Many More Students, Especially the Affluent, Get Extra Time to Take the SAT
Responding to parent pleas, high schools grant special test-taking accommodations to growing numbers
By Douglas Belkin, Jennifer Levitz and Melissa Korn
Wall Street Journal
May 21, 2019 10:52 a.m. ET

At Scarsdale High School north of New York City, one in five students is eligible for extra time or another accommodation such as a separate room for taking the SAT or ACT college entrance exam.

At Weston High School in Connecticut, it is one in four. At Newton North High School outside Boston, it’s one in three.

“Do I think that more than 30% of our students have a disability?” said Newton Superintendent David Fleishman. “No. We have a history of over-identification [as learning-challenged] that is certainly an issue in the district.”

Across the country, the number of public high-school students getting special allowances for test-taking, such as extra time, has surged in recent years, federal data show.

And students in affluent areas such as Scarsdale, Weston and Newton are more likely than students elsewhere to get the fastest-growing type of these special allowances, known as “504” designations, a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 9,000 public schools found.

The special allowances don’t apply specifically to college entrance exams. They apply to all tests the students take while in school.

The effect, however, is to make these students much more likely to receive extra time or another special accommodation when they take an exam to get into college.

The 504 designation is meant to give students who have difficulties such as anxiety or ADHD a chance to handle the stress of schoolwork at their own pace and level the playing field. It often lets them have a separate room for test-taking and more time to do it.

The Journal analysis shows that at public schools in wealthier areas, where no more than 10% of students are eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches, an average of 4.2% of students have 504 designations giving them special test-taking allowances such as extra time.

Only 1.6% of students have these designations at public schools in poorer areas, defined as those where 75% or more of students are eligible for free and reduced-cost lunches, the Journal found.

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Tests taken with accommodations should be noted as such. That was done prior to 2003, as discussed in an article

Disabling the SAT: The College Board undermines its premier test
By MIRIAM KURTZIG FREEDMAN
Education Next
Fall 2003

I oppose the College Board's introduction of "adversity scores", but buying more time on tests by finding a psychologist willing to sign off should also be curbed.

too bad Felicity Huffman didn't know that all she had to do was get a 504.

Well, the extra time is not what actually helped the kids in this scandal, right? If you do not know the correct answers, extra time will not do much. The extra time afforded them the ability to actually cheat - i.e., time and space to have someone correct their answers, do the test over for them, etc.

Thank you for pointing this out. In this scandal, the accommodations were exploited to facilitate cheating. I worry that this scandal will end up further stigmatizing kids who legitimately need time even more than they already are.

My DYS DD17 has been allowed extra time on tests since third grade because she is dyslexic and dysgraphic. She considers extra time to be a blessing and curse. In elementary and middle school my daughter was in a GT program. She was bullied and teased by other students in the program that she was stupid because she had to go to "the extra time room" when she took state standardized tests. Also, her classes moved on while she was getting her extra time so she had extra homework to make up for what she missed.

High school has been somewhat better because she can go complete classroom exams or make up work that she missed due to extra time during her off blocks. For college board tests, she acknowledges that she needs the extra time but also acknowledges that her brain is mush by the time she gets to her extra time.

I don't think that accommodations should be noted on score sends, but over-diagnosis is definitely an issue. For kids who are legitimately 2e, discrimination arising from the practice of "score flagging" would serve only to depress college decisions to a level below that commensurate with reasoning ability and knowledge, which the SAT and ACT are designed to measure. Although time limits exist, these tests are not primarily intended to assess processing speed. Many studies, including one by College Board itself, suggest extremely minimal (on the order of 10 points on the SAT) score improvements for those who do not have a reasoning/PS discrepancy. And in an era when many colleges are willing to accommodate demands for additional time, the practice would seem not only unethical, but also superfluous.

I can't speak to the broad range of issues in play but I do have an anecdote.

In law school, there was a student with experience in this area and, unbeknownst to the rest of us, she had been receiving additional time for her exams. Now, I don't know if this student had legitimate issues or not so I won't claim otherwise.

