Hey, John of Discriminations has been blogging up a storm this week, and he ran across the recent NYTimes article on the accommodated testing flagging controversy, which he mentioned in passing in another discussion of a GRE peculiarity (I left comments on that topic, if you're interested).
Anyway, if you'd like to read more about the concept of flagging accommodated scores, and the controversy surrounding the College Board's decision to stop flagging on the SAT, you can go read three of my earlier posts:
So what's in this latest NYT article?
Last year, when the College Board announced that as of this fall it would no longer flag the SAT scores of students with disabilities who took the test with extended time, educators expected a flood of requests from savvy parents eager to secure every advantage for their children.
Ok, I'll admit that I predicted that, too, and in this posting, I noted that while the percentage of SAT-takers has increased only 18% since 1987, the percent of those requesting accommodations has increased by more than 300%, as shown by the graphs accompanying this article.
Apparently, though, the expected flood ran up against a well-built dam:
From July 1 to Sept. 30 this year, the board received 17,920 requests for extended time and other accommodations, a 10 percent decline from the 19,970 filed in the same period last year.
At the same time, the board has been turning down more requests for accommodations — and the number of appeals from such rejections have more than tripled — in part because of a new requirement that students seeking extra time must generally have a diagnosis and a plan for accommodations in school at least four months before taking the SAT.
So, ETS put sensible procedures in place to turn away those who might be trying to game the system, and as news of that has trickled out, the requests for accommodations has declined. Interesting. In case you were wondering, those 17,920 requests equal somewhere around 1.7% of the SAT-taking population
The board also compiled a list of 142 schools — 43 private and 99 public — where an unusually high proportion of students use accommodations and asked them for further documentation of the disabilities. While those schools represent less than 1 percent of the nation's high schools, they account for 24 percent of all accommodations nationwide.
Faced with such scrutiny, many of the schools that had asked for the most accommodations have pulled back substantially on their requests.
I bet they have. What a smart use of data exploration that was. While some of these schools may have legitimately attracted a larger number of disabled students, I'm sure there were some in there that were taking advantage of the system. Not surprisingly, though, the cries that the College Board is now "too restrictive" has begun.
About 2 percent of the two million students who take the SAT receive accommodations for their disabilities, the majority of them students with learning disabilities who are allowed extra time. The percentage has more than doubled since 1990, amid a troubling inequity: Affluent students are far more likely than poor ones to have documented disabilities and therefore to receive accommodations.
Indeed, some refer to the greatly-increasing learning disability diagnoses as "boutique diagnoses," for which rich familes go "diagnosis shopping."
Historically, the College Board has relied largely on the recommendations of individual schools in granting testing accommodations. In most public school districts, the process is well-defined...The situation is far murkier in private schools, where, typically, parents who believe their child would do better with extra time go to a private evaluator and come back with a report recommending extended time on tests, a report that is usually accepted.
"We have high-powered, savvy parents, and if they come in with a $3,000 evaluation, dead set on getting extra time, it's very difficult to turn them down," said a learning specialist at one selective New York City private school. "I think the College Board's doing the right thing, and helping us not buckle to parental pressure. But right now we're seeing a lot of freaked-out parents."
Just think about those "high-powered" parents who are so eager to have their kids labeled as disabled. These parents have $3000 to spend, and yet they can't manage to find tutors for their kids so that they can learn to take the SAT under normal timing conditions? Am I alone in finding it odd that in one generation, we have swung from the label of "disabled" being a stigma to that same label being something that is seen as desirable, and sought after? Do these parents really have so little respect for the test that they're willing to essentially help their kids cheat? Or are they so desperate to think of their kids as "special" that any means of setting them apart from the general population will do?
At a College Board forum on accommodations in Manhattan, a California educational consultant said on Monday that parents often had trouble accepting that even if an evaluation concluded that their child could benefit from extra testing time, that was not a diagnosis of a learning disability.
"Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that someone could benefit from extra time does not mean that they need extra time to level the playing field," said the consultant, Jane McClure.
Gooooood point. Miriam Freedman suggested that one way to level the playing field might be to increase the time limit for all the test takers, simply because most high-stakes exams are somewhat speeded, and many non-disabled test takers could benefit from extra time. Indeed, the NYT story notes that some educators believe that all SAT-takers should have the option of choosing extra time, or that the test should essentially be untimed.
The problem with that choice option is that everyone will choose the most amount of time possible, so that effectively sets a new time limit. A very lengthy time limit - or none at all - can create financial and administrative nightmares. Testing costs go up when seat times lengthen (if testing locations charge for their use), so we could move from a situation in which disability disagnoses are too expensive to a situation in which testing costs become prohibitive. This could also make test scheduling more problematic, and once the time limit expands, the College Board goes from speededness concerns to fatigue effect concerns. Oh, and the new test would need to undergo rigorous reliability and validity analyses because it cannot be assumed that items pretested under one time limit, and administered under another, will remain the same in terms of discrimination, difficulty, and predictive validity. The SAT administered under double time, or no time limit, is a new test, and much data would be needed before colleges could use it to predict first-year performance.
And speaking of validity analyses, those who think the SAT timing should be expanded for everyone are making two assumptions that may very well be incorrect. The first assumption is that increasing the time for everyone would "level the playing field." Problem is, there's no research to show that only students with true LDs would benefit, while others would not, and logically, it makes sense to conclude, as Jane McClure does above, that some non-LD students will benefit from extra time. It is not unreasonable to imagine a situation in which students with true LDs will be more likely to have lower scores on an untimed test, because the non-LD students will have leaped ahead of them due to their ability to benefit more from the extra time.
The second assumption that extended-time proponents are making is that all parents and disability advocates really want a level SAT playing field. No matter how generous a time limit might be, there will always be someone who will ask for more, because there will always be those who want preferential treatment for themselves or their children, as opposed to equal treatment for everyone. If extending the time limit for all in fact widened the score gap between LD students and non-LD students, a lot of people would be furious; there would be no way then to remove the "stigma" of that lower score.
Posted by kswygert at November 13, 2003 08:40 PM