This is a month old, but still interesting:
A learning-disabled freshman suing Princeton University for refusing to allow her extra time to take exams was dealt a setback this week, as a federal judge refused a temporary restraining order on the eve of midterms. But plaintiff Diane Metcalf-Leggette still has a shot at getting a preliminary injunction in January, when final exams begin, if she can show probability of success in her suit under the Americans with Disabilities Act.Metcalf-Leggette, of Centreville, Va., contended that a poor performance on the midterms would constitute irreparable harm, but U.S. District Judge Anne Thompson in Trenton, N.J., said the school could deal with that after the fact. Thompson set a hearing date for Jan. 11, a week before the start of finals, in Metcalf-Leggette v. Princeton University, 3:09-cv-05428.
Metcalf-Leggette, represented by Seth Lapidow and Jonathan Korn of Blank Rome in Princeton, asked for an accommodation in a series of meetings with university officials before suing the school on Monday, the day before midterm exams began.
The student has apparently been diagnosed with 1) Mixed-Receptive-Expressive Language Disorder, 2) Disorder of Written Expression, 3) Developmental Coordination Disorder, and 4) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The University did agree to give the student the right to take tests in a “reduced distraction testing environment,” to provide a 10-minute break every hour during tests, and to impose a one-exam-per-day limit. But the University refused to give her extra time on the exam.
When I was in law school, there were a lot of rumors about the top performers in the class having special arrangements to take exams with extra time or special rules. I don’t know if the rumors were true, but they did make a lot of students skeptical of these sorts of medical claims — whether rightly or wrongly.
Hat tip: Blackbook Legal.
JMA says:
Other than raising fellow students’ ire, it raises questions about the applicability of exams (particularly the standardized kind) to real life–and, if they are at all applicable, whether or not that matters in the long run given our habit of bending the rules when the right motivation comes along.
If nothing else, surely I can mine this for some kind of excuse the next time I have to take a test.
December 10, 2009, 3:12 pmNowMDJD says:
I’ve seen excellent doctors unable to pass high stakes exams until they received special accommodations for genuine reading difficulties. These problems are real. The problem is students who try to abuse the system.
It is my understanding that in evaluating for accommodations on high stakes exams, testing services employ consultants who evaluate the quality of the evaluation, the reputation of the evaluator, and the content of the report. This is within the means and expertise of an organization such as ETS. I don’t know what a college or university without these resources can do.
Of course, the whole area is governed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which limits everyone’s options.
December 10, 2009, 3:18 pmHouston Lawyer says:
Just another reason to repeal the ADA.
December 10, 2009, 3:24 pmMark N. says:
The problem is that there’s not very good ways of separating those two— there’s no objective test for most of the conditions, and the subjective criteria that have been developed appear to be extremely difficult to apply in a consistent, predictable manner (diagnosis variance between doctors is huge).
December 10, 2009, 3:25 pmBrian G. says:
How did she even get into Princeton to begin with? I’ll bet she has put more effort intot his lawsuit than in her coursework.
As for law school, I know a few people that got extra time for exams and even the bar exam. I didn’t care, because I knew they would never survive harsh reality of the private sector. Of course, they are all low-levl and low paid government lawyers nowadays.
December 10, 2009, 3:28 pmGreg-o says:
When I taught the last thermal science class, I had one student who was granted, by the school, the right to double time on tests. This student and several other students scored similarly on homework, and during class, quite obviously had similar levels of understanding. During the mid term, however, there was a difference. Watching these folks complete the test, in the allotted time, they all were at about the same degree of completion when the time was up. However, this one student got twice as much time. This student proceeded to get the highest score in the class because of that extra time. From a practical standpoint, this made it very difficult to properly score the test (they are curved, generally, to make up for some of the absurdly hard problems I tend to toss in) and had this student’s grade been counted in the curve, it would have unfairly skewed all the tests but this student towards/into the hard fail range (that test was a skosh on the hard side for the class). Watching this student take the test, compared to the others, it was obvious this student did not really need the time. So I called this student’s score an “outlier” and tossed it from the curving, which resulted in a fair distribution for the remainder of the class.
After that experience, I really dislike the idea of giving folks extra time. My take is simple, if you can not do it, perhaps you should choose a different profession more suited to your abilities. Maybe there is room for reasonable accommodation for really disabled folks, but my only interaction with how it was run was that a person who obviously didn’t need the time managed to get it.
December 10, 2009, 3:31 pmvic says:
I have heard fairly reliable rumors of upscale parents going psychologist shopping until they can get someone compliant enough to give their child an appropriate ( garbage) diagnosis that will allow him/her to get extra time on SAT/ ACT
December 10, 2009, 3:31 pmWidmerpool says:
Would anyone like to take a stab at the correlation between top-five-percent family wealth and positive diagnosis for these conditions? I’m guessing there are very few poor kids diagnosed with the power combo of 1) Mixed-Receptive-Expressive Language Disorder, 2) Disorder of Written Expression, 3) Developmental Coordination Disorder, and 4) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Waaah, my family is rich, give me more time for my tests.
December 10, 2009, 3:35 pmOther Person says:
Some doctors are very hesitant to diagnose students with medical problems for the purposes of special accommodations during exams. Before starting law school, I asked a doctor to write a note to my school requesting laptop (or even typewriter) exams instead of handwritten exams. My reason was real — writing by hand for even half an hour left me in excruciating physical pain. After $2000 in medical tests, the doctor told me that he couldn’t find anything wrong with me and I might want to consider finding a handwriting coach.
For what it’s worth, on my first (and only) handwritten exam in law school, I was in pain for the entire length of the exam, but still managed to score well above the curve.
December 10, 2009, 3:40 pmJoe Kowalski says:
In my mind I think there is a legitimate question of whether the time restriction makes sense given the content and the context of the exam. Is the ability to produce answers in a fixed amount of time truly relevant to the content? In subject areas where productivity and responsiveness matter, and being able to do X work in Y time can make the difference between profitability and not, strong time restrictions make sense. If not, there is a good case for more flexible time limits. Obviously there needs to be some limit on time for an exam, but a more open ended approach would appropriate for work that isn’t time critical.
December 10, 2009, 3:40 pmDjDiverDan says:
I think that anyone who demands and receives these kind of “accomodations” ought to be required to accept an asterisk on their Transcript next to every grade they received in a class for which they were granted extra time, and an asterisk with a footnote on the Diploma (assuming they earn one) explaining both the nature of “accomodations” given and the diagnosis. Then private employers could see up front that the Diploma and Transcript ought to be accepted with a large grain of sand. Of course, that will just invite more ADA lawsuits.
December 10, 2009, 3:41 pmDNJ says:
My experience is that granting extra time because of disability is done but not without good reason. Of course it is difficult to work out exactly what is needed to compensate for the disability – it’s not a very exact science.
December 10, 2009, 3:44 pmDNJ says:
I agree.
December 10, 2009, 3:47 pmkris says:
What is the test for an injuncation in the States? In the UK, we use the American Cyanamide test http://www.jsboard.co.uk/civil_law/cbb/mf_06.htm
and I wonder if her argument would pass muster here.
December 10, 2009, 3:52 pmEric Rasmusen says:
This reminds me of one of my classmates at Yale, now a law prof at a prominent school (there are so many of those you won’t be able to guess which one), who was disgusted with having to turn term papers in on time. “In the real world,” she said, “you don’t have this kind of artificial time pressure.”
December 10, 2009, 3:55 pmaf says:
They’re pretty questionable. Not necessarily because the medical claims are bogus, or because disability discrimination laws are bad policy, but because it’s not clear that giving students more time to complete a test should be considered a “reasonable accommodation.”
For better or worse, the purpose of grading is to evaluate the relative performance of students and as a result, grading is effectively a zero-sum game. Moreover, all students have varying abilities to perform under time pressure. Allowing students to take the test under more favorable conditions just because they have a particularly difficult time performing under time pressure doesn’t seem fair — or “reasonable.” It’s like giving someone with a bad leg a head start in a race and then declaring him the winner if he finishes ahead of the healthy people.
December 10, 2009, 3:58 pmrb1971 says:
Take an anonymous anecdote for what it’s worth, but when I was in law school (>10 years ago) there was a student (whose mother was a judge but obviously had an odd conception of justice) who scored in the bottom quintile of the class in the first semester exams. In January, he was taken to a doctor and diagnosed with ADD and thereafter got extra time on exams (I think the policy was double time) and was miraculously in the top 1/3 of the class thereafter. I suppose he probably thought that proved he really was disabled.
I never had a problem with accommodation of physical issues (e.g., blindness) even with more time on exams, but accommodation of mental issues (e.g., ADD, depression, others?) seems to me to go too far since those issues are not taken into account when determining real-world merit.
December 10, 2009, 4:00 pmNowMDJD says:
Capable school psychologists or psychometricians can do a pretty good job of separating the kids with problems from the fakers.
That’s why high stakes exam boards won’t grant accommodations without an appropriately written report based on appropriate testing, and written by a psychologist with a sterling reputation. Other commentators suggest that money can by accommodations recommendations from a compliant psychologist. That’s why high stakes exams are reluctant to grant them. Possibly, some schools will do anything to avoid administrative hassles and lawsuits from students claiming disability.
You don’t need to be a rapid reader to do OB/GYN. As I’ve said, I’ve seen very productive careers salvaged by appropriate accommodations.
December 10, 2009, 4:04 pmThe Awful Truth says:
There are supposed to be schools in the rich areas of Connecticut where more than 10% of the students are diagnosed as learning disabled and recieving special testing. The general rule as understand it as the child of a high income family is either an A student or learning disabled.
December 10, 2009, 4:04 pmEx-Bethesda Tutor says:
Long-time VC lurker here, first post (trying to come up with an appropriate and more permanent handle). Anyway, as current name indicates, in-between undergrad and law school, I did some SAT, AP, and subject tutoring at a wellish-known place in Bethesda. I had kids from top schools (Sidwell & St. Albans for example – ironically, I was often enjoined from mentioning to other kids that kids from their schools were also getting tutored there. Private school kids apparently had hush-hush agreements about getting tutoring) who had some of the faddish learning-disability diagnoses.
I saw first hand that what vic said (“I have heard fairly reliable rumors of upscale parents going psychologist shopping until they can get someone compliant enough to give their child an appropriate ( garbage) diagnosis that will allow him/her to get extra time on SAT/ ACT”) is almost certainly true. I remember being told by my boss in all seriousness that X, Y, or Z kid was AD-HD, which apparently was much easier to cure than one thinks: a no-bullshit no-tolerance approach which got most of these kids to sit down and do practice-SAT work (a more tedious and dull activity I cannot easily imagine) for 2 hours with minimal lack of attention or disruption to other students working.
The notion most of these kids deserved in some cases twice as much time on the SAT was absurd. They would have done just fine without (2000-2100 range), and if they had ever academically applied themselves and learned to concentrate, maybe better, but at the time they definitely were not quite Ivy League. I doubt their parents could deal with that.
Not to say that there are never real cases – though in about 2 years of tutoring literally full-time (probably had 150 regular students in that time frame), probably a third were diagnosed, and I believed the diagnosis in exactly one case. [Incidentally to claiming that in many cases they simply never learned to concentrate academically - I saw quite a lot of the 'what do you mean you won't write my essay for me?' attitude.]
December 10, 2009, 4:05 pmAnderson says:
Just another reason to repeal the ADA.
Callousness knows no bounds.
he was taken to a doctor and diagnosed with ADD and thereafter got extra time on exams (I think the policy was double time) and was miraculously in the top 1/3 of the class thereafter. I suppose he probably thought that proved he really was disabled.
Your anecdote certainly provides no reason to doubt that conclusion.
I’m as skeptical of potential cheaters as anyone, but there *are* real disabilities that cause some students to process more slowly, and that favor granting extra time.
The question is, I suppose, what law school exams are supposed to be doing. Are we interested in whether the student knows and and express her knowledge of the material? Or do they also test for the ability to think quickly?
The latter is handy in some aspects of legal practice, but by no means all.
… The more interesting issue would be extra time on the bar exam, which by definition does test one’s practical skill as a lawyer.
December 10, 2009, 4:08 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Eric Rasmussen,
“In the real world,” she said, “you don’t have this kind of artificial time pressure.”
LOL. Curious how she handles her own students’ papers.
Re accommodations, though, it seems to me that allowing extra time is unfair all round; it taints the disabled student(s)’ work, but also allows everyone else the dubious pleasure of feeling aggrieved at someone else’s special treatment.
What I would like to see (not that it’s practical, of course) is such students “accommodated” by increasing the exam time for everyone well past what even the disabled student would ordinarily demand. If it is, say, ordinarily a three-hour exam, give all students 24 hours. But they have to spend all 24 hours under observation (I’m envisioning an exam in a gym here, sleeping bags allowed and visits to the rest room — proctored — OK); and given that there’s no longer any time pressure to speak of, you pretty much have to get everything right. Fair?
December 10, 2009, 4:09 pmOff Kilter says:
On the bright side, the judge issued his opinion rapidly…
December 10, 2009, 4:11 pmAndrew says:
Here’s a true story. I was diagnosed as dyslexic at a very young age and, in fact, did not learn to read until quite late in life (relatively speaking). When I got to law school, I went to see a Dean and explained my situation. I said that I did not want extra time for exams, but that my spelling was so horrendous that I did want the ability to type my exam on a computer with a spell checker.
The Dean responded that I had to be diagnosed by a specialist of the law school’s choosing–something that, at the time, I was somewhat offended by, having struggled with dyslexia for most of my life. But whatever. I went through a battery of standard test used for this purpose and my diagnosis was confirmed.
In my second meeting with the Dean, I was told that I could use a computer with a spell checker, but that I would also be granted an extra time allotment of 50% (i.e., I would get 3 hours to complete a 2 hour exam). I said I didn’t feel that I needed extra time, just a spell checker. But the school insisted.
As it turned out, I rarely, if ever, used the extra time.
December 10, 2009, 4:16 pmProf. S. says:
Solve the problem by giving the students 20 days to do multiple legal problems on the issue. Answer a Complaint and draft a counterclaim, a TRO, an internal research memo, three letters to clients, and a proposed order and memorandum from a judge. Half way through the exam period, add on one more additional assignment you didn’t tell them about at the outset. Now THAT’S real life.
If a student requires additional time, s/he can solve that problem like they would in the real world – having all of the adverse parties (in this case, all other students) sign a stipulation for an extension. Problem solved.
December 10, 2009, 4:18 pmNickM says:
What is the difference between the first two of her disorders and being dumb?
Nick
December 10, 2009, 4:22 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Anderson,
The question is, I suppose, what law school exams are supposed to be doing. Are we interested in whether the student knows and [can?] express her knowledge of the material? Or do they [exams] also test for the ability to think quickly?
That is indeed the question, not just about law school exams but about all exams. If we are persuaded that it’s unfair to penalize a student who reacts very badly to extreme time pressure, it seems kind of harsh not also to notice the student who is merely mildly handicapped by extreme time pressure. Evidently if you aren’t absolutely crippled by timed exams, you have to take them with the same bounds as the rest of the class. So the people who thrive under time pressure excel; the people who wilt under time pressure get double time; and the unhappy rest of humanity gets to occupy the left edge of the curve.
If performance under time pressure isn’t considered significant, remove the time pressure, or attenuate it so that whatever is felt is felt pretty well equally. But don’t give time and a half, or double time, to students who dislike that pressure enough to get diagnosed about it, and no one else.
December 10, 2009, 4:22 pmDavid McCourt says:
This person, it is said, needs a “reduced distraction environment.” So how was that helped by having her participate in a lawsuit during her exam prep?
The brand proliferation of the various learning disorders listed at mind-numbing length in the DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition) would do Kellogg’s cereals proud. The thinking seems to be that by giving something a name and adding it to a list, one has guaranteed its real existence as an indisputable thing. “I am listed, therefore I am.” And along with the proliferation of ailments goes the proliferation of sufferers of those aliments, at least among those wealthy enough to badger their way into Princeton — despite, per her stated afflictions, the inability to concentrate, to develop decent writing skills or an extensive vocabulary, to read or to understand speech, or even to speak well herself.
This, from an article in Harper’s years ago, is worth quoting at length:
What will this much aflicted student do when she emerges with her B.A. into a work-a-day world where people expect things to get done properly and on time, no excuses?
December 10, 2009, 4:22 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Prof. S,
That is brilliant.
December 10, 2009, 4:24 pmKilo says:
This preferential treatment seems more than a little unfair to the students who compete on a level playing field.
What about the kid what wants to be a high school quarterback, but needs a little extra time to find the receivers down field? The new hire who needs twice as much time to prepare a brief, or provide a quote to a client, or do a stress analysis on a bridge?
One wonders at what point “equal opportunity” comes to an end and its OK to allow reality to intrude and produce unequal results.
