We do have some flawed laws.
“A simple solution is to mark any test score achieved through extra time as such in the official report. After all, if a student has truly learning disabilities, colleges are entitled to know this.”
My understanding is that this was done at one time but was eventually found by courts to be a violation of the ADA.
Someone else posted a link to this Atlantic Monthly article by a former GC at a private school in CA but was redirected to this thread.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
There are some hilarious comments about the parents: “A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.”
I don’t think she really makes the case that the parents involved in the scandal are expressing rage at a system stacked against them, “with rage of being robbed of what was rightfully theirs.”.
The current time limits are somewhat arbitrary. The extra time is, too. I think many are trying to guage how much time is really needed by results. How much time will get me to xxx level? But there’s more to it than that.
More about the parents from the GC in the Atlantic article in #3902,
“Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. … Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.”
The Atlantic article was amusing and made some good points. It also contained a fair amount of hyperbole. For example:
“In the recent past—the past in which this generation of parents grew up—a white student from a professional-class or wealthy family who attended either a private high school or a public one in a prosperous school district was all but assured admission at a “good” college. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Harvard or Yale, but it certainly might be Bowdoin or Northwestern.”
I graduated from a public HS in a prosperous district in the mid-1980s. It’s true that more white kids from these types of schools got into Ivy level schools back then compared to today, but it was still a very small subset of the class. The idea that every white kid from a rich/upper middle class family was “all but assured admission” to Northwester or Bowdoin is nonsense.
From today’s LA Times:
In college scandal, rowing was the ideal sport for stowaways, cheating, lies.
Excerpt:
“Crew was a particularly soft target for Singer’s recruiting scam. Schools with high-profile football programs use the sport as a Title IX counterweight, allotting women’s rowing programs as many as 20 scholarships, said Linda Muri, who coached crew at Cornell, Dartmouth and Harvard for two decades.
As a result, some crew programs have rosters of 40 or 50 rowers — enough, perhaps, to stow away one or two in the recruiting process who didn’t belong, Muri said.”
@CheddarcheeseMN --What a good read! Thanks for posting.
“They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.”
Best sentence in the article for sure.
@CheddarcheeseMN --LOL, the pop-up ad in CC right now is for ASU. Too funny!
My son has severe learning disabilities. He got extended time and was a National Merit Semifinalist when he took the PSAT. He had to redo his testing last summer because he was returning to college after his gap decade; it cost about $4000 and took three days. So you’re proposing that he should spend another three days and another $4000 because you don’t think he exists?
Invisible disabilities are invisible. I don’t know why you’d expect to be able to detect them if you meet someone casually.
a decade is a really long time. yes, I would want testing redone-people change a lot in a decade.
People who learn differently are not necessarily unintelligent. An example are twice exceptional (2e) children. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/twiceexceptional.pdf
There is a difference between extended time and two day testing. Extended time tests are taken at regular test centers in a smaller group setting (not individual proctor). The student needs to stay for the entire 5 hours.
It is very difficult to get two day testing or un-timed testing (and probably even more difficult now). Very few test centers offer these accommodations. Singer’s clients could not just get extended time. They had to get two day testing so his center would be one of the only options for his clients.
There are also extended break accommodations for students who have physical conditions (Diabetes, Chrons etc) They don’t get extra time on the test but have extended breaks to check their blood sugar, eat something, use the restroom, etc.
There are several other types of accommodations available based upon a student’s needs. One shouldn’t assume that students who need accommodations are not in the top 10% of test takers.
I am a teacher and I was referring to students I have taught individually for lengthy periods, often many months and sometimes years. I don’t know why you assumed my opinion was based on a casual meeting.
It is unfair for students without disabilities on regular time to have to compete with students who fake disabilities to get extended time. The current scandal has shown a very extreme case of abuse of the extra time provision, but this abuse is widespread. I don’t pretend to have an optimal solution to this problem, but the current system does not have enough safeguards against abuse.
These kids all come from wealthy families…they would’ve done well in life no matter where they went to school…heck, they probably could’ve done well even if they hadn’t gone to college…
There’s no cure for dyslexia.
I would be the last person to say that the SAT or the ACT is a measure of intelligence. I don’t think anyone claims this anymore. The SAT and the ACT are standardized tests, however.
My experience as a teacher has been that people who learn differently generally have problems with these tests that are not solved just by giving the people extra time. This has nothing to do with whether the people are intelligent – it has to do with the fact that they are not standard. I fully admit that this is just my personal experience, not a scientific study.
My comments were addressed only to people who get extended time for learning disabilities, not to people who get other accommodations for other reasons.
It’s not fair to the students who have actual learning disorders either. So now they’re not only being cheated – the same as neurotypical kids who are also competing with the cheaters – but now they should have to jump through extra hoops to prove to families of neurotypical kids that they aren’t cheating? That’s not the way our system works. We don’t require people to empty their bags on the way out of the mall to prove they didn’t shoplift, we charge the people who are caught stealing. Violating someone else’s rights to protect yours is short-sighted.
@roycroftmom, I wasn’t saying that my son shouldn’t have been re-tested after ten years (although there’s no cure for dyslexia, and there’s no cure for autism, so we didn’t expect any change and none was found). Rather, I was saying that when he did so well on the PSAT with extended time, the right response would not have been to send him out again for another $4000 and three days of testing.
It’s reasonable to take another look at students who do very well with testing, and to the psychologists who examined them. But that second look shouldn’t necessarily be redoing the lengthy, expensive psychological tests.
I understand there is no cure, but brains do change a lot between ages 5,15, and 25. So I agree that testing needs to be more current, in developing children and young adults, to be accurate. I understand your reluctance to spend additional time and money for further testing, but it is clear the current system isn’t working-at one point, literally half of Greenwich High in CT was getting accomodations, and while it may be a small number of the overall test takers, it is a greatly disproportionate group of elite college students, and those from wealthy families. The ACT spokesman said only 5% get accomodations on their test, but elite colleges report 25% of their students had them. So it does skew the system, For highly competitive schools. Solutions are unlikely to come from the medical professionals involved.