@3kidz2edu I believe standard practice is if you had a 504 or IEP in high school, you still had to request whether or not to have accommodations in college. The student would have to disclose that this was their preference.
Why? If the admissions office had wanted to check whether the coach-recommended athletes were actually athletes, they could have done it without difficulty, using various methods mentioned upthread or other methods. They probably will do this going forward. Actual athletes will show up as actual athletes. This is a nuisance for admissions offices, but it should affect actual athletes not at all.
This is the only reasonable solution. There is no way to find all the kids who need extra time and no way to stop the parents who are set on cheating. I have never met a parent who admitted to fudging the record to get extra time, however I have met more than one who admitted to holding their kid back a year in kindergarten so that they would be ahead of the class from the start. Its a big head start to be at the top of the class in reading fand math from the beginning. You get all kinds of extra enrichment and can eventually be tracked to the higher classes. It has an impact all the way to high school. These parents are thinking ahead. You can bet those same parents understand to build a “thick” file and start that early too. Its time to simply take away the incentives to cheat AND benefit the kids who need help at the same time.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/03/15/bono-partner-ethical-investing-falls-from-grace-admissions-scandal/cWN2UCaafpeqSD15gWDXoO/story.html
Bono’s partner in ethical investing falls from grace in admissions scandal
"Think Bono, the lead singer of Irish rockers U2, who told CNBC in January that capitalism is “a wild beast, and if not tamed, can and has chewed up a lot of lives.” Bono gave that interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, along with Bill McGlashan, with whom he cofounded the TPG Rise Fund. They opened the fund in 2017 with $2 billion, which made it the biggest impact investing fund by assets. "
Ethics is good until in interferes with getting what you want I guess.
An IEP doesn’t apply in college. The college doesn’t have to grant accommodations*, and the process is not trivial.
My son has experience getting accommodations from different colleges from the most selective (Stanford, where he took a summer course but still had to go through the standard disability accommodations route) to the non-selective (community college). In every case, the school demanded (expensive) recent testing to document the need for extra time.
For honest people going the standard route, getting disability accommodations for standardized testing or for college is onerous. They check all the documentation and sometimes come back to ask for more tests.
*that is, the college is required by law to grant accommodations to disabled students who need accommodations, provided it’s not too disruptive, but the college gets to decide whether the student needs them
@Nocreativity1 @Leigh22 I looked and this is what I found so far https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/education/2017/01/26/record-numbers-students-seeking-accommodations/96162464/
@northwesty I agree with you about post 1426. I hear slow and steady wins the race - maybe not with Usain Bolt under normal circumstances.
We want some people to make excellent decisions based on facts in a certain amount of time, the faster the better. We want a surgeon to figure out quickly why we are dying on the operating table, but not necessarily speed through the surgery and make a mistake or nick an artery. Does every job that exists out there need to be done fast to be done well? No.
I think some people get caught up in the idea that faster test taking denotes a certain amount of superior intellect.
@Leigh22 I seriously doubt the 50% internet quote.
I agree there is a lot of deference to the coach, but I don’t think the legitimate adcoms would be happy with recruits who are unable to play their sports or who ditch before the season. This is the reason that Singer had to go to so much trouble to fake athletic achievements and even photographs, not to mention test scores. It is a little hard to believe that the adcom thought the two celebrity daughters of Loughlin really were coxswains, and also did not later notice that although they were recruited as coxswains, they never were part of the crew team while they were at the university.
The new regulation comes as the number of requests to the board has soared, officials said: (from the article i posted above)
In 2015-16, the board received approximately 160,000 requests;
In 2014-15, requests totaled 108,000;
In 2010-11, there were 80,000.
Roughly 220,000 students in New Jersey have a special education classification, according to the New Jersey Department of Education.
According to the College Board, up to 46% of students at elite high schools receive special testing accommodations, including extra time. The natural proportion of learning disabilities should be somewhere around 2%.
He would be considered “rich” by most of the general public, but probably “middle class” by most of this forum demographic.
@SamuraiLandshark Apply for a mortgage and see how thorough and hard it is today. It is really and I mean really, thorough.
And the oversight and compliance around know your customer, money laundering and the rest is incredibly restrictive. Oversight. Monitoring and compliance is off the charts.
It’s easy to hate banks for some reason.