Both the student in the case and the parents should be ashamed of their behavior here.
December 10, 2009, 4:26 pmaf says:
If a student requires additional time, s/he can solve that problem like they would in the real world — having all of the adverse parties (in this case, all other students) sign a stipulation for an extension. Problem solved.
Actually, in the real world you can get an extension on motion, without a stipulation. In fact, motions for extensions of time are frequently opposed, though (in my experience) more often than not granted.
Of course, the judge will virtually always give the opposing party more time as well — which I think is the real point here.
December 10, 2009, 4:27 pmMalvolio says:
What? Somebody suing under ADA to get special assistance in a sporting event? That’s unpossible!
December 10, 2009, 4:31 pmOrin Kerr says:
Prof. S says:
Real, but potentially problematic from an exam standpoint. Given that there were notable rumors of cheating when I was in law school on just 24 hour take-home exams, I can only imagine how much cheating there would be if you gave students 20 days.
December 10, 2009, 4:33 pmBruce Hayden says:
I would not be surprised if it were higher than 10% – I think it was at my kid’s school. ADD/ADHD and Dyslexia were the big ones.
I do know kids who were “disabled” and straight A students there, even without getting the extra time on exams at school. But some of those did get extra time on their SATs, scored accordingly, and got into top colleges.
December 10, 2009, 4:39 pmpete says:
From what the high school teachers I know tell me that is how Texas administers its standard exams, minus the sleeping bags. Kids get all day to complete them if they want it and the teachers have to stay after school is normally out to proctor the kids who take all day to complete the test.
December 10, 2009, 4:43 pmpete says:
I was also diagnosed ADD when I was a kid, but in retrospect I think I was misdiagnosed and was simply bored in class since it went so slow and was full of busy work. I thrived under time pressure exams and actually had fun taking the GRE back when it still had a logic puzzle section.
This also reminds me of one of my college roommates who intentionally did not start writing papers until about 9pm the night before they were do because he thought he did better under pressure.
December 10, 2009, 4:48 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Nick, assuming that you are really asking and not just being nasty:
Here is an article about Disorder of Written Expression.
What I understand from this is that a person’s writing is evaluated, and is compared to that person’s age, IQ, and SES; and that the diagnosis means that the person’s writing does not correlate to what one would expect based on these other factors. So by definition, this diagnosis is not the same as being “dumb” as you so charmingly say.
Several years ago we had our daughter’s math ability tested for a program we wanted to get her into. Her percentile ranking among her agemates was what we wanted, and we got that; but they did a full-scale IQ assessment also, to make sure they were getting a valid number. I’m guessing that a deviation between IQ score and the percentile range one would expect would indicate a problem of one kind or another.
December 10, 2009, 4:49 pmluagha says:
Back in college many moons ago, I knew a woman with legitimate serious dyslexia who went through the appropriate rigamarole to be certified as such for the SAT. At the time, that granted the applicant unlimited time to complete the test.
She said that the SAT is 95% or more time pressure. Given enough time to puzzle out the sentences and figure out what they are actually trying to say makes the entire test childishly easy, and of course she got a score so high that her only errors were likely transcription errors introduced by the Scantron.
(On a similar tack, a close friend of mine is an elementary school teacher, and he says that if there is such a thing as dyslexia, he’s never seen it. His theory is that kids who show signs of dyslexia simply haven’t matured enough yet to learn to discern small shapes (such as letters) close together. He has giant posters of individual letters five foot tall that he will space ten feet apart on a blank wall to spell ‘CAT’. Only once they ‘get it’ at huge sizes are they able to learn to read with the letters smaller and closer together. until they get to normal sizes.
The principal noticed that his classes have no dyslexic students while the other classes have a ‘standard’ 10%, and started sending all the dyslexic children to his class.)
December 10, 2009, 4:50 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
All of my physical chemistry tests (2 semesters) and differential equations tests were week-long take-home tests. Once after we turned our diff. eq. tests in, the professor told us that two of the papers matched too well and that he’d given both of those students zeros; and if it happened again there’d be no more take-homes. It didn’t happen again.
But we had no more than 12 or 15 students in each of those classes.
December 10, 2009, 4:52 pmStarman says:
Orin Kerr,
December 10, 2009, 4:52 pmIf there are rumors of cheating on take-home tests, the cure is easy: make the test hard enough that cheating is impossible.
The tradition at my undergrad school was take-home, timed tests, often closed-book: that is, here is the test, bring it back next week, once you start you have 3 hours to finish. Many frosh worried that others might cheat–until the majority of students scored well under 50% on each test of the first round of midterms.
No one worried about cheating after that experience!
ShelbyC says:
OK, what’s the diff between that and just being a crappy writer?
December 10, 2009, 4:53 pmPhatty says:
The ADA should never apply in competitive scenarios. If a test is trying to rank the mental aptitude of the test takers (including the ability to read and analyze quickly) the entire purpose of the test is defeated if the lesser endowed test takers are given an extra advantage.
SO, for example, golf handicapping is used for casual play to allow not so good golfers to compete on even grounds with better golfers. But, in an actual competition, you don’t spot strokes to the weak golfers so that they can compete with the good golfers. If you did, you wouldn’t have a true champion.
If any student can show a valid disability, if they request and receive any extra accomdations all of their grades should be pass/fail and they should not receive a class ranking or in any way influence the grading curve or ranking of the other students.
December 10, 2009, 4:56 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Now, that is very interesting.
I read a bit about Montessori methods when my daughter was an infant. When she was old enough to toddle around, I posted the letters of the alphabet down the hallway at eye-level for her; but I made them red (more interesting than black) and large, and spaced them so that she could look at one letter at a time. The idea is that if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s hard to see the features that make, for example, A different from R. Your brain has to train to see these things.
She did develop an early facility with reading; but this runs in both sides of the family anyway, so who knows.
December 10, 2009, 4:57 pmvic says:
couldnt agree more
December 10, 2009, 4:58 pmegd says:
I really hope this is sarcasm. Because if not…wow.
You must not be a lawyer, or perhaps you’re a bar exam administrator.
December 10, 2009, 4:59 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Shelby, are you seriously asking?
December 10, 2009, 5:00 pmNickM says:
Laura – that “diagnosis” boils down to “we think he/she should be writing a lot better”. Anything that sets out an expected communicative writing ability based in part on “life experiences” is not a serious medical diagnosis.
The DSM is becoming a bad joke (and V promises to be worse). Being below-average is not a psychiatric disorder.
Nick
December 10, 2009, 5:04 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I disagree, Nick.
I posted on my blog about a note one of my microbiology classmates sent the professor.
I’m guessing that this person was low-IQ and went to a crappy school. But suppose that this note came from a person who was from an educated family, went to a decent school, and showed no deficit when you talked to her. Would you really not view a note like this as a big red flag that something is wrong?
I get the feeling that some people view a mental or physical deficit as a sign of moral weakness. I suppose that you and your family members and people you run with don’t have problems like that, so it appears to you that no one need have them unless they want to have them for some perverse reason.
December 10, 2009, 5:10 pmDavid Chesler says:
Indeed. Just how level must the playing field be. I can’t change my height, and if I were taller I’d do a lot better at various sports. Should I get a head start?
I think most bristle at the “more time” accomodations. I know people with debilitating conditions, but most of their accomodations (if they were to go back to school) wouldn’t give folks without that condition much of an advantage (permission to bring an oxygen tank, later scheduling for someone with a sleep-wake phase disorder.) There’s no reason not to give all students a quiet distraction-free place to take most tests. I’m sure I’d have done better in college if I’d had the diagnoses and treatments I get now. At a certain point it’s like NickM said, how do you distinguish the condition from “dumb” (or in the athletic case, “short”)?
December 10, 2009, 5:10 pmDJR says:
The suggestion to remove accomodated individuals from the curve makes sense to me. I would go further though — a person who needs an accomodation admittedly cannot compete under the same conditions as other students, so she should not be permitted to be graded as if she competed under the same conditions as other students. Students who require accomodation should be required to take their exams pass/fail.
December 10, 2009, 5:16 pmAndrew says:
Actually, Nick, using differentials between IQ and specific performance is pretty standard. The theory is that if you have a kid with an IQ of 140 who can’t do basic math or can’t read, then something’s amiss. All of which is supported by decades of scientific reaserch that shows that learning disabilities are real, physical, phenomena that can be observed, in many cases, in the architecture of the brain.
One of the most frustrating things about being learning disabled is the reluctance of people to believe that something is “really” wrong. But believe me, the experience of dyslexia is no different than being disabled in many other physical ways.
It’s one thing to point out abuses in a system. It’s quite another thing to imply that an entire category of legitimately disabled people (no matter what you’re view of testing accommodations) don’t exist.
And no, Shelby, that doesn’t make them “dumb.”
December 10, 2009, 5:17 pmAnderson says:
Egd, you may think it’s a *poor* test, but quite obviously, passing the exam is a requirement if one is to practice law. If it has zero bearing on one’s ability to practice law, then it’s a poor test.
She said that the SAT is 95% or more time pressure. Given enough time to puzzle out the sentences and figure out what they are actually trying to say makes the entire test childishly easy, and of course she got a score so high that her only errors were likely transcription errors introduced by the Scantron.
That in itself calls the SAT’s validity into question, though perhaps the lady in question was simply quite bright. Why are we evaluating people’s fitness for college by their ability to answer questions quickly?
December 10, 2009, 5:18 pmJK says:
So no braille/reader for blind people? No voice-to-text for people without hands? Sure there can be abuse, but the idea that all accommodations are illegitimate is ridiculous.
Frankly this all sounds like whining from people who got mediocre grades and want to blame it on a handful of abuses. Maybe I’m just good at working quickly, but I can only think of maybe 2-4 tests in my entire academic career (though law school at a competitive school) where more time would have been a significant advantage.
December 10, 2009, 5:19 pmDavid McCourt says:
As litigiousness can itself be a sign of mental disorder, per the DSM-IV, perhaps the student suffers from an inherited condition.
Of course, as obsessive categorizing and ordering of things can be a sign of mental disorder, perhaps the DSM itself is a symptom, and those who created it, the sufferers.
December 10, 2009, 5:20 pmOrin Kerr says:
Starman:
I don’t think I follow. In a curved class, the only issue is whether there is a marginal benefit to working together, which there usually is. Why is the difficulty of the exam relevant to that?
December 10, 2009, 5:22 pmDavid McCourt says:
Laura, you say: “But suppose that this note came from a person who was from an educated family, went to a decent school . . . .”
So it is upper-middle class kids, who already have the advantages of good homes and schooling, who get the benefit of this “medical diagnosis,” because they, despite their advantages, seem to exhibit behavior that would indicate, in your words, “that they were low IQ” if they weren’t well off.
Like the decreasing emphasis on SAT scores by schools, the proliferation and abuse of these disorders is another way for many dull but well to do kids to stop smart lower middle class kids from taking their places at Mommy’s and Daddy’s schools.
December 10, 2009, 5:29 pmaf says:
The ADA should never apply in competitive scenarios.
I disagree. The ADA should apply; it just shouldn’t give the disabled a competitive advantage.
If it is reasonable to give a particular accommodation (eg, more time to take a test), then the accommodation should be given. If someone can pass law school with 5 hour exams but not with 3 hours exams, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be a lawyer. But neither I do see any reason they should get an advantage over the student with no diagnosis who simply runs out of time on a three hour exam. So give everyone 5 hours.
December 10, 2009, 5:31 pmJK says:
Could you provide some evidence that these disorders are diagnosed disproportionately in “upper-middle class kids”?
December 10, 2009, 5:33 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David, I am not following this at all.
Do you understand that IQ is tested and not estimated by family’s SES?
December 10, 2009, 5:35 pmaf says:
So give everyone 5 hours.
December 10, 2009, 5:38 pmDisability Insurance says:
This is an interesting case, it seems that the school has made some pretty reasonable concessions already. One exam per day? That seems rather fair. I think that maybe she should learn and develop better study habits, but I don’t think that the school should be required to make much more concessions like extra time on exams.
December 10, 2009, 5:40 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
JK,
Frankly this all sounds like whining from people who got mediocre grades and want to blame it on a handful of abuses. Maybe I’m just good at working quickly, but I can only think of maybe 2–4 tests in my entire academic career (though law school at a competitive school) where more time would have been a significant advantage.
Could you maybe stop a few ticks between your first and second sentences and see what that might mean?
More time, you say, wouldn’t have meant much difference to you. Fine. Can you maybe conceive that it might have made a significant difference to someone else? Difficult to conceive, sure, but try. Now, for a further stretch, imagine that, of those who might have benefited from more time, some were officially granted it, and some were not. Finally, for a last exercise of the imagination, … but I think you can see where I’m going here.
I say, if any student needs an accommodation, structure the exam, if possible, so that everyone has the accommodation. If it’s time, allow the time to everyone. If it’s a keyboard, let everyone have a keyboard. Level the playing field, but really level it, not giving a boost to the student who’s badly impaired, but nothing to her classmate who has the same problem, only slightly less severe.
December 10, 2009, 5:41 pmDavid Chesler says:
You seem to be putting them in opposition.
December 10, 2009, 5:42 pmPhatty says:
To catch cheating. As the difficulty of the exam increases, the likelihood of any two test answers looking the same decreases (particularly in a math test where one’s work must be shown).
December 10, 2009, 5:42 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
JK, Laura,
Do you really not think that the vast majority of kids who bear these attested diagnoses are upper-middle-class or better? I mean, I’d be persuaded by evidence to the contrary, but in my experience it isn’t poor parents who take their kids through psychiatric evaluations to smoothe their paths through the student test-taking maze.
December 10, 2009, 5:46 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David – putting what in opposition?
I suppose I am revealing my poor reading comprehension skills. What and what am I putting in opposition?
December 10, 2009, 5:46 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Michelle, if the poor kids aren’t being advocated for by their parents, that’s bad, but is that a reason why upper-middle-class kids who truly need help shouldn’t be advocated for?
December 10, 2009, 5:48 pmDavid Chesler says:
How do you distinguish between a smart person who is unreasonably bad in an area and a dumb person who is unreasonably good in a few areas?
And that leads to the question of why you are trying to compare people at all. It’s one thing to say “You may drive you are restricted to cars equipped with ______ (which you of course needed to take the road test)”; it’s another thing to say “And the scholarship, awarded to the person who scored best on this exam, goes to …”
Serious question: Most of us here probably have above-average IQs (by however measured.) We’ve been with smart people, most of us with people smarter than ourselves. Smart seems to be on a continuum. What about dumb? Is there a continuum, or is there a difference in kind between being as dumb as we are smart and being mentally retarded (or whatever the correct label is today)? What if an individual was naturally very intelligent (Mom and Dad were) but suffers from a point-source cause of mental retardation – where do they end up on the scale?
December 10, 2009, 5:51 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David that individual probably ends up with a deficit that can be tested for. It may be caught if, for instance, in first grade he or she has a rich and colorful vocabulary and speaks in well-constructed sentences but doesn’t learn to read with the group.
December 10, 2009, 5:56 pmegd says:
I may have misread your statement.
You said:
I read this statement to mean “the information tested on the bar exam is relevant to one’s practical skill as a lawyer.” Something that could only be believed by a nonlawyer or someone who writes bar exams.
However, you could have meant “passing the bar exam is one hurdle to becoming a lawyer, therefore knowledge of bar exam subject matter is inherently relevant to becoming a lawyer.”
If the second is your point, then the bar exam could just as easily be a test of differential equations, which have little (if any) relevance to being an attorney. Thus, while knowledge of Laplace transforms would be relevant to one’s ability to be a lawyer, such knowledge would not be particularly relevant to one’s ability to practice law.
I think the second interpretation would get few detractors.
December 10, 2009, 5:58 pmDavid McCourt says:
JK,
You ask: “Could you provide some evidence that these disorders are diagnosed disproportionately in “upper-middle class kids”?
See, e.g., “Paying for a Disability Diagnosis To Gain Time on College Boards”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/nyregion/paying-for-a-disability-diagnosis-to-gain-time-on-college-boards.html
December 10, 2009, 6:01 pmShelbyC says:
When have I ever said anybody was “dumb”?
December 10, 2009, 6:06 pmShelbyC says:
Yes, your description sounds alot like a fancy way of saying that the person was a crappy writer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for sorting out the difference between poor knowelege of the underlying subject matter and being a crappy writer, or having crappy writing disorder, or whatever, but I’m not sure how effective rent-seeking doctors, lawyers, and “patients” are going to be at that.
December 10, 2009, 6:14 pmNickM says:
Andrew – you don’t get a 140 IQ result if you can’t read or do basic math.
Dyslexia is real. It’s also two different processing disorders (visual and auditory), which are being lumped into one name.
