A recent California court ruling has disability advocates seething and accusations flying in all directions:
An Oakland judge has refused to mandate special accommodations for a pair of attention-deficit students scheduled to take a national medical school exam Saturday.
In a ruling issued Monday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Ronald Sabraw decided it would be wrong to order the American Association of Medical Colleges to provide Anne Cashmore and David Lebovitz extra time and a tranquil room while taking the Medical College Admission Test.
While it would be logistically simple to provide the San Francisco residents with a private room and proctors, allowing states to independently determine who gets preferential treatment might damage the integrity of the standardized national testing system, the judge decided.
A judge in California decided that maintaining test integrity was more important than placating the disabled. How's that for a "man bites dog" story? And let the carping and kvetching begin!
"This is a pretty remarkable ruling, in that it basically eviscerates any state's right to protect the civil rights of their citizens," attorney Stephen Tollafield of Disability Rights Advocates in Oakland said Tuesday. "Judge Sabraw basically said it is more important for a company to have uniform standards than for Californians to be protected under their own state's laws."
Well, yes, that is what he said. In essence, he said that the AAMC has the right to say that all examinees should be held to the same standards of proof of disability, and that examinees don't get to enjoy relaxed standards on a national exam due to their state of origin. The articles claims that these standards are clear, and that 75% of accommodations requests for the April exam were approved. You can peruse the standards here on the AAMC website for yourself (as well as the AAMC's response to the lawsuit).
Of course, the cut-and-dried language of the standards doesn't stop critics from complaining that that they aren't sure what the standards are. And the comments about how well the plaintiffs did under standard testing conditions muddies the waters:
[Dr. Ellen Julian, director of Medical College Admission Test] pointed out to Sabraw that Cashmore, Lebovitz and a third plaintiff, Andres Turner, took the April test under the standardized conditions. Lebovitz scored higher than 75 percent of his peers. Cashmore's score was higher than 70 percent of the other test takers, and Turner finished ahead of 51 percent of the other aspiring medical school students, according to Julian.
Tollafield contends the case is solid, and California law protecting the rights of those with disabilities should be enforced even though the medical school entrance exam is a national test...
"They decide the person is too smart to be disabled and will decline accommodations on the test," Tollafield said. "Intelligence has nothing to do with disability."
Technically, yes. But this isn't a test of intelligence; it's a test of knowledge related to pre-med concepts. MCAT scores may very well correlate with IQ scores, but this isn't an IQ test.
What's more, I don't think Dr. Julian mentioned the plaintiff's MCAT scores as a way of justifying the fact that they did not grant accommodations to them; after all, the AAMC could hardly have known their scores in advance. If the plaintiffs didn't have evidence at the level the AAMC required (no matter what it might be otherwise in California), the plaintiffs don't get accommodations. The scores were most likely mentioned in order to point out the defendants were not that impeded by the lack of accommodations, which does lend some credence to the AAMC's claim that these students aren't disabled. But unless the plaintiffs could somehow present some evidence that the AAMC was incorrect in refusing their request for accommodations in the first place, they don't have a case, and so I believe the judge's ruling was the correct one.
Posted by kswygert at August 11, 2004 03:12 PM