dealt were skeptical and teachers/professors were more so. In HS, skeptical teachers would just not honor the accommodations written in an IEP. In college, some professors made it hard. If you didn’t have/use these accomodations in HS, colleges would be unlikely to provide them (some did not offer to provide accommodations my kids were getting in HS). Students had to request the extra time accommodation before every test and sometimes work out what room they were going to use.
@billythegoldfish , I don’t see a big problem with this if the purpose is to test what you know and how you can reason. If the purpose is to test what you can produce in a limited period of time, untimed tests would not be the best measure. As someone pointed out above, timed law school tests might make sense for lawyers who bill by the hour and productivity/hour might be an important metric. OTOH, I have worked with the general counsels of a number of big companies and one of the best was a very dyslexic guy who just put in extraordinary number of hours. But, he could think out of the box and come up with very clever solutions to difficult problems.
But, if you want to test for great physicists, timed tests may not be helpful. My father was a gifted theoretical physicist who told me about one of his colleagues. You could ask him a question. He could not answer many questions right away. He would walk away and come back the next day with a deep, thoughtful response. That physicist was John Bardeen, who won two Nobel prizes, one for experimental work (co-inventing the transistor) and another for deeply theoretical work on superconductivity (I believe). I suspect he would underperform on timed tests but I think he did OK in his career.