Abilities in different areas are not in fixed proportion between people. Pretty much everyone knows people who had SAT Verbal scores 200 points greater than their SAT Math scores and people who had SAT Math scores 200 points greater than their SAT Verbal scores. People with normal ability in one area may be well above or well below normal in another. You wouldn’t call the guy with a SAT Verbal of 490 and a SAT Math of 750 as learning disabled; why then would he be learning disabled because it was 290 and 550 instead?
Laura – that’s a huge red flag, but not for a learning disability. That looks like emailing while drunk.
Nick
December 10, 2009, 6:14 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura,
Michelle, if the poor kids aren’t being advocated for by their parents, that’s bad, but is that a reason why upper-middle-class kids who truly need help shouldn’t be advocated for?
No, of course not. What I said was that I suspected that (contra you and JK), most kids so diagnosed are in fact upper-middle-class.
And as regards those who truly need help: Let’s, again, structure exams so that all accommodations are taken care of from the get-go. If it’s unfair to make some students do an exam in three hours, let’s make them all do it in 24. But let’s not let some do it in 6 and some in 3, depending on diagnosis. Either doing the work quickly is something to be graded on, or it isn’t.
December 10, 2009, 6:15 pmLaura Victoria says:
Litigation is obviously a time sensitive area of practice. After hearing questionable testimony, is a lawyer to request a 15-minute break to ponder whether to make an objection and how to phrase it? In my experience, corporate law is also time sensitive. Time is the ultimate budget constraint.
Back when I was in law school 30 years ago there were complaints about the time pressure of the CA bar harming minority exam takers. Get real. The “test” proposed by ProfS makes a heck of a lot of sense. I’ve dealt with dumbass judges who seem to have the conditions set forth in the post (in addition to “Prefer to Spend Time on Golf Course Syndrome”. The legal profession would be better off without these folks with these “syndromes” that are the equivalent of “I’m a dumbass” disorder. And soooo funny, that so many of these “disordered” folks inhabit low-level government lawyer jobs, including small-town DAs and judicial appointments.
Geesh.
December 10, 2009, 6:24 pmPhatty says:
IQ isn’t a readily definable term. My test for IQ may be heavily biased towards the ability of a person to perform visual and auditory processing. Your test for IQ may be heavily biased towards the ability of a person to perform conceptual processing.
So, a person could say “I’m a really smart person, I just have a problem with visual processing.” But somebody else could say, “But I define a ‘smart’ person as a person who has excellent visual processing abilities.”
December 10, 2009, 6:24 pmDavid McCourt says:
JK,
“New Test-Taking Skill: Working the System,” LA Times (“The number of students who get extra time to complete the SAT because of a claimed learning disability has soared by more than 50% in recent years, with the bulk of the growth coming from exclusive private schools and public schools in mostly wealthy, white suburbs.”). See article at:
http://www.earlyentrancefoundation.org/peep/articles/2004/testtaking.html
There’s also this:
http://chronicle.com/article/Removing-the-Scarlet-Letter/4370/
December 10, 2009, 6:26 pmLaura Victoria says:
I once had an otherwise good (not great) associate who I only found out too late had Dyslexia. I made this discovery only after I figured out he’d written down the phone numbers of prospective clients he’d spoken with incorrectly. Sorry, but I should have been alerted to this disability by him beforehand. I had close to an 80% retention rate on prospective clients I was able to contact. His screwups caused me significant lost income.
December 10, 2009, 6:33 pmroad2serfdom says:
How long until disabled speech students demand a use of a teleprompter?
December 10, 2009, 6:38 pmluagha says:
Anderson: “That in itself calls the SAT’s validity into question, though perhaps the lady in question was simply quite bright.”
The lady in question was indeed plenty bright. But her statement should be taken to mean that it is the time pressure that makes the questions on the SAT difficult – without time pressure they would all be considered simple questions. The SAT is not testing your capability, it is testing your capability to do low-grade comprehension tasks at high speed. (And this is certainly valuable, because it indicates a base of well-known, ‘reflexive’ knowledge. It just isn’t the be-all, end-all.)
This is why SAT prep courses can get substantial gains. They give basic facility with the TYPE of comprehension tasks you will need to perform and then drill you on them. Drilling increases your speed on these tasks, gives you the template you need to discern the question.
Your score on the first SAT test you have ever taken is quite different from your score on the fifth or sixth.
December 10, 2009, 6:39 pmKharn says:
Unless they’re feeding the student one question at a time and refusing them the ability to go back to previous questions, a 10 minute break every hour is extra time on the exam.
I always loved engineering profs that were not afraid to say they were given two hours for the exam room by the university, but if you were still sitting there after 60-75 minutes, you’d better plan on retaking his class next year.
December 10, 2009, 6:40 pmJK says:
Thanks David,I think that demonstrates your point. Frankly I didn’t have much of an intuition either way, it’s been a while since was in Elementary/High School, but I don’t have children of my own.
December 10, 2009, 6:50 pmSteve2 says:
It’s not a moral weakness. It is, though, a physical defect. Which in a way makes it interchangeable with moral weakness: both are flaws needing to be corrected or eliminated.
December 10, 2009, 6:51 pmJK says:
I definitely see your point, but sometimes distinctions in why there is a problem do matter even when outcomes are the same under certain circumstances. For example, someone with a correctable vision problem might be a “bad reader” (perhaps to the point of being illiterate) without glasses, but a perfectly normal (or better) reader with glasses. Sure, under certain circumstances they may “simply be a crappy reader or have crappy reader disorder,” but to label someone with a correctable vision problem as a “bad reader” in a general sense seems unhelpful at best.
December 10, 2009, 6:57 pmShelbyC says:
Agreed, but Laura’s description of “Disorder of Written Expression” to me seemed indistinguishable from simply not being able to write very well. I didn’t really see a difference in the article either. For example, if I asked you, “Well, JK, what’s the difference between being a crappy reader and having bad vision”, you’d be able to say, “Well, crap, Shelby, somebody with bad vision can just put on glasses and read just fine.” I’m not sure I see a similar answer with Disorder of Written Expression.
December 10, 2009, 7:07 pmDilan Esper says:
I think the issue turns on whether the aspect that the student wants relief from is an inherent part of the test. In some situations it is– for instance, the SAT is supposed to be a strictly timed test that a lot of students can’t finish, and these accommodations are truly unfair in that situation unless you have someone who faces a PHYSICAL hardship that prevents him or her from getting his or her answers down as fast even though he or she can think as fast as the other students.
Another example is accommodations to allow students to deliver oral presentations in the professor’s office. No dice– part of the assignment is getting up in front of the class and getting over your phobias. If you can’t do that, you should be awarded an F.
However, sometimes, these aspects are not inherent. For instance, if the professor allots 4 hours for a test that should take any average student 1 hour to complete, there’s nothing wrong with giving even a bogus claimant 5 hours. In that situation, there’s nothing wrong with applying a very loose standard.
December 10, 2009, 7:14 pmThe Awful Truth says:
So it means you’re dumb at writing
December 10, 2009, 7:20 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Shelby, there are different reasons why a person might be a crappy writer.
It could be that the person has an IQ of 60, in which case the crappy writing is part of the overall low-IQ picture.
It could be that the person had really bad teachers, which is a problem but it’s a different problem.
Maybe the person has bad language skills overall, possibly from an undiagnosed hearing disorder so he or she never really learned English.
Or maybe the person has a problem with the written word. Written and spoken English are almost two different languages – have you noticed that?
To say that a person is a crappy writer isn’t really saying anything.
December 10, 2009, 7:25 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
December 10, 2009, 7:30 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Suing to Get More Time on Exams -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Gentry, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Suing to Get More Time on Exams: This is a month old, but still interesting: A learning-disabled freshman suing.. http://bit.ly/6H1PI4 [...]
December 10, 2009, 7:31 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
That is a very interesting statement. Seriously.
December 10, 2009, 7:32 pmDilan Esper says:
To say that a person is a crappy writer isn’t really saying anything.
Well, the question is whether there is a difference if the person is later hired for a writing-intensive position.
Part of the problem with this issue is there are a lot of people who are deeply uncomfortable with the screening aspect of education, i.e., that the education process should be brutal and Darwinist and should separate people who are really efficient at tasks from those who are not.
And actually, in its most extreme forms, I have some discomfort with that as well. But the other side of the equation is that if you don’t adopt a relatively strict approach to separating the wheat from the chaff, the result is you just give wealthy kids huge opportunities to game the system. Because the alternative to meritocracy isn’t equality– it’s some sort of system based on privilege and wealth. The educational system in this country has made some good strides in giving smart kids from disadvantaged backgrounds better opportunities, but to do that you have to eliminate obvious methods for rich kids to game the system, and this is one of them.
December 10, 2009, 7:32 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Shelby, you understand that there are kinds of bad vision that cannot be corrected with glasses, right? They occur in the brain, in the way that visual input is processed.
It would be nice if other people’s problems could be easily solved so that we would not be inconvenienced by their attempts to accomodate them somehow so they could live their lives.
December 10, 2009, 7:34 pmJozxyqk says:
It strikes me that we’re pretty universally willing to accommodate those problems that do not involve the mind. If your mind is not capable of writing for some internal reason (general dimness, some elaborate disorder, or what have you), then many will put you in the “crappy writer” category, regardless of the creative diagnoses that you might acquire. If the problem is external to your mind (needs glasses, can’t hear, was never taught to write, doesn’t have hands) we are unwilling to judge so harshly.
December 10, 2009, 7:35 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Jozxyqk, unless we equate physical defects with moral weaknesses.
December 10, 2009, 7:41 pmShelbyC says:
Well, if those conditions are present you usually highlight them. You don’t say, for example, that a guy in a wheelchair is a crappy basketball player. If you say somebody is a crappy writer, you say it because he is a flat-out crappy writer.
The example I was responding to involved someone who was a crappy reader except when wearing glasses. And anyway, is there an accomodation for “Disorder of Written Expression” that would be inappropriate for someone who is just a crappy writer?
December 10, 2009, 7:48 pmJozxyqk says:
Perhaps not as rare as we would like–from Shakespeare to Hollywood–but I would guess (or at least hope) that most people would not stand by such a view if pressed. In any event, I’m not entirely sure that’s what Steve2 was doing. There’s a difference between equating the two types of weaknesses and recognizing that curing either is desirable.
Do you think the distinction between mind-based defects and extra-mind defects is a good one with respect to where we allow accommodation? I have to say that it appeals to me (without much thought having been given to the topic)…
December 10, 2009, 7:51 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Right, unless you’re one of those people who look at diagnoses like this and say “maybe she’s just dumb”. May I point out that you can see a wheelchair.
I don’t know how you accommodate disorder of written expression. Maybe you shouldn’t accommodate it at all, I don’t know. I am objecting to conflating it with “dumb” and “crappy writing”. I’d rather reserve “crappy writing” for bad grammar and spelling and punctuation, and syntax errors that interfere with the reader’s understanding. Run-on sentences, that kind of thing. Sentence fragments. (!)
December 10, 2009, 7:54 pmShelbyC says:
I never conflated it with dumb, and as a pretty crappy writer myself I hope dumb shouldn’t be conflated with crappy writing. (fingers crossed). But aren’t the symptoms of crappy writing you just discussed among the symptoms of the disorder? I still don’t understand how it’s different.
December 10, 2009, 8:05 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I think a lot of people would stand by such a view, sadly.
As to accommodation, I think we have to ask ourselves what the ultimate goal is. I would like every human being to be able to reach as high as her ability and ambition will take her. We understand that a nearsighted person may need glasses, and that’s not frowned upon. But even other physical disabilities don’t get reasonable accommodation because it’s too damn much trouble for able-bodied people to have to install a wheelchair ramp, or whatever it is. It’s a waste of human capital, to let people rot because they’re not stamped out of the same cookie cutter we’re stamped out of.
I hope William will not mind if I point you to his blog post here. I don’t agree with him about everything, but then I’m not living the life he’s lived for decades. It’s really easy for us to think about accommodation from a strictly theoretical point of view, and then get up out of our chair and get on with our two-footed lives. And talk about other people who have trouble writing as being just “dumb” or whatever.
December 10, 2009, 8:07 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The conservative writer Mona Charen had to break with the conservative mainstream when she had one of those wild inattentive boys and he responded to Ritalin. Some day ShelbyC will have a learning-disabled kid (well, if any partner would have him), or nephew, or something like that, and he’ll get the story.
At one point before remediation I had a relative who had a 19-grade differential between oral (adult-level) and written (near-kindergarten level) expression and couldn’t spell his own name and address consistently. I suppose we could have just said he was stupid and a bad writer, but that doesn’t seem to fit in with most people’s ideas of stupid and bad. Especially if you could hook him up to dictation software and get better results.
My experience is that there is, in fact, quite a bit of abuse of things like extra time. It’s also true that people’s brains come in a variety of nonstandard capabilities, and do we want to do something about that, or just set up a Procrustean regime?
This may mark the first thread I agreed with Laura about anything.
BTW, I wonder if people like ShelbyC are scared that if things like dyslexia are recognized, their own policy of laughing at people who slip on banana peels will go out of style?
December 10, 2009, 8:08 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Shelby, my guess is that when you are a crappy writer, you could do better but you’re just being lazy. Imagine that you have all of the grammar problems, syntax problems, etc., when you are taking your time and doing the absolute best you can do.
December 10, 2009, 8:11 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I know, I am stunned.
December 10, 2009, 8:14 pmBC says:
Laura, there are indeed many reasons why someone might be a crappy writer — not least of which is that for any given activity human competence is distributed along a bell curve. Some people simply fall on the left side of the curve, without being afflicted by bad teachers, limited intelligence, a bona fide physical malady like an undiagnosed hearing problem, or a bona fide neurological disorder like dyslexia.
What I gather Shelby is driving at is: going by the description in the DSM-IV, how do you distinguish between somebody afflicted with Disorder of Written Expression, and somebody who’s simply on the left side (perhaps the far left side) of the curve?
December 10, 2009, 8:15 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
BC, this is not my area of expertise at all, but I think you’d look for a very obvious disconnect between written and verbal expressions. Look at what Andrew posted:
December 10, 2009, 8:19 pmJozxyqk says:
I am stunned that I, a bleeding-heart liberal, am being guided skeptically towards the light by Laura.
Interesting/heartbreaking blog post you linked me to. Starkly demonstrates that this is no easy question. Though it’s still hard for me to be sympathetic to the litigious Princeton student who wants more exam time based on some sketchy disabilities.
December 10, 2009, 8:20 pmEli Rabett says:
There is another point in here which is actually more important. Are (all) tests competitive, or (at least some of them) checks on whether a student has learned the material. If an instructor gives a test that he or she thinks probes the material and all pass, is that something the instructor should be proud of.
Particularly wrt law school, this appears to be saying that the law schools properly function as selectors for law firms rather than teaching law.
As far as reasonable accommodation, consider this woman’s contributions
December 10, 2009, 8:23 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The cut-off for being legally blind is pretty arbitrary, wouldn’t you say?
December 10, 2009, 8:24 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Also, there’s a lot to language that you wouldn’t necessarily know if you haven’t studied it or had other reason to know about it.
(Going OT here, kind of – I hope no one minds.)
My mom had a stroke a few years ago, that affected her language for about a week. She made an excellent recovery, but that was a strange and scary few days. I learned that the concept of answering a question with “yes” or “no” is actually a complex thing. It was fairly late in that week of recovery that she got that back. The speech therapy had told me to work with her, so I did. I remember handing her a toothbrush so she could hold it in her hand and look at it and feel it, and she was able to tell me that it was a toothbrush. So I said, “If I said to you, ‘Is that a toothbrush?’ you would say, ‘Yes.’ And if I said to you, ‘Is that a tricycle?’ you would say ‘No.’” I paused for a moment and said, “Is that a toothbrush?” She smiled and said, “Toothbrush.” Now she did really still have all of her marbles, and just a few days later you could carry on a conversation with her and never know anything had happened. But there’s a lot going on in our brains, with language – it’s really complex, a lot more than I had ever realized.
December 10, 2009, 8:24 pmBC says:
Sure, but that’s the nature of bright-line legal rules. I would hope and expect that a medical diagnosis — psychiatry is ostensibly medicine, after all — would be considerably less arbitrary.
December 10, 2009, 8:30 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Snort.
Seriously, it’s good for us not to put ourselves in pigeonholes. I consider myself a conservative because most of the views I hold seem to line up with the conservative side. That doesn’t mean I then have to hold the conservative view on every issue. When people let their tribe tell them what view they have to have to be consistently liberal, conservative, or whatever, the tail’s wagging the dog, I think.
December 10, 2009, 8:30 pmDan Hamilton says:
?????
I always thought that the purpose of grading was to find out if the students knew the subject matter. Not a zero-sum game. It just appears that way because of differences in learning.
Your way it doesn’t matter if anyone knows anything about the subject. The “A” goes to the best of the know nothings. That is just stupid.
