I know it is annoying to invoke Occam’s razor, but the rapid growth and high prevalence of accommodations that neatly correlates to the wealthiest towns most invested in selective college admissions seems to suggest it is working for people.
Your gift link says that the CB grants 94% of accommodation requests.
CB granted my extra time but would not allow a fidget toy!
Right, and I woudl submit that is/was due to the state public colleges which enroll hundreds of thousands in comparison to 1k per year who graduate from Dartmouth, particularly since D doesn’t even offer a business major.
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My friend was complaining about his own PhD students in a very specialized area of math. It’s not a top PhD program in its field but still very respectable at a university everyone has heard about. The school is very commonly used as a safety for kids applying to the Ivies for undergrad on the East Coast.
So yeah, in this particular specialty, the GREs and subject matter testing was pretty useless screening for math skills needed to succeed in this applied math PhD program. The foreign students are much better prepared…
He feels bad that some don’t have the requisite math skills to succeed in their PhD but he cannot tell them that…. He is looking for another job
Accommodations are difficult and expensive to get. They require neuropsychological testing at around 3-5k a pop and most places do not take insurance and if they do, the wait will be over a year long. Also, the report cannot be older than 3 years old to get accommodations for standardized testing.
It’s more an issue about access to medical care than anything else.
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Interesting, because my D23 has diagnosed anxiety and does not get (or need) extra time. For standardized tests, she got a smaller room with fewer students, or, barring that, preferential seating in the main testing room.
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It depends on what accommodations the doctor recommends. There is no standard accommodation for anxiety so not everyone who has an anxiety diagnosis gets the same accommodation.
My son has anxiety, ASD, ADHD, etc but his main accommodation is that he gets to use a laptop for all written work except in math and Chinese. No extended time for assignments or classroom testing. Preferential seating but it’s not needed at his private school which has small classes.
Time and a half for standardized testing in a quiet room with fewer people/distracting. He also gets to mark the answers on the testing form not fill in bubble sheet.
I imagine that your son’s ADHD is a significant reason for the extra time on standardized tests - that’s pretty standard.
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The general concept of accommodations for standardized testing is fine here, but let’s move one from discussing one’s personal accommodation programs and diagnoses.
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I don’t see anything wrong with kids getting accommodations when there is a valid diagnosis. I think the change should be to make evaluations for learning disabilities more available and not just for the well off. People are not trying to “game the system” by getting accommodations for disabilities.
I hope more schools reinstate the SAT. Nothing wrong with more data.
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You’re absolutely right, except that many of the public flagships are also difficult to access for low income families. U Michigan has only 3.6% of its students from the bottom 20% by income, and, with 9.3% of their students from the top 1%, U Michigan has as many students from the top 1% by income as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton together. Most state flagships and all of the most popular public universities are top heavy when considering the percent of students from the top income classes.
The flagships with the lowest percent of the top 20% by income are U Idaho and U Nebraska, both with 40% of their students coming from this economic quintile.
More importantly, until the past few decades, a college degree wasn’t required to advance economically. As late as 1979, 40% of the people with income in the top 10% had high school diplomas or less. In 2019 it was 6%. Of people with a median income, 60% had a high school diploma or less in 1979, versus , versus 26% in 2019.
That means that a large proportion of the economic opportunities that were available were not due to access to college.
Oh, when I wrote “opportunities in business”, I did not mean “opportunities for business majors”…
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But the math acceleration has gotten out of hand at this point. Kids taking calculus as freshman and/or sophomores or even in 8th grade. It’s gotten ridiculous…. I much prefer the old days.
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I completely agree with you about the need to have accurate diagnoses and appropriate accommodations. My only point above is that there is clearly some inequity in the process (which has nothing whatsoever to do with your child, who appears to be getting the help he needs). An accurate diagnosis and accommodations can be life-changing for a kid, which is why I’m pretty religious about making sure my own students get what they need.
Some people, however, are clearly trying to “game the system” (see “Varsity Blues” scandal) but not those who have legitimate diagnoses. And this problem does lead to some built-in inequity in standardized testing.
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I am confused by this. At the doctoral level, standardized tests like the GRE play such a small role compared to the interviews, research, professors’ letters-none of the other parts of the admission process captured the applicants’ inadequate math skills? Or they did, but the school admitted them anyway to have math grad students?
Is his program that desperate to retain PhD students? My wife has never kept PhD students who are unable to perform math at the level that are required for a PhD program. In fact, she only accepts students on a more or less provisional basis until she can see what they can do. She has eased out students who couldn’t keep up. Now she’s at a major university, but her previous place was an R1, similar to the one you describe, but in the Midwest.
Of course, she’s in CS, and there are far more applicants clamoring to be accepted to PhD programs in CS than to PhD programs in math.
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But even if Dartmouth started admitting 50% Pell grantees, your statement would still be correct. (Dartmouth is just too small to move the needle on opportunities to college.)
OTOH, you are correct that many state publics are unaffordable for many. (here’s looking at you Pennsylvania). That said, that is a choice made by the voters in such states. They fund higher ed for their own poor, or they don’t. The Ivy+ colleges are too small to make a dent.
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I think they want to have “some” American PhD students otherwise their entire PhD program would be foreigners. The foreigners do just fine, they can be much more picky about who gets into the program too. It’s not a huge field like CS. I really want to be more specific but I don’t want to out him.
or, are they only partially funded, so counseling them out means less money into the dept?
Sounds like a heated meeting with students and admin about test requirement restatement.
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