LD and Elite Colleges

shawbridge
Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:07:16 +0000

toadstool, there are two separate issues.

First, which poetgrl and pkelly address, is whether it is appropriate to conflate speed with either intelligence or understanding of the material. I might have had the same thoughts as toadstool, because neither reading, writing nor processing speeds were ever a problem for me, until I met my son. He was clearly incredibly smart and this was recognized by almost everyone. Full and complex sentences by his first birthday. Could solve math problems in his head that were remarkably complex for his age. Had complete recall of books read to him [e.g., found a logical contradiction of sorts in the Lord of the Rings between something stated in book 3 and book 1 many hundreds of pages apart] which I read to him each night when he was in first grade. But, he couldn’t read and his speech was somewhat delayed. But, his giftedness was recognized by almost everyone, including his K and 1st grade classes, who would wait without teacher prompting to hear what he had to say even though there was a significant delay in getting there. Then it turned out that he just couldn’t read or write. My sister, who is a neuropsychologist, told me to get him tested in grade 1 or 2 and predicted a 50 point differential between Verbal and Performance IQ, where the median IQ is set to 100. The former is untimed, the latter timed. She was exactly correct. VIQ, which is something like raw horsepower was extremely high. PIQ was like a normal person. The psychologist who did the testing told us that all timed tests would ever tell about our son was that he worked slowly and would not test comprehension or thinking.

As I learned this, I started reading and talking to people and realized that in our society, we incorrectly conflate speed and intelligence. Someone who is not very smart is “slow” where as a bright kid is called “quick.” That may actually be appropriate to the vast bulk of the population but is not appropriate for everyone. My father was a brilliant theoretical physicist. He told me the story of a physicist named John Bardeen, with whom my father worked early in his career. Apparently, if you asked Bardeen a question, he was unable to answer that question quickly. Indeed, he would usually come back the next day with an answer. That answer was typically unusually deep. Had Bardeen been judged based solely upon timed tests without accommodations, he would have fared poorly. Was he unintelligent or not deserving of a spot at one of the best schools? Bardeen 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, and again in 1972, for a well-developed theory of superconductivity. Extraordinary – one Nobel for a practical device and another for deep theory. Most colleges now would be thrilled to claim him as an alumnus. Timed tests are biased against people like Bardeen with certain processing, reading and writing issues. Failing to give accommodations just means a) denying opportunities to people whose underlying understanding will be better than those with comparable scores on timed tests; and b) deny elite institutions from identifying the brightest kids.

So, on this, I am in poetgrl’s camp and think what your D’s prep school did in just getting rid of the timing for tests (at least in calculus). A system that thinks quickness and understanding are the same is flawed.

Then there is the second issue. Do people “game” the system? When my son’s request for double time was initially denied by The College Board, his SpEd caseworker was irate and told me that there were kids who magically discovered LDs in the last couple of years of HS and in our affluent town, parents were effectively going out to purchase these diagnoses. Studies by the TCB seem to show that extra time on the SATs does not help kids without LDs and does help kids with LDs. But, would it help on other tests in HS? Could easily do so. For example, I got into a tussle with my son’s math teacher, who gave him double time on tests but decided he didn’t have to on quizzes. He got the highest mark in the class on every test but was betting B’s on the quizzes. The teacher said to me that the strong students finished the quizzes in 10 minutes and that everyone finished in 15. I pointed out that if the input/output was slow, then my son was actually getting less thinking time than anyone else and if he was trying to compare understanding and clarity of thought, my son should get the extra time on quizzes just so that the results would be comparable. After a while, he concluded that a) I was logically correct; and b) I was a gigantic pain in the rear end to argue with, so he started giving my son extra time on the quizzes and guess what, he got a 100 on every subsequent quiz. Could extra time help other kids if tests didn’t really fit in the allotted time? Yes. Good. Rather than having only some kids with proactive and/or affluent parents get extra time for their kids, give it to everyone so that each kid can demonstrate knowledge and thinking.

In this too, I’m thus with poetgrl. It may be administratively inconvenient, but just give all kids the time they need to finish. No need for gaming.