December 10, 2009, 8:46 pmShelbyC says:
Do dyslexic folks slip on banana peels more often than uncordinated folks like myself? People slipping on banana peels will always be funny. And don’t you worry, I have plenty of learning-disabled folks in my family. But what I’m scared of is that, if we start making a legal distinction between “disability” and “inability” a cottage industry of doctors and lawyers will spring up where, for a fee, theyt will convert the inability of those who can afford it into a “disability” with inhierant special legal rights, like extra time on tests. Hey, as I said before, I’m all for doing whatever we can to help folks overcome whatever inabilities or disabilities they may have, I just don’t think lawyers and judges should be the folks deciding how it gets done.
you mean, other than your Mom? :-) (don’t complain, you had it coming)
December 10, 2009, 8:52 pmloki13 says:
Here’s my solution, which would both serve to aid those who truly need the help due to a disability as well as weed out those who are (increasingly) gaming the system (this is for law schools- might need to be tweaked for other circumstances):
1. If you need added time because of a learning disability, you may have it.
2. However, you will receive only pass/fail credit for the class, and the exam will not count toward either the class curve or to class rank.
Therefore, those who need it may still get through law school and receive their JD. The can take (and pass) any courses they choose to. There will not be any incentive for people to game they system if they do not need assistance.
December 10, 2009, 8:57 pmJK says:
So I assume this will apply to people who wear glasses right?
December 10, 2009, 9:01 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Loki, but if a person truly has a disability that she needs the extra time for in order to have a level playing field, now you’ve x’d her off the list of people who can talk about their class ranks. She’s now a second-class citizen, through no fault of her own.
I think it would be better to find a way to accommodate those people, and only those people, who need it. Or, as other have suggested, give everyone the maximum amount of time that anyone needs.
December 10, 2009, 9:05 pmShelbyC says:
But if the ability to respond in a certain time-frame is critical to the skill being measured, aren’t you just distorting the measurement by giving some folks extra time? And if it’s not, wouldn’t you get a more accurate measurement if you gave everybody all the time they need?
December 10, 2009, 9:07 pmLN says:
Laura seems to be placing a lot of weight on the concept of IQ and natural intelligence.
Let’s say you wanted to disprove the idea that IQ was a mark of “general intelligence” and that someone with a high IQ would be able to do everything well. How would you disprove it? Well, you would find people with high IQs who are crappy writers, maybe. This means that IQ is not everything it’s cracked up to be, right?
No wait, Laura says. If someone with a high IQ is a crappy writer, then that’s just proof that they have a medical disorder. Because a person with a high IQ *should* be a good writer. In other words, you can’t possibly refute IQ as a measure of general intelligence.
Saying that a bad writer *should* be a good writer is fundamentally a judgment call. Education takes work, it is not a purely “natural” process, whatever that means. There are a lot more people studying calculus now than 500 years ago and this has nothing to do with “nature” (and yes, I know when calculus was invented). I hadn’t thought about this too much before, but Laura’s comments suggest to me that people have pretty strong ideas about who “should” be doing well in school and who shouldn’t. Are your parents smart and well-to-do? Well then obviously the only thing stopping you from academic success is a learning disability or four. Are your parents dumb and poor? Well then obviously if you are a bad writer, it’s just the way of the world. Nature is speaking, and it’s “too much” effort to fight Nature.
December 10, 2009, 9:15 pmloki13 says:
ShelbyC,
1. I proposed my solution for law schools, so it is germane to that situation.
2. The time pressure is an inherent aspect in many (but not all) law school exams. On a given exam, you have to spot the issue, decide on the correct course of analysis, use the correct rule, do the analysis, and write your conclusion. I don’t know how well that maps on to real-world practice (while I’ve certainly found RL lawyerin’ to be time pressured, it isn’t time pressured in the same way that exams are). Because of that, giving all students all the time they need is taking away an important part of the test.
Laura,
I wrote above why all students whouldn’t be allowed an infinite amount of time to do their tests. While I was in LS, out of roughly 24 classes, I only took one exam that had no time pressure element (a multi-day take home). As for the second-class citizenship- well, they can still receive JDs. Many might prefer not to have to worry about being ranked in the lower half of the class. But I think it is unfair for students who are given extra time on exams to be considered for the highest class ranks because they don’t have to contend with an important part of the exam process. They should still be allowed to take the exam and pass the class (and receive their JD), but why should they be ranked in the same way, especially knowing that there are unscrupulous students out there who abuse the system.
Furthermore, this could be tweaked somewhat; this is for time extensions only. If a student wanted their exam graded seperately, or the professor allowed them to turn ina paper instead of an exam, I wouldn’t have an issue with that. But while I am most definitely in favor of helping the disadvantaged, I find it perverse that so many are gaming the system to the disadvantage of the honest and diligent.
December 10, 2009, 9:21 pmloki13 says:
By the way, part of my disgust comes from being a (somewhat) recent and older graduate of law school. There’s something distinctly unnerving about watching:
a) The vast amount of adderall abuse going on among LS students.
b) The high class rankings gained by “the learning disabled” who were magically just as able as anyone else in conversation, in assignments, and in summer associate positions, yet had to have double time for exams.
c) Hearing professors chewed out by parents over their precious snowflakes getting a B on an exam. How dare they!
Seriously. It’s enough to make me say, “Get off my lawn!”
December 10, 2009, 9:25 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Is this really what you gleaned from what I wrote? Wow.
I’d try to explain again, but I wouldn’t want to deny you the pleasure you evidently get from attributing evil motives to me.
December 10, 2009, 9:30 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Loki, given our respective positions on the RIGHT and the LEFT, I really shouldn’t be talking to you about privilege.
It seems to me, though, that you are putting the chance that you might not get some one thing that you want, ahead of somebody else’s possibly one and only chance to get something she deserves due to innate ability and hard work, if she might need a little accommodation to get there. Widespread abuse is one thing, I agree with you that that is bad and needs to stop. But you’re very casual about denying that student who needs a little extra time her moment in the sun, if it means that you might risk getting one more chance to shine your already shiny medals.
December 10, 2009, 9:34 pmRoss says:
Learning Disorders are not diagnosed based on how “crappy” one’s writing or reading abilities are. Essentially, being on the “left side” of the curve is rather irrelevant to the question. What matters is the difference between your intelligence (IQ) and your ability in the area. We expect your academic ability (reading, writing, math) to reasonably correspond to your intelligence. So if your writing “IQ” (I’ll use the term IQ as the scores are based on the same kind of metrics) is 85 and your actual IQ is 100, that’s unusual and might indicate a disorder. If on the other hand your writing IQ and actual IQ are both 65, unfortunately you’re just on the left side of the curve with no disorder or accommodations.
Where your writing ability falls on the scale isn’t meaningful for diagnosis unless you know how it compares to their actual IQ. People of course do show strengths and weaknesses relative to their IQ in many areas, but the “amount” of strength or weakness tends to be predictable. These disorders require a weakness outside that predicted variability (at least 1.5 standard deviations, which is 15 points on most IQ tests).
December 10, 2009, 9:36 pmdevoman says:
Some people here seem to think that people who have ADD or dyslexia won’t fare well in the “real world” if they receive special accommodations while in school. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth especially if the individual learns how to compensate for his or her condition. These individuals often do not do well in conventional jobs but then go on to start their own companies and then do spectacularly well. For example, David Neeleman who founded Jet Blue or Paul Orfalea who founded Kinko’s.
I was on the board of an organization that tutored kids with ADD and dyslexia and their saying was, “The A students work for the B students. The C students own the firm while the building is named after the D student.”
December 10, 2009, 9:41 pmjccamp says:
Although I think many (most? lots?) of the special accommodations reached via ADA for such as promotional and SAT tests are probably bogus, there really is such a thing as dyslexia. A close relative has what is now termed “developmental dyspraxia”, something commonly confused with dyslexia. If she were to try to open a typical sash window, she would actually push down on it until she thinks about it. Similarly, she would push up – you know, the wrong way – when trying to close the same window. Tell her to turn left, and her first reaction is to turn right. Her brain is cross-wired for directions, for visual comprehension. When she looks at printed words or numbers, she consistently transposes characters and/or entire words. She was never diagnosed or treated and somehow learned to cope on her own.
BTW, per Luagha’s post @ 4:50 PM, what that trick of increasing the spacing (between letters) actually does is turn reading into spelling. A different brain function is engaged. It’s classic dyslexia if such works. Rather than argue against the existence of dyslexia, it confirms it.
Also, some years ago, I dislocated a knee while working, tearing the anterior and medial ligaments and pretty much destroying the joint. I had surgery just a week before a 6 hour Civil Service promotional exam. I was in a cast to my hip. I didn’t take the pain pills the night before or the morning of the test. When I arrived, one the proctors told me “Oh, right, we have accommodations for you.” I sat in the same typical school room student chair with a folding desktop on one side as everyone else. They dragged a second chair over, and positioned it in front of me so i could rest my leg with the cast on the second chair. “There you go. Let us know if we can do anything else.”
December 10, 2009, 9:59 pmLoki13 says:
Laura, I’ve already polished all my medals. But while your comcern is about one person getting their moment on the sun- well, so is mine. I sort of view it like the Incredibles. Some people are really really good at the law thong (or, if you prefer, the law school thing) and their moment in the sub shouldn’t be stolen by misguided attempts to level the playing field (and by the many miscreants who glom on to those attempts). My moment wasn’t stolen, but I knew many good people whose moments were. You might want to spare spare some of your LEFTist sympathy for them. :)
December 10, 2009, 9:59 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Loki, maybe we can reach a point of agreement.
1 – A person’s moment in the sun shouldn’t be stolen by somebody else getting accommodations she doesn’t need.
2 – A person’s moment in the sun shouldn’t be stolen by an irrelevant disability that other people are too selfish or uncaring to accommodate.
December 10, 2009, 10:09 pmjccamp says:
I seem to recall that in most of my college tests – and unlike the SAT’s – time was never really an issue. I either knew the material or didn’t, and was comfortable in finishing within time limits in both eventualities. In a test environment that does not include an intentional and built-in abbreviated time limit, is allowing extra time in and of itself a large advantage? So, if the time limit is merely some arbitrary number, set for convenience as opposed to being a component of the test itself, I would say “Why not?”
I can see how allowing extra time in something like the College Board tests is a definite advantage, and I think in almost every situation, doing so would be unfair. If a testing student cannot compete within the same SAT-governed rule-set because of some learning disability, then perhaps another type test would be more appropriate.
December 10, 2009, 10:18 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
jccamp, I have the same memory of my college tests. Apart from those killer weeklong take-homes, I usually had time to finish up and check my answers long before time was up.
Which means that the fact that the SAT and ACT are timed is kind of odd. These tests are not designed to measure general knowledge, they’re supposed to predict how likely the prospective college student is to succeed in college.
December 10, 2009, 10:33 pmDG says:
I’m dyslexic and, ironically, writing is part of my professional responsibilities. The only real “disability” I have at this point is that my handwriting and spelling are horrible – luckily, I can type very quickly and have spellcheck.
For most, dyslexia is rough for say, K-5, but with appropriate training, you can overcome most aspects of the condition. I did get some weird looks in Jr High for turning in typed assignments (most assumed my parents had done them), and I had one run-in with a senior-year English teacher who threatened that one spelling error would provoke an automatic “F”.
In the vast majority of cases, both ADHD and dyslexia can be fully managed and largely overcome by high school, with either training or drugs. I have trouble understanding why any appreciable percentage of such students require special accommodations, beyond, say, the ability to type their work, or a special quiet room (both of which seem reasonable).
As an occasion adjunct professor of engineering, I have never had a test where students could not complete it in the time allotted – the exams were difficult and you either knew how to do the work or not. The idea of an engineer rushing his work is rather inane – rushing to an incorrect answer could kill someone, whereas taking a few extra minutes could save a life. If someone needed extra time as an accommodation – well, I wish them luck, it won’t help them if they don’t know the math.
December 10, 2009, 10:53 pmSteve2 says:
What I run into is a feeling that if she needs a little accommodation, then by dint of needing that accommodation she clearly doesn’t deserve to get the thing. How could she, she was flawed? Indeed, the idea of accommodation seems to me like an artificial infusion of unhad potential, not a way of meeting actual potential. Also, there’s a difference in my mind between adapting – the quadriplegics I know who push their wheelchairs up and down stairs and escalators, and play Murderball – and being accommodated. Adaptation is good and laudable, but accommodation does not have the same respectable qualities.
Ah. I’m not at all uncomfortable with the screening aspect of education. Actually, I think the education process, and life in general, should be as brutal and Darwinist as possible (more than it is at present). Grades, for instance, I’d say having an absolute score below 70% or a ranking score in the bottom 20% should both be sufficient conditions for getting an F while having an absolute score above 90% and a ranking score in the top 10% should both be necessary conditions for getting an A.
December 10, 2009, 10:54 pmDavid Chesler says:
This is a few hours old, sorry. The poorly written note is expected if the author is “low-IQ and went to a crappy school. But suppose that this note came from a person who was from an educated family, went to a decent school, and showed no deficit when you talked to her. Would you really not view a note like this as a big red flag that something is wrong?”
Why does the author’s family and the quality of the schools she attended matter? Couldn’t she have a low IQ even though she came from an educated family and lived in a good school district?
You clarify a little later “Do you understand that IQ is tested and not estimated by family’s SES?” but in the first entry you seem to be suggesting that we use the family’s education and the quality of schools (which are certainly well correlated with socio-economic status) as proxies for high IQ.
December 10, 2009, 11:06 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
OK. I see how you read it that way, but that is not what I meant. What I meant was that you take the other things you can measure or observe about the person, and see if the writing ability fits in. I did not mean to make the family’s education and school quality proxies for IQ; they certainly are not.
To flesh this out a little – suppose that you are evaluating a kid whose writing is atrocious. If the kid goes to a school whose average standardized test scores are at or below the 30th percentile, as is the case with several schools in Memphis, you can’t rule out the possibility that the kid just didn’t get taught how to write. (The situation with the schools is way more complex than that, of course.) In that case, you’d have to do some pretty intensive tutoring to be sure that it wasn’t just a matter of the kid not being taught. But if the kid went to a school with high average test scores, you probably can rule out bad teaching. What this means is that the kids in the schools with the low test scores are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to finding deficits for which there might be effective therapy, which is just one more brick in the wall for them along with all of their other troubles. Which is why I tended to give Miss X a little more slack than to say that she was lazy or stupid, although I still thought she shouldn’t have been admitted to that micro class.
December 10, 2009, 11:24 pmJohn Doe says:
1) Mixed-Receptive-Expressive Language Disorder, 2) Disorder of Written Expression, 3) Developmental Coordination Disorder, and 4) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
The problem that I have is that many of these inventive psychiatric disorders have no objective basis in physical reality. It’s not like a broken arm or a case of cancer, where any doctor would agree about what’s going on; so many psychiatric “disorders” have no objective existence outside of whatever some random psychiatrist happens to be willing to sign off on.
What’s worse, some of these “disorders” really boil down to “not very smart.”
So what we’re really doing here is just the mirror image of a Harrison Bergeron world, in which smart people have to wear headphones with distracting noise so that they can’t do any better than the stupid people (giving stupid people twice as long to take a test is the same as handicapping the smarter people with harsher time constraints).
December 10, 2009, 11:36 pmSuzy says:
Honestly, this is ridiculous. My child has an actual visual impairment that makes it more difficult to distinguish written characters. The solution is not to sue for more time on exams; the solution is to develop faster reading skills, and learn to overcome the difficulties that nature handed down. If a visually impaired child never learns to accomplish certain tasks as well as others do, then isn’t it a good thing that he or she doesn’t become the lawyer you depend on to file the motion in a timely manner, or the surgeon
you depend on to quickly process all kinds of visual information accurately?
If this is true of my child, who has a legitimate reason to need more time accomplishing certain tasks, then it is certainly true of students who have “disabilities” like ADHD (which I think most of the time is a bogus diagnosis in the first place) or whatever other nonsense the student described above is supposed to have. The exception is when the written exam has nothing to do with the skills that are being tested. For example, if a visually impaired student cannot pass a written exam about plumbing repairs as fast as someone else, but those skills would never come into play in the actual situation of performing the repairs, then it should not be a problem to grant students the time they need to finish the exam. When it comes to exams like the LSAT or law school finals, presumably students are being tested on their ability to quickly process and respond appropriately to the information because they are going to exercise these skills in real-life situations. Yes? One hopes.
December 10, 2009, 11:40 pmKirk Parker says:
AJL,
Where are you from? Because around here (and the rest of the US, too) there aren’t 19 grades between kindergarten and adult-level.
December 10, 2009, 11:44 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Suzy, can you really extrapolate from your one child with his/her specific disability, to everybody out there and all of the various disabilities that they can possibly have?