In law school, the exams are timed and they usually require you to identify and evaluate as many potential legal issues as possible. Additional time is very valuable in that setting. Moreso, because law school exams are graded on a curve where only a few students will get As, some will get Bs, most will get Cs, etc., more time can mean the difference between the top of the class and the middle or the bottom.

The contrast is another student. This student consistently did very poorly in school until he was kicked out at the end of his 1L year. It was only then that he was diagnosed with a learning impairment that would have qualified him for extra time. I often wonder if he would have been able to finish school if he'd been granted the same accommodations as the other student.

The only difference between them being that she knew to ask and he didn't.

To that end, I kind of feel that something should be presented that indicates which students have accommodations and which ones don't.

May I ask what happens to the students who get extra when they get into the workforce and don't get extra time?

I believe it should be noted on transcripts- it's only fair to future employers and also the future employees.

Just a quick comment: my practice is to explain to students both the pros and cons of extra time (brain turning to mush from exhaustion is why I very rarely recommend 100% extended for standardized testing), their own agency in advocating at every level of education and career, and, more importantly, explain how understanding your own learning profile and accommodations helps you to make informed decisions about school, career, and life choices that allow strengths to flourish and weaknesses not to be obstacles. This includes understanding that applying for a grad program or job where needed accommodations will change the essence of performance expectations may not be the best fit.

In my son's case, nothing.

The type of skills demanded by a test like the SAT and those required by his job as a robotics engineer are, apparently, worlds apart.

Similar to Kai

My DD is doing an internship at a research university in a STEM field. She has a proof of concept project for a new medical device. Since this is a heavy math and computer project, she has been doing great. She did take a while to plow through a 30 page paper that her professor wrote which was the basis for her project. When she told her professor that she is dyslexic so it might take her a while. He told her, "We are used to that around here. A lot of my students are."

I guess those careers involve high fluid reasoning and not so much processing speed or working memory.

I look at the SATs as replicating a lot of career choices that demand quick decision making and processing, and/or memory demands. I'm thinking of careers like a surgeon or a lawyer. I have an acquaintance who has dyslexia and became a teacher. She constantly teaches the kids to spell words incorrectly and apostrophise plurals. I think in this instance she shouldn't have received accommodations.

Personally, I could have received accommodations but I wanted to do it on my own to see what I was capable of. I still did really well and I know that I'm being hired for my raw ability.

I think that you are imagining a far bigger and wider ranging boost from accommodations than there actually is.

Accommodations are merely tools. They should not change the nature or the underlying quality of response, but allow access to the optimal performance of that person. You still need a skilled person to employ the tools.

If an individual who may lack the skills to instruct children in spelling and punctuation manages to obtain qualifications to do so, with or without accommodations, that is a separate question. Also, if the particular person referenced previously used accommodations in spelling and punctuation to obtain her position, then she should continue to use them in maintaining her position--in which case these errors would not be transmitted to her students.

Actually, quite a lot of teachers of language arts at all levels have dyslexia--but they may still be excellent teachers in their field because of their strong language comprehension and expression skills outside of word-level mechanics. Flawless spelling is not a prerequisite for high-level literary analysis. But it helps to be able to acknowledge one's own vulnerabilities, and be willing both to use tools and to receive corrective feedback.

I'm with Archie on this one. Why not just give accommodations to everyone?

Actually, I would agree. If a test is a measure of what it claims to be, the accommodations should not change the nature of the measure. This is the principle behind universal design, after all.

Keyboarding is an interesting accommodation in terms of “everyone should have it”. My children have a physiologically driven handwriting disability. At my eldest child’s OT assessment for senior school exam provisions her handwriting was on the 3rd percentile for speed, her typing above the 99th. It seems natural in my family that everyone would prefer to type their exams. But speaking to friends they’d be appalled if they or their children were required to type over handwriting as their whole approach to planning and writing benefits from a pen and paper. My daughter sits her exams separately so no one is distracted by the noise of her keyboard. A situation where everyone could choose which they preferred would be fair and seems not unreasonable, but would require running two exams in our system, while enforcing 100% typing will harm some people’s outcomes...

My daughters handwriting might be an issue as a primary school teacher, but there are very few careers where it will matter at all. In most cases her speed and accuracy of typing will be an asset.