Coming into testing season (PSAT and fall SAT), I am increasingly aware that time management is a major scoring factor on these exams. The questions on both sections of the exam are clearly designed so that some can be answered in about 30 seconds or less and others will require a few minutes to thoroughly parse.
The outcome of this is that test takers can not simply take a section of 45 questions, divide by 60 minutes, and assume that if they have completed 22 questions and have 35 minutes left that they are “on track”. They might be way ahead or a bit behind depending on when the time-consuming questions occur.
Further, I’ve noticed that the most time consuming questions tend to be in the final third of the test, though not at the very end. The result is that a test taker almost has to budged disproportionately for the latter part of the test or risk not completing the final shorter questions.
The test writers are clearly evaluating time management. Given that about 1/3 to 1/2 of the students in our neighboring town have testing accomodations allowing for extra time and qualifying for accomodations correlates much more strongly with wealth than GPA, athletics or any other metric out there, is there some possibility that accomodations are significantly increasing the wealth / SAT correlation that is most troubling to those who oppose testing?