December 10, 2009, 11:51 pmSuzy says:
I’m not relying on her case as the exemplar for all others, though. I’m merely saying that I understand why some people have legitimate disabilities that put extra time pressure on them, but even in these cases it may not be appropriate to grant them extra time. So it’s surely not appropriate when someone fails even to have a legitimate physical disability.
I honestly don’t grant the legitimacy of the diagnoses mentinoned in the original case above. I think most cases of ADHD can be treated by permanently turning off the video devices, especially for children under 5, encouraging lots of physical play and outdoor activity, and practicing to increase attention for academic tasks. It’s a “disability” in the same way that parents failing to read to a child regularly makes them “disabled”. It’s somewhat shocking and even offensive to me that controllable, correctable behavioral issues, or cognitive issues that may well just result from laziness or lack of proper training, are considered disabling on the same level as physical problems like blindness.
December 11, 2009, 12:12 amnice strategy says:
Some of them do and some of them don’t. There are some incredibly smart people out there with deep but narrow deficits in one cognitive area. Society ought to be able to make use of this human capital, no?
A few parents do game the system by hiring compliant psychologists, but that doesn’t mean all testing accommodations are bogus. There should be a higher degree of scrutiny towards accommodations in higher education than secondary or primary school, naturally, but cognitive psychology doesn’t lend itself well to broad policy statements, in the ADA/504 Plan/IDEA or in criticism thereof. Princeton? I hope they win and the student takes her finals straight up for a change, even if the diagnosis is legitimate.
It comes down to what the exam is supposed to be assessing. Is it assessing understanding of the content in the course of study, or is it assessing the performance speed at which that understanding can be applied and clearly communicated?
As a teacher, I prefer to assess whether the student has learned the material. I’m not trying to throw in an IQ test on top of it. What complicates matters is that part of my curriculum is (and should be) teaching writing skills, and I want to assess that, too. I think I get better data, and more valid grades, by not having every graded task be a combination of content mastery and skill performance. Thus, some papers, and timed writes as well as final exams that have some but not excessive time pressure and not a whole lot of points off for minor errors that would have been caught with more time to edit.
Too much time pressure and the results won’t validly measure what I need them to. I’m not going to teach someone not to have a mild or moderate learning disability, so why should I let my assessment be corrupted by their input/output issues? I can still teach them history, government, and economics, and I want to test that more than anything else.
I get a much more valid measurement of their engagement with my curriculum when I make reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities and create a test where people can work at their own pace. If that pace isn’t satisfactory for some job down the line, well, that’s real life, but not my problem, nor most undergraduate professors. Still, at some point the balance has to include more skill performance once all students have grown up and had time to catch up on development and skill acquisition over time. And I think Princeton is past that point.
December 11, 2009, 12:24 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The US, but for some reason that isn’t clear to me, the top of the proficiency scale was (IIRC) 21. I assume they figure you develop more reading skills in grad school!?
I’d add dictation software.
And if she can’t develop those faster reading skills?
Shorter version: the tiny percentage of quadriplegics who manage to get up and down escalators (which, I might add, must be terribly risky to the people behind them) are meritorious. The others? Losers.
I do think people should play to their strengths, and I suspect that some of these diagnoses are too vague to be useful. But whenever someone cites Harrison Bergeron, I think I’m looking at someone terribly worried about his own mediocrity.
December 11, 2009, 12:26 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
You know, I agree with this (we have no TV), and yet, having said that, I have known two boys who were far beyond measures like that. One truly couldn’t sit down for more than 30 seconds, and he was a pretty bright kid (from a ghetto home). The other could stay seated better, but he was fidgety and restless and couldn’t really stay on task.
Somewhere on the intertubes is the confessional column of the New Orleans columnist who ridiculed anti-depressants. Until he needed them. I am much reminded.
December 11, 2009, 12:30 amEMB says:
She should have gone to Harvard instead!
That way she’d get her extra time on exams, plus she (finally) wouldn’t have to deal with a silly fall-finals-in-January calendar…
(In all seriousness though, in my (limited) experience with students with this sort of disability, despite the extra time they tend to if anything underperform on exams compared to my subjective impression of their abilities based on conversations in class and office hours. Of course it’s conceivable that some doctors might be persuaded to sign off on nonexistent disabilities, but I’m pretty sure at least some of these conditions are very real.)
December 11, 2009, 12:46 amSuzy says:
Some people think faster than others and are better able to focus their attention than others. These abilities may make them better professionals. It’s not a disparity that needs correction so that equal outcomes may be achieved among those with different capacities.
The fact that the disparities are real, or perhaps have an underlying physical cause that could be addressed by medication, doesn’t affect the basic demand that students be assessed by demonstrating their skills. Like ‘nice strategy’ says, in many instances there is no reason to make a timed test part of the assessment because it’s not relevant to the skill in question. In other cases, though, it is relevant. If my child couldn’t perform under those conditions despite reasonable accommodations (e.g. larger font sizes), then maybe she shouldn’t be pursuing that line of study or work. She is probably never going to be an astronaut or fighter pilot, and this is not an unfairness that requires a special fix. Similarly, someone who can’t learn to sit still and concentrate for an hour is not going to fare well in professions or academic enterprises that demand it.
What I’m saying about ADHD is based on various recent studies of attention and cognition. Several simple factors have a powerful influence. All students, but especially those with ADHD, do better at learning to solve math problems if they are given periodic exercise breaks, for example. I don’t think it’s clear yet whether physical play outdoors, or any form of brief, relaxing interruption of the focused attention would do equally well, but it’s clear that these things are more effective for most students than the medications! And exposure to TV and video–really, to frequently flashing images–is so strongly correlated with attention difficulties and bad behaviors (e.g. refusing to follow instructions, tantrums, sleep irregularities). It shocks me that we rush to diagnose and medicate a “disability” long before we try other strategies that are already proven to have positive effects. Much less that we’d reward such diagnoses with special perks on academic tests!
December 11, 2009, 2:41 amSebastian Tombs says:
Simple question. How many of you would want a [lawyer][doctor][engineer] who received extra time on his test because of a “behavioral disability” [representing you][treating you][building a bridge you had to cross]? I suspect not many, even among those who extol the ADA. The purpose of a test is not to massage the student’s wretched little feelings; it’s to determine competence.
December 11, 2009, 5:04 amBrianMac says:
This does seem at least plausible – from what I remember of high school, the kids that excelled in maths but struggled in other academic areas tended to be somewhat “special.” But I’m pretty surprised that clinical diagnoses can be made on the basis of such crude indicators, rather than requiring the discovery of underlying pathologies/disabilities.
December 11, 2009, 6:59 amCJColucci says:
Extended test time is a standard accommodation under the ADA. Students and school authorities often disagree about whther it is needed in a particular case. All of this is old news.
December 11, 2009, 7:29 amSo what’s the point of this post? That the student has fake disabilities? That extended time is an inappropriate accomodation for the disabilties this student has? That the ADA itself is a bad idea and ought to be scrapped? Maybe Orin needed more time for this post.
Perseus says:
So it is, and based on my experience, it appears to be an accommodation frequently abused by students. What is somewhat surprising is Princeton’s firm resistance to allowing extra time.
December 11, 2009, 7:40 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Sebastian, is it your conception of what lawyers, doctors, and engineers do, that their work is all done in tight 2-hour time increments, one increment after another?
Doctors who irritate me are the ones who want to rush through without giving sufficient thought and focus to what they’re doing. They do and say stupid things and cause me to look for medical care elsewhere. Engineers that I’ve worked with who had problems were impulsive ones who wouldn’t slow down and think through what they wanted to do. I wonder if these people were trained to be this way at school when they were never given enough time to think on tests and were constantly having to turn in their product before they were ready.
I wouldn’t want to undergo any kind of medical treatment from a doctor who had to make a decision by X time, whether he had all the lab results he needed or not. I sure as heck wouldn’t want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer under an artificial time pressure.
December 11, 2009, 8:12 amneurodoc says:
Writer’s dystonia? Unquestionably real neurologic abnormality that might not be recognized by non-neurologists and by some neurologists.
Save for the practical issue of how to provide a typewriter or computer and printer for every test-taker, why shouldn’t it be exceptional for anyone to “write” an exam?
December 11, 2009, 8:39 amnice strategy says:
Determine competence at what? At taking an exam? To determine whether the student understands the concepts, or to determine their skill at expressing and applying those concepts under time pressure?
The exams in question are not law school exams, or a test of a surgeon who needs to think on his or her feet with actual, limited time. They are undergraduate exams at one of the top Universities in the world. I don’t think they should have to make accommodations for this student, even if she is truly disabled. But don’t conflate her situation with tests that are supposed to serve as professional performance measurements or that are used to weed out students so they don’t end up having their ability mismatched with their career path. If she wants to delude herself into thinking she’s equally skilled as her peers, that’s her problem.
December 11, 2009, 9:31 amJMA says:
“A person’s moment in the sun shouldn’t be stolen by an irrelevant disability that other people are too selfish or uncaring to accommodate.”
If the disability can “steal” that “moment,” it isn’t irrelevant.
Having been disabled at one point, I can empathize to an extent: I was flunking math in elementary until my mom realized that the reason for it was that I could not see the blackboard (ten feet away). I’m near sighted.
My empathy, however, is not complete: unlike extra time for various tasks, I can carry my glasses around with me all day without really inconveniencing anyone else. Moreover, even if a normally-sighted person were to steal my glasses and “abuse” them, my glasses would confer no advantage whatsoever. Without a doubt, there is a significant difference between most kinds of physical accommodation and some of the other remedies being discussed here.
Finally, I should point out that my poor eyesight was not at all irrelevant to the task at hand (that being the task of learning to do long division rather than actually doing long division). Otherwise I would have had no trouble learning it. Right?
December 11, 2009, 11:21 amShelbyC says:
I once had a guy I supervised tell me he needed extra time to do stuff because of some ADA type thing. It struck me as reflecting a jaw-dropping lack of understanding of how things actually work. Another guy told me that the reason he was often short-tempered and unpleasant was due to a mental illness, so I shouldn’t hold it against him.
December 11, 2009, 11:23 amneurodoc says:
Nor to do a great many other things. And I think it could be argued that one could become an accomplished psychiatrist despite little or no aptitude in mathemtics, yet that is a subject that would be psychiatrists are tested on when they apply to college and medical school.
But what I really wonder is what you say to af at 3:58PM on 12/10. Why not handicap these contest with what would amount to different starting and/or finish lines for competitors, so that a slower runner making maximal effort might compete with a faster runner? They do that in horsing racing, don’t they, with faster horses being made to carry greater weight. Or, why not allow everyone whether they present a doctor’s note or not to take as much extra time as they feel they need, rather than just giving that advantage (clearly, it is an advantage) to some so they can compete with a better chance of success? What about the comparative goals of testing, rather than the ones of assuring minimal competence, as on licensure exams?
[NowMDJD, in the interests of full disclosure, shouldn't you mention that your wife has an advanced degree in psychology, as well as a JD, and teaches school psychology?]
December 11, 2009, 11:25 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
JMA, what if there were a rule that said no one can wear glasses? Then, on a math test, you have a disability artificially keeping you from succeeding.
If being able to perform X function in Y time is a bona-fide requirement of whatever it is that the test-taker has to do, fine. I question whether it always is.
Also, the idea that accomodations are OK as long as they don’t convenience others is kind of cold, IMO. Look at wheelchair ramps. Maybe it inconveniences people to have to remodel a building so that other people can get into it. That’s a one-time thing with a limited effect. The person in the wheelchair is dealing with wheelchair-related issue all day long, every day. (It would be extremely convenient, I suppose, if people in wheelchairs would just go on and die, but I won’t invoke Godwin’s law here and say that we’ve been down that path before and decided we didn’t want to do it again.) When you look at issues like public schools and colleges, other government buildings, sidewalk cutouts, etc., then you’re getting into the fact that people like William pay taxes and they can’t use public facilities like other people do. I just don’t see inconvenience to able-bodied people as being the barrier we should point to when we say we can’t accomodate someone.
We humans inconvenience each other all the time. I’m inconvenienced when I have to stop at a red light. It’s part of the price we pay for living in a society.
December 11, 2009, 11:43 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
This possibly means that NowMDJD has been indirectly exposed to non-cookie-cutter people, and potentially makes his viewpoint more valid.
December 11, 2009, 11:47 amShelbyC says:
If it’s not, than it distorts the score of someone who just takes a while to think things through to the same degree that it distorts the score of someone with a diagnosed “disability”, correct? It still seems the solution is do do a better job at categorizing what skills you’re trying to measure, not to treat some people differently.
December 11, 2009, 11:53 amnice strategy says:
Well, if he needs extra time, he can stay late and get his work done. How he gets it done is up to him. If it is an hourly position and he isn’t willing to work extra hours, then he’ll need to find another job. But if he can do the work slower in a way that doesn’t impact other people’s productivity, what’s the big deal?
It isn’t like accommodations aren’t made for all sorts of other external factors. If you can’t wait a day for a report when someone’s kid has to go to the doctor, then you are part of a bigger problem in which short term productivity trumps humanity and long term human capital growth and those intangibles that lead to better teamwork and therefore productivity growth.
Obviously, disabilities will disqualify people from many jobs. You can’t be LD in math and be a math teacher. But rejecting the entire concept of disabilities is poor management. Turn that excuse into an opportunity and use your supposed expertise as a manager to work with the employee to mitigate whatever deficit is getting in the way. If it is too much in the way, oh well. If you lack the ability to come up with a way of maximizing productivity of the workers you have beyond setting deadlines and enforcing them, then it sounds like the Peter Principle has run its course.
December 11, 2009, 12:28 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura(southernxyl),
If being able to perform X function in Y time is a bona-fide requirement of whatever it is that the test-taker has to do, fine. I question whether it always is.
If it is not, then allow extra time for everyone. If someone asks for double time due to disability, allow double time for all. Or make the exam untimed. Don’t, though, give extra time only to those who (a) need it and (b) are willing to call themselves “disabled” in order to get it. Because there are people who struggle mightily with working under intense time pressure, but don’t have a diagnosis attached to the struggle. Maybe they should have; but they don’t.
If time pressure is really irrelevant, get rid of it. Don’t get rid of it just for those willing and/or able to document their time-pressure difficulty as a medical condition.
Also, the idea that accommodations are OK as long as they don’t [in]convenience others is kind of cold, IMO. Look at wheelchair ramps. Maybe it inconveniences people to have to remodel a building so that other people can get into it. That’s a one-time thing with a limited effect. The person in the wheelchair is dealing with wheelchair-related issue all day long, every day.
Ummm . . . it can “inconvenience” businesses a lot to make everything wheelchair-accessible. I worked for a time at a music store in Berkeley that had three stories (counting the basement) and no elevator. What would have happened if someone raised the accessibility issue as a legal matter, I don’t know (we did, on request, shop for people who couldn’t navigate the stairs, of course). And accommodations of physical disabilities are not always one-off fixes, either, as you would know if you got around mostly by public transit (as I do). I don’t begrudge wheelchair users bus space (and time); I just remember to add a cautionary half hour to schedules’ arrival times.
December 11, 2009, 12:36 pmDavid Chesler says:
Or in the case of the new athletic football facility at my town’s high school, it meant nobody was allowed to use the press box or even sit in the top center rows until it was made handicapped accessible.
In the case of two buildings that burned down in the town center, the one that was left as a burned out shell was able to rebuild, because the non-accomodation was grandfathered in, but the good citizen who had the structure razed so it wouldn’t be an eyesore or attractive nuisance still owns a vacant lot nearly 10 years later because he could afford to build what was there but he can’t afford to build a new, compliant structure.
It’s not always minor.
December 11, 2009, 12:48 pmShelbyC says:
Well, the point is that I don’t “give” people time to do stuff, and I can’t “give” him more time, no matter what the reason. If something is going to take him 4 days to do, I don’t care why it takes him 4 days, I just need to know it’s going to take 4 days so I can plan the rest of the schedule. And if we have a business goal, say a customer needs something in 4 days, I just need him to do his best to get it done. If he can’t do it, so be it, we’ll plan better next time. But people need whatever time they need, whether they’re smart, dumb, incompetent, disabled, whatever. I don’t “give” them time.
And if I can’t wait an extra day for some reports because somebody’s kid is sick, then I need to figure out a different way to get the information, and I’ll try to plan better next time.
December 11, 2009, 12:54 pmBlunt Instrument says:
I was recently diagnosed with ADHD. Prior to my diagnosis I had scored in the upper 5% on the LSAT with no accommodations. The time pressures of test taking are quite focusing for many people with ADHD. For others, the ability to focus for even 30 minutes without a break can be impossible.
December 11, 2009, 12:58 pmIt is the way we are wired.
From what I have learned about ADHD, the degree and intensity of distractedness is extremely variable from person to person. Therefore, it would be quite unfair to base accommodations merely on the diagnosis of ADHD. For someone who, like me, has ADHD but does not suffer from distraction during tests, there is no need for additional time.