Not sure everyone hates their atm machines being available a drop of a hat. Transferring money to kids at school. Fraud monitoring. And when you need that loan to buy the house or build the business who is there generally with the funds.
But it is a business, not a government agency.
And they are not just faceless monoliths as people love to visualize, but millions of fellow Americans. People, just like you and me trying to do their very best each day and raise a family.
But, as with any enterprise that involves human beings there are bad actors.
Like other industries such as college counseling, coaching, law, socially responsible investing, medicine, academics and acting- seen in this case- there are always a potential for avarice and fraud.
But wholesale condemnation of industries is not useful and actually misinformed.
The dentistry professor baffles me. He mortgaged his house to cheat for his daughter. Thats almost heart breaking if it weren’t so sickening. I wonder where she could have gotten in without help.
Re: the accommodations issue. My S17 is dyslexic, dyscalculic and Dysgraphic. He also has visual issues for which vision therapy was incredibly successful. Needless to say, he received accommodations, including resource room, from early on. We applied for SAT accommodations and got them fairly easily. However, the format of the testing, with its high emphasis on math, didn’t work for him and he got about the equivalent of a high 1200’s score.
He did better on ACT practice testing, which I let him do with extra time. The first time we sought accommodations, ACT denied them. He took the test and got a 21 composite. At that point, I actually called ACT myself. I was told that the wording in my son’s GC’s letter did not trigger ACT to give the accommodations, even though the person agreed with me that his file clearly demonstrated that he needed them. I love S17’s GC, but English is not his first language and he didn’t formulate the letter correctly. ACT told me what was needed and I had the GC submit again. S17 wound up with a 27 composite with accommodations - he didn’t really study and could possibly have done better, but the 27 was perfect for the schools he was interested in.
I have found that ACT is much more stringent than SAT in granting accommodations and this seemed to be borne out in this scandal as well.
@Leigh22 not denying the data, but 46% is an astounding number. Is this from the College Board’s website?
@mdphd92 The standard for recruiting athletes may not be the same at all universities, but I know that my kid and kids I worked with who wanted to play in college were often seen by coaches or scouts at tournaments, games and with game film. They knew people on club teams and would call them or email them with feedback about kids performances. I had one student client that only did crew for 18 months in high school (at the same place Loughlin’s daughters supposedly did row), and she was recruited by coaches several colleges and landed at one.
In sports that are team based, it may be hard to judge an athlete’s performance. They might be amazing on that team, but could they compete in a larger field with kids who have better training? Coaches take chances on some kids because they may not have ever seen them perform.
@LisaNCState the article you point to describes how hard it is to get accommodations and that those navigating the complex process are getting help and the numbers are going up. Not consistent with the point @Leigh22 or you have been making.
No reference to a HS with 50%, nothing about fraudulent claims, nothing about students cheating. That is a myth that people have seized on to validate a preconceived opinion.
This scandal didn’t exploit extra time in isolation. Instead students falsely claimed a disability, went to specific locations across the country with compromised proctors who manually changed answers. They provided elaborate back stories to cover their tracks as to why they needed to travel to CA and FL for the exam and spent tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate the entire thing.
Oddly many here are some how suggesting that either this broad scam is wide spread (hardly), the wide spread prevelance of a lesser version such as a HS with 50% getting extra time (doesn’t exist) or that the individual kid that is diagnosed is some how scamming.
In response they want to make children with disabilities give up their right to privacy, create a legally unenforceable construct where principals are legally bound to sign off like CEOs on the validity of their students health or just scrap the system as a whole. Folks relax, if some kid got a better score than your kid on his ACT it is much more likely that he was smarter, better prepared, or just plain lucky on exam day then having cheated.
I am not naive and will readily acknowledge that some people are unscrupulous and faking a need for more time but enough complaining we are not all victims because we suspect some are cheating!!!
I’d be interested in reading more about who exactly Rick Singer told he was wired and how the FBI handled it. Specifically, I wonder why Singer “protected” some of his clients but not others by tipping them off that he was wired. Did he maybe give up only the people who were small potatoes? The $25 million figure means there are a lot more bribes we don’t know about.
That is a very high #. I didn’t see that in the linked article, not on the College Board site. Do you have a link to that stat? Also wondering which schools are included in “elite high schools”?