I understand as well as anyone how disabling ADHD can be. Our educational system must devise better means of evaluating performance that do not seriously discriminate toward or against a certain type of brain.
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Michelle, you are preaching to the choir. A test ought to measure the things the test needs to measure, not irrelevant peripherals. If finishing within a set time doesn’t matter, and some student who doesn’t have a disability will do better with more time, then extend the time, already.
The new athletic football facility was designed and built after the ADA went into effect? I have no sympathy.
December 11, 2009, 1:11 pmYasha says:
“Metcalf-Leggette graduated with honors from The Wakefield School in The Plains, Va., where she was granted a 100 percent time extension on all school exams and on the SAT, according to the complaint. She also received a 200 percent time extension on the ACT.”
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/10/30/24330/
The standard ACT extra-time accommodation is +50%.
http://www.act.org/aap/disab/opt2.html
Sorry, but anyone who needs 10 hours to take the ACT does not need to go to Princeton.
Lives in VA horse country, dad is an “energy lawyer.” As students go, she’s at least a very good soccer player, according to the Princeton athletics web site.
“Her older brother, David, [last name simply Metcalf] who also had learning disabilities, graduated from Princeton University in 2008 and was given 100 percent extended time for exams while there.”
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435011993
Don’t know if that means the genetic issue is multiple LDs or a desire to game the system.
Based on my family’s experience (sister’s a HS principal, and my dad used to run a university’s testing center), it’s almost always the rich parents (not the kids) asking for special this and that.
December 11, 2009, 1:16 pmAnonymous says:
Like Blunt Instrument, also a late diagnosis of ADD (not ADHD.) Maybe. I usually get top 1% in standardized exams (SAT, GRE-Math, and LSAT). Thom Hartmann’s books made a lot of sense to me. I’m probably the hyper-focusing type, but I thrive on stimulation. 30-minute blocks of exam taking work fine for me. I’m too old to have grown up on Sesame Street, but I played my share of video games. I’ve spent hour after hour trying to solve certain problems, or reading books cover to cover.
The pshrinks don’t agree with each other. Could also be depression. And I think there’s a touch of Asperger’s, which would especially explain my prosopagnosia. It also explained why I could take a few cups of coffee and go to sleep.
In any case, I take bupropion (Wellbutrin) and methylphenidate (Ritalin). I don’t feel much better. I don’t feel like I’m more productive. But people around me notice. And my bosses don’t keep telling me I’m not producing as much as I ought to be given my intelligence and abilities.
Other than taking pills whether I need them or not, I do not ask for nor receive any accomodations; but I do believe that there are mental conditions in which some people are not like most other people. In my case I can be more like the good parts of most other people if I take pills, same as I wear glasses and take pills for medical conditions.
December 11, 2009, 1:16 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
“prosopagnosia” – thanks for the new word! My mother long ago became resigned to the fact that I never know who anybody is – people recognize me and call my name and I don’t know who the hell they are. She says my dad is the same way so I come by it honest.
My adhd story is that I can’t think if the radio is on or if there are other conversations taking place in the room. I literally cannot carry through a thought. Background music in the grocery store bothers me so that I have to talk out loud to myself about what I’m trying to find. My husband watches TV with headphones so I don’t have to hear it. My daughter thanks me for passing this very inconvenient trait along to her. Obviously this never was a problem with test-taking b/c it was always quiet in the room.
December 11, 2009, 1:27 pmElliot says:
I hope this individual doesn’t intend to bill by the hour.
December 11, 2009, 2:01 pmEric Rasmusen says:
It’s interesting how many people say that more time on tests wouldn’t have helped them. To me, that is a sign the test isn’t testing more than memorization.
This is a big problem. I realized a few years ago that when my economics students said they couldn’t think of the answer, it meant they couldn’t *remember* the answer. Actual thinking was a foreign concept to them. But the more time you have, the better your chance to reason through a problem or spot flaws in your analysis.
December 11, 2009, 2:04 pmDissent says:
To the contrary, there is abundant research demonstrating that ADHD persists in the majority of cases. And one need only look at the college graduation rates of students with ADHD compared to their non-ADHD peers to see that ADHD is still “biting” them badly in college (if we look only at the students with ADHD who actually apply to and start college — many of them don’t even try after their failures in high school). In many cases, it is the Executive Dysfunction that is often comorbid with ADHD that interferes with successful college performance as well as subsequent ability to get and keep a job, etc. In other cases, comorbid learning disabilities such as written expression sabotage their efforts and plans.
As a psychologist, I know that yes, there is doctor-shopping, without doubt. Yes, there are people looking for extended time to give them an unfair advantage. But in my experience over the past 20 years working with kids and schools, the vast majority of students who request accommodations need them if they are to have any kind of equal chance to demonstrate what they know.
December 11, 2009, 2:11 pmDan Weber says:
When I took the SAT, they were still testing vocabulary. If you had 3 hours or 30 hours, if you didn’t know what “unctuous” or “august” meant, thinking harder about it wasn’t going to help you.
It has changed recently, but I don’t think many of our readers are young enough to have taken it after that.
December 11, 2009, 2:13 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Laura(southernxyl),
Michelle, you are preaching to the choir. A test ought to measure the things the test needs to measure, not irrelevant peripherals. If finishing within a set time doesn’t matter, and some student who doesn’t have a disability will do better with more time, then extend the time, already.
When I see someone petition to give everyone more time on an exam, rather than only him/herself, I’ll believe that the point is getting rid of irrelevant “qualifications” rather than gaining competitive advantage. An “accommodation” like this extra-time business is rather like building an elevator in a tall building, but restricting the use of it to those whose legs have been certified useless.
December 11, 2009, 2:18 pmDavid Chesler says:
Designed and built after, but opened before it was complete. In this case it opened 8 months ahead of schedule because just before the Thanksgiving game the facility at the opponent’s field was declared unsafe. I guess this is the flip-side of everyone getting extra time to take the test: if there is a part of the facility that anyone is unable to reach, nobody may use it.
As time and funding have been found the facility is getting completed. It’s a poor city but a few alumni who’ve done well with local businesses have donated the scoreboard and other bits. They’re still working out whether they need permanent bathroom facilities outdoors for the 4 home football games each year. The original plan was that the bathrooms inside the school met the requirement, but some board won’t sign off on it.
The question isn’t whether we have your sympathy; it’s a matter of realizing how unreasonable some of these “reasonable accomodations” are.
December 11, 2009, 2:49 pmSuzy says:
Perhaps JMA chose a misleading word; the issue is not accommodations that “inconvenience” others, but accommodations that literally make it less fair to others taking the same exam. My daughter’s specialized glasses aren’t giving her any sort of unfair advantage; they’re just allowing her to see the same printed material that the other students see without the glasses. If the text on her exam was printed in a larger font, she receives no special advantage that allows her to see the information better than another student does. Extra time could be a reasonable accommodation in that circumstance only if it literally takes more time to physically page through a text booklet printed in a larger font. But extra time is not a reasonable accommodation when it gives her an advantage over other students, on a test where time is precious.
As Michelle was saying, plenty of people could benefit from extra test-taking time or might even qualify as “disabled” despite not having been certified as such. In these situations, giving more time to one person because of a cognitive disadvantage strikes me as unfair, given that cognitive skills are precisely at issue in the test. It’s a parallel situation to one I often encountered in college: those who were willing to complain to a professor about their emotional difficulties and stresses could sometimes wrangle extended time to complete a paper or lab. Meanwhile, the rest of us who wanted to keep our dignity intact and take care of business self-sufficiently were put at an unfair disadvantage, because having an extra two days to write a paper during finals week could easily make a difference in the grade! I like to think in the long term that people who relied upon their own efforts to succeed were served better, but honestly I don’t know. I think the squeaky hinges fared quite well. And it’s ridiculous.
December 11, 2009, 5:11 pmleo marvin says:
What nice strategy said.
December 11, 2009, 7:24 pmnice strategy says:
This is not a given. If taking college exams was meant to assess cognitive ability, we could dispense with the entire institution and give 20 year olds a comprehensive cognitive assessment, i.e. a better IQ test.
No, most teachers want to primarily assess understanding of the new content presented in their class, not get a measurement of how smart the students in their class happen to be.
At the college level if not before, skills and abilities that translate to efficient performance under time pressure are also worth assessing, and if Princeton wishes to do so, that should be their choice, or the choice of individual professors.
Only if professors are grading on a curve, which is an atrocious practice that leads to invalid and unreliable grades. Surely, some disorganized students work excuses they don’t deserve, but how is that unfair to you? You went to spring break without a paper hanging over your head? A 10 page paper is a 10 page paper, and if the point of the assignment is the content and skills the student is going to learn from the process, then there is no great reason to deny people extensions from time to time. Otherwise, you are assessing how well people make deadlines in addition to the actual curriculum.
It seems like you expect the grading system to incorporate a large degree of evaluating whether a student did things right the first time. From a teacher’s point of view, I am happy to offer an extension to a student if that means the student is going to learn more from the assignment. If what they need to learn is that partying all weekend is a privilege and not a right, then I’d say no. The point is that the judgment is based on what is best for them, not what is best so you can feel superior.
If you show up to office hours with evidence of your progress on an assignment and ask for an extension because your original concept turned out to be flawed, and you need to start over, most professors will accommodate your request, as they should. Same goes if the kid just ended a relationship. How that hurts someone else’s project is beyond me, unless the professor hasn’t learned what it means to grade against a benchmark standard, in which case, they probably aren’t granting extensions in the first place.
Frankly, those few teachers and undergraduate professors that still see education as a competition for an arbitrarily limited number of credentials, instead of a place of growth and training where everyone can succeed, ought to be drummed out of the classroom.
December 11, 2009, 7:27 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Yes.
December 11, 2009, 7:47 pmDavid Chesler says:
Now how do you get the graduate schools to agree? And how will they decide whom to admit?
December 11, 2009, 8:40 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David, is it the undergraduate professors’ job to impose arbitrary and irrelevant criteria to students’ performance so that they are ranked in some fashion – any fashion will do – and the graduate schools don’t have to make any decisions?
December 11, 2009, 8:53 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
What do you suppose would befall a professor who “graded against a benchmark standard” and called meeting the benchmark a “C,” as it once was?
My long-ago undergraduate self never minded professors granting extensions on assignments for what seemed to them good cause. But I would have resented exceedingly an arrangement whereby a classmate got, as a matter of right and in every class, an extra ten days to do a three-week paper. Which is what getting four-and-a-half hours to take an exam that everyone else has to complete in three seems like to the uninitiated.
Once again: Argue that timed exams are testing the wrong thing, and I’m with you. But Metcalfe-Leggette &c. are arguing that timed exams are testing the wrong thing in their individual cases, but needn’t be altered for most people. That looks to my admittedly nasty mind like an attempt to get a competitive advantage.
December 11, 2009, 9:21 pmleo marvin says:
Comments like this one reflect the sort of intolerance accompanying ignorance (about mental illness) that make the ADA necessary.
Like others here, I only recently got around to having myself diagnosed for the ADHD, mild dyslexia and moderate dysgraphia I was always aware of. I started reading and writing before my peers, but from the moment they started, I was much slower (i.e., speed, not comprehension). Like Laura, I can’t tolerate distractions, and can only sustain concentration on a single thing if I hyper-focus. A revealing example is that I’ve more than once put pills in my mouth, but before I reached the refrigerator for something to wash them down with, found myself opening mail or washing dishes.
None of these things prevented me from succeeding academically or professionally without special accommodations, but I’m not typical. Let’s face it, most of us here are pretty far up the intelligence curve. We can devise ways of coping with mental obstacles that would stop a lot of people. And I’m as certain my grades would have been higher if I had more time on exams as I am that my condition slowed my performance.
As it happens, I’m glad I wasn’t treated differently. I chose a career (BigLaw) that demands obscene productivity, so an unadulterated academic record was relevant to my ability to do the job. But there are plenty of ways to be an excellent lawyer which, if you’re willing to forgo some money, require diligence, intelligence and good judgment, but not hyper-speed or massive output. As NowMDJD said, the same goes for doctors, and I’m sure it applies to a lot of other intellectually demanding careers. The ability of someone with my condition to do that sort of job would be misrepresented by an academic record that didn’t correct for the neurological reading and writing impairment. Needless to say, for the many whose condition is worse than mine the distortion would be that much greater.
December 11, 2009, 9:26 pmnice strategy says:
I didn’t ask the graduate schools to agree, I was arguing that grading on a curve in K-12 or Bachelor’s degree programs was inappropriate. If grad schools can’t devise a proper admissions system based on college transcripts, the GRE, other standardized tests, essays, personal interviews, etc., that is their problem. There are other ways of measuring skills and time-pressure performance; it does not need to built into every class and every assessment, and doing so rewards people with no weaknesses without identifying every students’ true strengths. That’s a crummy outcome; it doesn’t maximize learning opportunities, it doesn’t maximize the development of human capital, and it doesn’t lead to the most efficient utilization of that human capital once in the workforce.
The reality is that most undergraduate professors have already adopted grading against a common standard instead of grading on a peer curve, so any graduate school that tries to use class rank or some proxy thereof judging their candidates in a capriciously arbitrary way.
Another reality is that law school grading does big law firms’ job for them and sets up an unhealthy environment under the false pretense of a perfect meritocracy. Some of the top law students are truly superior intellects, and some are just proving that they are willing to become soulless automatons in pursuit of the big $$$. It is a professional training program with an academic side, and it is their world, but they are in the distinct minority in higher education.
Supporting the general idea of testing accommodations under certain circumstances in no way means supporting the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. I would think that Princeton would prefer to leave it up to the judgment of individual professors, but the student is insisting on across the board changes a priori, which suggests to me that she knows she can’t hack it and doesn’t trust her teachers to be reasonable. Based on what I know, I hope she gets smoked in the lawsuit.
That has become disconnected from this thread, in which people with no experience and no exposure to the relevant research have made sweeping generalizations about education policy in a way that is borderline offensive, and yes, a pretty good validation of why the ADA, despite some flaws, was a necessary law.
December 11, 2009, 10:07 pmnice strategy says:
I would say that professor should wake up and get a clue. First of all, benchmarks are by their nature socially constructed (one hopes by the academic department if not school) and not the prerogative of individual teachers. The de facto range of B (proficient, solid), B+, A-, A might be too few gradations, but pretending that A/B/C/D/F with +/- is valid under a benchmark system is really placing too much stock in the validity of assessments. Clinging onto an old scale that outside readers will not be able to put into context is just punishing your students because you can’t adapt. Hence, when students avoid such a professor, they are not only being rational in terms of their GPA but also in terms of avoiding out of touch teachers who don’t respect their students.
Agreed.
December 11, 2009, 10:15 pmleo marvin says:
The Bush v Gore thread reminded me of David Boies. His dyslexia prevented him from learning to read until the third grade, and even now it limits the type of written materials he can use at trial. If anyone needs proof you can have a neurological reading disorder unrelated to intelligence or ability to practice law at the highest level, he’s it.
December 11, 2009, 10:35 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
nice strategy,
That has become disconnected from this thread, in which people with no experience and no exposure to the relevant research have made sweeping generalizations about education policy in a way that is borderline offensive, and yes, a pretty good validation of why the ADA, despite some flaws, was a necessary law.
I confess relative “inexperience” and lack of “exposure to the relevant research.” I have done my best not to make “sweeping generalizations.”
I still say what I said way up-thread: If time constraints on exams are irrelevant, they’re irrelevant for all. If there’s nothing more to be learned about a student’s knowledge of the material if you give her six hours vs. three, and someone insists on six, then let everyone have six. Only no one that I’ve heard of has actually asked for extra time for all; what people seem to want is extra time only for themselves. You’ll forgive my thinking that this looks slightly self-serving.
I would say that professor should wake up and get a clue. First of all, benchmarks are by their nature socially constructed (one hopes by the academic department if not school) and not the prerogative of individual teachers. The de facto range of B (proficient, solid), B+, A-, A might be too few gradations, but pretending that A/B/C/D/F with +/- is valid under a benchmark system is really placing too much stock in the validity of assessments. Clinging onto an old scale that outside readers will not be able to put into context is just punishing your students because you can’t adapt.
So “B” is “proficient, solid”; the old “C.” Has “C” any place at all in your system? Is it “I really don’t want to fail you, but, dude, you aren’t doing any work”? Or is it “I haven’t seen you in my classes, and you haven’t submitted any work, but your name’s on the roster”?
True stories (of which I am the butt, so I think I have the right):
(1) I once had a physics exam and a history exam back-to-back; the physics professor allowed us to take a double-sided 8.5×11″ sheet of notes into the exam, and I (slacker that I am) thought I’d do my last-minute studying for that exam by making up my “cheat sheet” after the history final. Unfortunately for me, I’d got them in the wrong order. I positively needed the cheat sheet, but by the time I’d written it and gotten over to the other side of campus, I’d lost an hour.
(2) There was a required electrical engineering course (I was MechE) taught by a guy who liked to give exams back to students in grade order. His final was a positive nightmare: Ten questions, each of them demanding some extension of what the course had actually covered. I was positive I’d failed, and when I went to pick up my final (the exams were by his door — stacked, natch, in grade order) I looked at the wrong part of the pile; turned out that the TAs had been extremely generous with the partial credit.
In exam (1) I ended up having two hours rather than the allotted three, and it didn’t make any difference; I think I left early even though I got there an hour late. In (2) I ended up third from the top of the class, but I was extremely pressed for time, and I can only assume that everyone else was in similarly dire straits, else I couldn’t have gotten the grade I did. With another hour or two I would, I think, have been able to make at least a start on two or three questions where I wrote basically nothing.
So suppose in (1) everyone (not just me) had to do the exam in two hours, except for those willing to plead that they needed three? And suppose in (2) some got the extra hour and a half the rest of us dearly wanted, but the grading TAs weren’t told who did and who didn’t get extra time? For whom are these set-ups fair? For whom are they not?
December 11, 2009, 11:55 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Damn. I just Googled the professor of my (2) above and found that he died earlier this year. I hope he has been better remembered elsewhere, because he was an extraordinary teacher. I mean, he was an extremely annoying old cuss, with an exasperating habit of getting into the classroom early and drawing stuff on the sliding blackboards that we only saw when he said “Now let’s wind the motor THIS way!” and slid up the panel concealing the new diagram, which we tried in vain to copy while also listening to what he said about it …
December 12, 2009, 12:08 amSebastian Tombs says:
You’re right. I am intolerant of failure. I don’t care why the hypothetical doctor, lawyer or engineer can’t pass the test. Those who do are welcome to form a support group to commiserate with one another. I care only about whether they can do the job. Now, if you want to argue that the test in question does not measure what it’s supposed to be measuring, fine, but that’s rather a different question. The line you’re taking sounds more like measuring weight-lifting capacity by giving weaker students smaller weights — and then “adjusting the academic record” to make them all equal.
December 12, 2009, 1:33 amleo marvin says:
How you inferred that from my comment is beyond me, since I neither said nor believe anything of the sort. I won’t ask you to read again what I already said, but I will ask whether you read nice strategy’s comments. S/he lays out in very clear terms the reasoning underlying the argument I made mostly by anecdote. If not, please do and then get back to me.
December 12, 2009, 3:22 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I actually think that’s what we’re arguing.
December 12, 2009, 9:47 amneurodoc says:
Were any special accommodations made for Boies when he sought admission to college (Northwestern), law school (magna cum laude Yale), a graduate law program (LLM), and the bar, or when he sought employment by a premier law firm (Cravath)? If not, then what support does his case offer those like the privileged and advantaged Metcalf-Leggette who demand more time than others are given to take tests? Or for that matter, your own case?
December 12, 2009, 11:44 amneurodoc says:
The ADA to which you refer is the federal law that requires public and commercial buildings to provide handicap access, e.g., a wheelchair ramp, which is viewed favorably by most people? That law requires, and should require, that a private university like Princeton admit applicants without regard to what special accommodations they might require, or that they grant students with disabilities additional time to complete assignments or take tests? Those who think otherwise are in your view “borderline offensive”?
As for grading on a curve, I will tell you that at the most meritocratic institution I have ever known, MIT, most exams were graded on the curve, with 50% or less correct responses often an “A” (5.0) result. Indeed, many years later I can’t recall any that weren’t graded on a curve. And if anyone was granted extra time on an exam on account of non-physical limitations, I was not aware of it and expect others would have loudly protested such an accommodation.
December 12, 2009, 12:06 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Separate topic – but how is this not an indication of a very poorly designed test?
December 12, 2009, 2:38 pmneurodoc says:
I think it is first for you to say why an exam for which a score of 50 out of a possible 100 is a good result should be seen as presumptively “a very poorly designed test.” When you have made a prima facie case for the proposition that such a test is likely a “very poorly designed” one, then I think you will have met your burden and shifted it to me or others to say why top scores not well above 50 out of 100 are not presumptive evidence of “a very poorly designed test.”
(Note, the exams I had in mind were mostly hard math and science ones with challenging problems to be solved and partial credit given. It wouldn’t do, would it, to have a True or False exam in one of those, or in any subject for that matter, in which 50 out of 100 was a superior score.)
December 12, 2009, 3:46 pmChrisTS says:
Glad to see we are still at this. I have written something up on this case and on my own recent worrying about some students on my blog. I would really appreciate your thoughts/comments over there.
For the moment, I will quote the description of the hypothetical case I describe, on which I would welcome your comments here or ‘over there’:
So, what should I do in this hypothetical case, and why?
December 12, 2009, 4:26 pmChrisTS says:
@nice strategy:
I’m mostly in agreement with your comments (particulalry about the aims of undergraduate education), but I’m not sure I understand you here:
I am probably not thinking clearly (too much grading!), but why would A/B/C/D/F with +/- be less valid than B/B+/A-/A?
Also, in relation to your exchange with Michelle, is it possbile that ‘C’ still is ‘average’ – and that ‘proficient’ is superior to ‘average’? (‘Solid’ confuses me on this.)
December 12, 2009, 4:55 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
If the best students can only have learned half the material on the test, why in the heck are they being tested on stuff they can’t possibly know? It’s like testing a third grader on her comprehension of War and Peace. You’re testing something where you have no expectation of finding success.
I had plenty of math courses where we had complex problems and got partial credit. Was grateful for the partial credit, too, but to think that getting 50% right and 50% either wrong or not attempted is a good score doesn’t make sense to me at all. If it does to you, fine.
Chris, my thought is that a person with OCD can develop bad habits out of laziness as well as anyone. I would ask that student to agree up front on what the requirements for turning in the papers and attending class will be, and then hold her to them. In the normal course of events, there may be a paper or two late, so you could give the class at large one free late paper, or whatever. Otherwise, I would tell the student, it’s to her advantage to learn some coping skills so that OCD doesn’t take over her life more than it has to, and you’re not going to enable her to put off learning those skills. As to the final, she can show up or take a zero.
December 12, 2009, 4:56 pmneurodoc says:
In my time, and I’m confident its still true these many years later, there were no third graders at MIT or those with the mental development of third graders being tested on their comprehension of War and Peace. Instead, all students had demonstrated superior intellectual capabilities, especially in math and science, and were expected to perform accordingly. “Gut” courses were a rarity (number theory taught by an aged professor was one), and tests were meant to discriminate between those who knew enough of the subject matter to deserve a passing grade and those who knew it impressively well. Thus, often times tests were intentionally so challenging that even the best students wouldn’t find it easy to ace the exam. Few were quite as certain of their superiority as they had been when they entered, but any reduction in self-esteem attributable to difficult exams and consequently low scores was usually only temporary and restored later when they continued in graduate school or went out into the world.
It wasn’t Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average. Do you think the educational result was less because students were not often to point proudly to test books with scores of >95%?
December 12, 2009, 5:53 pmnice strategy says:
That’s a different kind of a curve. A relative curve, in which the class set of responses are ranked cardinally and assigned grades based on a predetermined distribution of grades available (the top 20% get As, the bottom 20% get Fs, or some such), is the one I’m objecting to.
Having more gradations of quality raises validity problems mostly in subjects with inherently more subjective grading. It is possible to create a formula to grade history essays with (introducing your thesis: 10 points; sequencing of evidence: 10 points; etc.) but those raise validity issues of their own. How do you weight a response that hits on the 3 biggest factors related to a prompt against one that only hits on 2 of them but explains each more fully and clearly? Etc. What is the difference between a C and a C- essay? If you can’t explain that clearly to your yourself or your students, you shouldn’t be trying to sort their responses into that many categories. They will get much better feedback from your written comments, anyway. A grade for a 10 page paper aggregates the evaluation of dozens of different criterion, the weighting of which is subtly different for each paper depending on the assignment and theses in question.
Laura: I’m not sure I can explain clearly, but including questions that half the class might not get helps differentiate the strongest students from other very strong students. Building schema for more advanced topics in later units/courses requires exposing students to vocabulary or analytical tools that they have incomplete context for. The very best students will be able to pick up and apply things without as many examples, and that is a skill and performance type of thing that higher order academics does need to incorporate into an assessment and reporting of a student’s abilities.
Yes it was. It was MIT. Most of the children are in the 99th percentile.
Their system makes sense for their student population and emphasis on laboratory science and engineering, in which teaching and learning proper processes is often as important as the outcome. You can’t teach people the scientific method without having some failures now and again — failures that might teach a lot, and still reflect a lot of learning.
As they say in skiing (sorry ladies), no falls, no balls.
MIT has their entire freshman year pass/fail, which fits in with the above.
In any case, it is a lot easier to interpret grades from MIT than from just about every other school, and we are talking about different types of curves anyway.
December 12, 2009, 6:36 pmChrisTS says:
Nice:
I agree with you that the ‘curve’ based on a predetermined distribution of grades is an arbitary and unjust – as well as inaccurate – method. (Not quite your words.) I have never had a colleague who uses this approach explain either the justice or the pedagogical purpose of it. It’s always simply ‘Well, that’s what we do in X.’
I do understand your point about the broader grading scale. I still employ the full range because it allows me to have room for holistic assessment. I realize this might seem to fall into the subjective category you reference. However, as your example suggests, I want to distinguish between the paper that “explains each more fully and clearly.” Also, my college uses the full range. :-)
December 12, 2009, 6:56 pmChrisTS says:
Laura:
Well, we are on the same page vis a vis my hypothetical. If only this had – hypothetically – worked.
As there have been a number of personal anecdotes, and as you note ‘bad habits,’ I’ll share:
I’m pretty sure I have always been mildly ADD and had what is know called dysgraphia when young – maybe still do. For years I thought something had ‘happened’ to me during an especially violent bout of the chicken pox. Really, school had become more demanding. I got a lot of nasty treatment from teachers. But, no one knew of these conditions and, like Leo, I just managed them.
I believe both my children are mildly ADD, and my son has been diagnosed with dysgraphia (pretty severe when he was just starting to wield a pencil). But we never pursued the diagnoses of ADD, nor sought accomodations for our kids beyond extra training in eye-hand control and spelling for my son.
I really did not want them to suffer the psychological bruising I experienced, but I also did not want them to end up as so many of my students have: reliant on special accomodations/drugs, sure that they ‘can’t do’ XY or Z, and accustomed to asking for or demanding special consideration.
It has served my eldest well, and I think the younger one is coming along. Will he have the grades he could have had if we had gone the accomodation route? No. But I think he is better prepared for the future than many of my students.
For what’s it worth.
December 12, 2009, 7:12 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Neurodoc, you have a false dichotomy here. Surely there are more options than either having all of the students get more than half the test wrong, and having them get more than 95% right.
Chris, in general, I think kids are better off learning coping skills rather than getting labeled. I’m thinking that the backlash against accommodations is only the first problem that the labeled kids are going to see. Plus, you have people like the person who told Shelby he’d have to overlook his bad temper.
December 12, 2009, 8:09 pmDavid Chesler says:
After my first hourly (within the semester) exam in second term Organic Chemistry came back, the late Professor (later Dean) Jeremy Knowles announced in his Oxford accent, “You did wonderfully. I did not.” He explained that the grades had fallen out into a beautiful bell curve, but the median was skewed from where he’d expected it to be. It strikes me as reasonable to assume one class of 400 students is more similar to the 400 who take the class at the same college the year before and the 400 who will take it the following year than to assume an exam is just as difficult as the one given at that time in different years.
December 12, 2009, 8:16 pmThere’s a different question whether the curve should be the same in different classes (why were so many of the summa grads concentrators in Folklore and Mythology?) or different colleges, or year to year (grade inflation being what it is.)
I can certainly see the value in end-of-chapter quizzes, “If you understand this unit, you should be able to answer these questions”, but I also see the value in exams that you shouldn’t necessarily be able to get completely correct.
leo marvin says:
I assume not.
None.
I don’t have a case. There is a legitimate case for accommodating disabilities, but I’m not it. As I said, I chose a job description that includes the very things, i.e., speed, productivity and multi-tasking, my condition undermines. Anyone who can’t manage those things should go into another line of work. But even if I’d made a different choice I wouldn’t have wanted special accommodations for two reasons. First, as Chris suggested, self-reliance, when possible, is a more successful life strategy than dependence. More important, I’d feel selfish and unseemly accepting that kind of help. The obstacles of reading and writing slower than everyone I know without a similar disability are real, but I know I’m a lot more blessed than I am disabled.
My concern is for people with conditions worse than mine, or who for whatever reason simply can’t overcome them despite their best efforts. I only mentioned David Boise and myself for the people who equate learning disabilities with stupidity or laziness. Many of them apparently want so badly to believe these conditions are only the product of some imagined victimization industry, they think babies look like bath water.
December 12, 2009, 11:20 pmChrisTS says:
Good for you, Leo.
And you are correct: there are people – very bright people – who struggle with challenges far beyond ours. I, alas, am still struggling with figuring out what is right and just for all my students.
December 13, 2009, 12:25 amChrisTS says:
Jeez. I cannot believe I typed ‘know’ for ‘now.’ [myself at 199.] :-) Onwards and upwards.
So, I am going to ask you all about what I might have done in my hypothetical case of ‘Q.’
Imagine I got fed up – especially when I learned that Q had told all her/his profs that s/he was getting an ‘A’ in every OTHER course, while engaging in the same behaviors as with me. So, I email Q and say s/he must either turn in whatever s/he has for the now 3 plus weeks late assignment or fail the course. Q does not respond to me (or to other profs). Now, no one can get any response from Q. I, at least, am worried – others seem less so.
Should I have done otherwise in this hypothetical case?
December 13, 2009, 12:36 amleo marvin says:
Chris,
Just saw you have an update question, but first here’s my general take. Obviously it’s too late for this Q, but would apply to future Q’s.
I agree with Laura. It does neither you nor Q any favors to make every boundary negotiable. She needs to learn how to function within a structure, not be encouraged to believe artful manipulation of her condition may be the ticket to a fruitful, structure-free future. It would be kinder just to fail her now. So, as Laura said, require an up-front commitment consistent with her needs, and then hold her to it, as you would any other student. As with any other student, something unforeseen (and properly documented) may justify a rare lapse, but I wouldn’t mention that at the outset (i.e., no “if you’re hospitalized, I’ll give you more time”).
Also, why is it your job to decide what the accommodation should be, ad hoc? I’d ask whoever approved the special treatment for the most specific instructions possible.
As for the update, what was your understanding with Q when she didn’t turn in the overdue assignment?
(P.S. Please tell her she was my favorite character on Star Trek, The Next Generation.)
December 13, 2009, 3:15 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
It wasn’t that half the class might not get the questions. It was that no one in class got more than 50% of the test. If the students’ scores exhibited a normal distribution, the right side of the bell curve stopped halfway through the graph.
My brother failed one of his undergraduate physics courses at Ole Miss and had to retake it. This bothered him until he discovered that not only had the instructor failed it the first time, but also the department head. They all passed on the second attempt. That sounds all tough and nietzschean and everything if your goal is to stomp on people. If your goal is to teach physics, it would have been better to have designed the course as a two-semester course to start with, since two semesters appeared to be required for mastery.
December 13, 2009, 10:56 amDavid Chesler says:
The left tail has to stop at zero. Every few years there will be some kid 5 sigmas out on the right tail, and you offer her a fellowship.
Reach should exceed grasp and all that.
Decency requires that the professor let all the students know ahead of time that they’re not expected to be able to solve more than half of the problems in the time allotted. It may come as a shock to the student who has finally reached a point where she’s not head-and-shoulders better than everyone else that there could be such an exam. The student who expects it will strategize her time better than the student who expects solving each problem completely, in the order given (or reading the complete passage beginning to end instead of skimming), will work just as it always has, leaving partial credit on the first question and none for all the others. Otherwise there’s needless stress, and the score reflects test-taking strategy.
December 13, 2009, 12:30 pmneurodoc says:
Giving an exam so challenging that the the best performing among outstanding students will earn an “A” though they score not in the 90s, but in the 60s or even 50s, does not necessarily imply a curve. The instructor could see a full third or half the class narrowly clustered close to the top mark and decide that all warrant an “A” or that all warrant a “B.” If the test were to be criticized, it might be for the failure to produce a “spread” of scores, and hence discriminate between performances. But awarding of grades in “clumps” rather than according to a Bell-shaped curve would lack the intuitive appeal of the Bell-shaped curve. There’s really no good reason to believe that performance under these circumstances (smaller classes, more advanced and difficult math and science subjects) should follow a normal distribution, that is to say a Bell-shaped curve, but some will argue there’s a logic there. There’s no way around the fact that the assignment of grades will always entail some arbitrariness.
Your answer is fine, but what really requires explanation here? That tests requiring problem solving on which the top performers get no more than 60 out of 100 can be “good” tests? Such test results in high school might call into question the test design, but why should they do so in advanced math/science/engineering courses at the university level when subject mastery is being assessed? Why not see such a test as “challenging,” and dispense with the silly notion that the teacher did not do a good job of teaching or the test was flawed if no one gets a score at least in the top 80s?
Actually, the freshman year subjects aren’t “pass/fail,” it’s even gentler than that, it’s “pass/no record.” If the student doesn’t perform at what would be an “A,” “B” or “C” level, but rather at a “D” or “F” one, then there is no notation on their transcript to indicate that they ever took the course! It wasn’t that way back in the remote past when I was there, and the change allows me to tease those who came after by telling them that they don’t know what the experience was like when one could really say, as we did, “Tech is Hell.” They usually bristle, because notwithstanding that change in freshman grading, the place still is quite challenging.
December 13, 2009, 12:42 pmnice strategy says:
+1
I wasn’t meaning to defend that particular test, only the idea that if you wish to challenge the best students you will likely end up with some questions that a low % of students get correct, and therefore using different ranges to translate %correct into letter grades is reasonable and normal. The default of 90% of questions correct = A-, etc., just doesn’t work for advanced study in many subjects.
I agree that giving exams that no one can pass is just crummy teaching, or that giving an exam with a significant number of exceedingly difficult questions is just a waste of time that makes analyzing the results that much harder. I don’t see the point in it. It’s like saying, so, I’ve (supposedly) taught you the individual tools you need to do this sort of problem. But I haven’t taught you how to think through this sort of problem, I want to test your ability to synthesize various parts of the curriculum live during a timed final. While there is a place for some such questions, 50% impossible doesn’t sound like a very good assessment. If you want to identify the next Nobel laureate to be your RA, then have a few extra credit prompts without making the whole class suffer. Also, what David C says above.
December 13, 2009, 12:51 pmneurodoc says:
Fine, but which disabilities; determined/measured/confirmed how; accommodated how; and under what circumstances? No problem with wheelchair ramps; computer assistive devices; etc., but what about when testing and results will be the basis on which one does or doesn’t qualify, admissions are decided, competitions are determined, opportunities are afforded, etc. Do those accommodations amount to a form of “affirmative action” or can they be anti-meritocratic?
Yes, there are legitimate cases for accommodating disabilities, but there are also illegitmate ones, especially when the “disabilities” are not unarguable physical ones that can be accommodated in relatively straightforward ways, but rather “mental” ones that may be not so certain and “accommodation” might be seen as advantaging the individual unfairly over others.
So…Ms. Metcalf-Leggette at Princeton (and before her, her brother at Princeton), and possibly after Princeton (e.g., 50% more time to whack away at the LSATs)? I think Princeton may have made a mistake in the first place when they admitted her.
December 13, 2009, 12:58 pmnice strategy says:
Well, you have to translate what a 60 or a 50 is going to mean in terms of a letter grade. Most people call those adjustments a “curve” and there are all sorts of ways to make those adjustments, not just trying to conform to a bell curve. My “curves” take a 1/2 point off for the first X number of mistakes, 1 point off for then next Y number of mistakes, etc. The “curve” is just a function of translating the scantron-generated number of questions correct into a grade on the A/B/C scale the students understand.
Why is a spread of scores desirable in the first place? There is no reason to presuppose that identifying minute differences in performance, if they can be properly measured in the first place, is worth reporting out in a way that will magnify the different levels of achievement by the students in the class. If your A student actually is only .5% better than your B student, then your grading system is bunk. For that matter, if half your students learned virtually nothing because your course was way too hard for them, then half your grades should be Fs. Whether that is a problem with your course, the curricular sequence, or just the reality of students reaching their limit and needing to be told to pick another discipline is another matter.
I’d argue more but I actually think we agree on this and are talking past each other. The failure to produce a spread of scores is not a problem unless one believes that the function of grading is to compare students to each other and not to report out out a level of achievement by an individual student.
I’m glad we agree, I guess, but there is no reason to be rude about it since I was responding to someone else; this is a highly unusual sort of kind of assessment design that raises questions about what purpose grades and assessment play in that department, discipline, or school. (see above)
I guess that’s true at some level, but there are things one can do to make the grade more meaningful and fair. Having extremely difficult tests and then sorting complex distribution of results into letter grades is going to involve more arbitrary judgments than giving an exam that provides more comparable data in the first place. And assigning test or course grades along a predetermined bell curve is a terrible teaching practice that has more to do with maintaining a fiction of meritocracy than an actual attempt to evaluate merit.
December 13, 2009, 1:39 pmnice strategy says:
I’m not sure why you feel the need to put disabilities, mental, and accommodation in quotes, but I think it says something about your orientation to the subject, presuming that most non-physical accommodations are bogus based on I’m not sure what.
Believe it or not, most teachers (and hopefully most professors) are professionals who have the expertise to sort through the different cases and draw reasonable boundaries.
I’ve taught AP seniors for almost a decade now and less than 2% of my students had any kind of legally mandated accommodation. Several of them no longer needed or took advantage of it, several had a generous diagnosis that needed to be reined in at the college level (but really didn’t impact my class much), and several of them were highly intelligent and capable thinkers whose language processing was slow but sophisticated, entirely worthy of the elite colleges they were admitted to. This last category is the only one that should be tricky at the college level, and it is a minute # of students. (I can think of 2 individuals in 9 years, both of whom understood that there was a reasonable limit on what accommodations would be appropriate in higher ed, and that they weren’t going to cut it in every field)
I also teach non-AP sections, and most of those students with accommodations were correctly diagnosed whose accommodations made sense for their education. All of my colleagues would agree with my general take on things, and while I grant that our SpEd department is better than most in this regard (they will not write stupid accommodations into a IEP just to placate a parent), the sample size over the years is in the 1000s. The psychology is just that complex, and being closed-minded about it would selectively hurt certain students that don’t deserve it.
Put another way: competent teachers with experience teaching all kinds of students would find your comment curious at best. I can’t teach an Ed psych course and an assessment course in this thread. All I can say is that Princeton is almost certainly in the right in this lawsuit, but people who want to make blanket statements about accommodations and learning disabilities are displaying their own lack of knowledge.
December 13, 2009, 2:15 pmneurodoc says:
As a fully-trained, board certified (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) neurologist who has seen a good many patients with unmistakeably “real” mental disorders of various sorts, including ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, and the like, I don’t know why it should be necessary for me to say I do not presume that reliably confirmed “non-physical” (not easily observable and confirmable motor or sensory problems) impairments are bogus. Just show me the evidence that they are present in the instant case, and consequential, and I will readily accept that they may be counted as disabilities, and we can then discuss what, if any, accommodations are warranted under the circumstances.
And while I think that a sharp, experienced teacher may have valuabale observations to offer about neurobevioral issues in the educational setting, I would want to know what a capable and reliable neuropsychologist or specialist in higher cognitive disorders had to say about the purported disability. When people self-diagnosis “prosopagnosia,” I am suspicious, as I am when adult who have been successful in demanding professional positions, e.g., big law practice, say they have learned they have ADD. Not impossible, just not too likely.
And when there is great advantage at stake, e.g., being allowed 50% more time on LSATs than other takers are given, I am going to demand very reliable proof of the purported disability, as well as a convincing argument why that sort of accommodation amounting to an advantage over others, should be made. Anybody who has any experience of disability evaluations, and I have had considerable, knows that it is a different business than assessing an individual who comes seeking treatment for their problems rather than compensation, dispensations, advantages, and other forms of gain.
December 13, 2009, 3:52 pmneurodoc says:
If the professor thought it sufficiently impressive that students managed to score 60 out of 100 on an exceedingly challenging exam, he might give them all A’s without reference to how many or few of the class attained that score. If he thought 60 a shockingly poor score, he might fail them all without reference to how many or few of the class attained that score. Granted, such judgments might be questionable and deserve scrutiny, but they could in fact be quite sound. I don’t know where a “curve” comes into play if one is not grading on the basis of relative performances and notions about how grades should be made to correspond thereto.
The logic of your scheme for adjusting scores escapes me. On some standardized, multiple choice exams points are subtracted in an attempt to adjust for, and perhaps discourage, guessing (5 choices, so expect randoming guessing to produce 1 “right” answer for every 4 wrong ones). I don’t see that as advisable, since what can it achieve other than to advantage “gamers” over the timid. (The former will see one or more choices they recognize or suspect are wrong and “guess” one of the remaining choices, and are likely to come out ahead. The timid or “non-gamers” will needlessly handicap themselves by using less than all the knowledge they have, fearing the “penalty” for wrong answers.)
You are, in effect, putting your thumb on the scale by adding the qualifier minute. It is possible to produce unreliable, if not unfair, results by making it so that differences in performance are not demonstrated, as when an exam is insufficiently discriminating and a wrong answer to one question drops the more knowledgeable/capable/prepared student back with or even behind those who are less so. Not common, but I can personally attest that it does happen.
December 13, 2009, 4:17 pmneurodoc says:
Why do you think “Princeton is almost certainly in the right in this lawsuit”? Can you articulate the reasons for your conclusion? Do you think her claims to be impaired are bogus, or that though they may be real she ought not be granted the accommodations she seeks? If the impairments are neither bogus, nor trivial, why shouldn’t she be granted those accommodations? (I don’t think she should be granted those accommodations, if only for equity reasons.)
December 13, 2009, 4:26 pmleo marvin says:
Why?
December 13, 2009, 5:22 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I agree with David also.
My daughter had a very tough biology course whose tests she never felt she could adequately prepare for, because every possible topic for inclusion on the test could be drilled down quite a ways. The tests were very hard, but the last item on each one was: Tell me about something you prepared for the test, that I didn’t include. She told me that she always wrote several paragraphs on that one, and always received full credit. That would be one way of identifying your star, if you have to ID one from the test.
…My kid had a bit of an issue with perfectionism starting in elementary school. Hard for me to help her with, since she’s an only and her dad and I are both middle children. I think middle children are more likely to set reasonable standards for themselves b/c they always have the older sibs and younger sibs to compare their skills to. Anyway, I helped her out of that when she would freeze on a project or a paper she had, by telling her that something is better than nothing – i.e., a half-ass paper is better than a blank paper with your name on it. And by enforcing bedtime most of the time, whether she was through with her homework or not. Whatever you have by 9:00 PM is what the teacher gets, so get on with it. Maybe something like that would have helped Chris’s OCD student, but as she says, it’s probably too late.
December 13, 2009, 5:41 pmnice strategy says:
To clarify, I am judging this situation against what I think would be ideal policy, and my ideal education policy treats learning disabled students rather differently at different ages. I guess you could say I have a “strict scrutiny” standard for higher education, especially at a college with admissions criterion designed to ensure a high natural ability level.
I have little knowledge of ADA law in this area. I do have experience with IDEA in a K-12 context and I believe most special education lawsuits are bogus, period. The law could stand to be reformed. Moreover, I know from experience that students from my school who are admitted to Stanford, Yale, Harvard (I would say Princeton but they haven’t admitted a student from my school in many years), Duke, etc. have never had any kind of accommodation, or need for one, and virtually no students going to any of the UC campuses, do, either, and if they do, most of those were not expecting or counting on their being continued. So, I can totally understand Princeton just balking at the idea that this one student is uniquely entitled to something special. Even if Princeton is too hard for her, it isn’t like her right to an education has been compromised, she is presumably naturally talented enough to succeed in most other undergraduate programs if she can get herself into Princeton, even without benefits she might have been overly dependent on in HS. The law wasn’t intended as a leveling device, it was intended as an opportunity device. She got her opportunity, no?
Most schools aren’t out to screw over deserving students, perhaps I have a little institutional bias in that direction, also. Getting sued by people who feel their child is entitled to (insert anything) is part of education in America, and with 95%+ of those cases being bogus, a case at Princeton is pretty likely to be bogus.
The thread got off the rails when people criticized the concept of reasonable accommodations in general. So far as I can remember, no one was all that sympathetic to the plaintiff’s claims in this case.
I need to be done with this thread. It has been a pleasure debating with you all. Peace.
December 13, 2009, 5:56 pmChrisTS says:
Leo:
The problem lies in (a) the nature of the ‘disorders’ and (b) our commitment to killing ourselves for every student. B is our problem. A is of more general interest.
I can get ‘fixed’ accommodations for students whose problems are entirely cognitive. But when someone has behavioral/psychiatric conditions, it gets murky. If Q took an in-class test, she gets something like double time. But what about papers? I’m encouraged to be aware of the problems and try to figure out what accommodations work for me. Not too precise.
That it would be in my email box by a certain day. The day came and passed with a couple of deceptive emails. I finally said, ‘Done.’ All this is hypothetical, of course.
I don’t think we are speaking.
December 13, 2009, 5:56 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I don’t think any of us here know the girl in the story and we aren’t in a position to say whether she has bona-fide disabilities (and the raw intelligence to succeed with a little help) or whether she’s gaming the system. I think one clue might be that she has both “disorder of written expression” and “developmental coordination disorder” – could this mean that her motor skills suck and she takes longer to write stuff? That would explain the across-the-board need for more time on tests. But I don’t know, this is pure speculation.
Well, I’d never offer either definition for myself, b/c while my not recognizing people who know me is a source of amusement and my inability to think with extraneous noise is a source of irritation, I know these are things with specific definitions and I wouldn’t apply them without a qualified doctor telling me to. But most of these things occur on a continuum, right? And for those who are a little bit further on that continuum than most, we/they might need to learn some coping skills, but those problems won’t require extra accomodation or hold us back.
…So a few years ago I went to a neurologist and said, “I have essential tremor!” He examined me briefly and said, “Yes, you do!” (I found the name for my tremor from Dr. Gott’s column in the newspaper. I knew it didn’t have to be treated from a medical standpoint, b/c I’d had it forever and my dad has it too, but it had gotten to the point of making lab work almost impossible.) Would it irritate you if a patient came to you and had already diagnosed herself that way? Or does it make a difference that you can see a tremor, and AFAIK there’s no way to game any system with one?
December 13, 2009, 5:56 pmChrisTS says:
Laura:
At least as far as what can be done in a full-time higher ed situation.
December 13, 2009, 6:03 pmAnonymous says:
Would you be less suspicious if I told you that at age 3 I referred to my cousins as “the big one” and “the little one”? That I lost my grandfather in the park and asked all the old men “Are you my grandpa?” That in college I got kicked out of a psych exam on cartoon facial recognition because I was taking too long or having some sort of trouble, and when the grad student administering it asked why I said something about trying to reconstruct the faces and she said “You’re not supposed to do that, just recognize them or not.”?
December 13, 2009, 6:52 pmSimilarly if I told you my performance in college was much less than my high school GPA and my SATs would have predicted; that I once spent days on a paper, not at all goofing off, and still couldn’t get a paragraph per day? Though other times I’ve spent an entire weekend in a lab. That I was regularly let go from jobs, and if not frustrating my bosses with lack of production given how bright I appeared, until when I worked with a therapist who thought ADD might apply I started on drugs and have been much more productive since. I read Thom Hartmann and said “That’s I!” And of course I did well when I was getting hit with a new class every 45 minutes in high school, I thrive on that sort of stimulation.
The diagnoses don’t matter much. The drugs help, and I work in a field where I don’t have to deal with a lot of people. I do my best to compensate, though I sometimes get messed up when I see someone in a surprising context.
Given the nature of this medium a diagnosis, which is likely but not definitely true, is better than trying to give years of history that would come out in many hours of couseling.
neurodoc says:
I would be less so if I knew you had been properly evaluated by those suitably qualified to make these diagnoses and could see their report(s) and supporting data.
Those who want to “screen” themselves for this relatively rare brain disorder can go to:
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/
December 13, 2009, 11:02 pmSuzy says:
I’m mystified by a few things above, but will try to make this brief. First, if student A gets more time to write a paper because she just broke up with her boyfriend and is sad, then she’s apt to do better on it than student B who is in the same circumstances but has a “suck it up and deal” approach to such matters, rather than a “beg prof for extension” attitude. It is irrelevant whether they are being graded on a curve or competitively, though of course that would make the situation even worse. It’s about taking personal responsibility for your actions. Everyone has stuff to deal with, so I think special treatment ought to be reserved for truly exceptional cases.
I’m not rejecting disability accommodations in general. Rather, I’m saying that when you’re testing certain cognitive skills, it’s not particularly helpful or fair for one person to claim an incapacity here, and then demand accommodations that nobody else will receive. People’s brains differ! And when it comes to ADHD in particular, and some of the related cognitive issues claimed in the original case above, I think most of the diagnoses are bogus. I don’t say this in ignorance of the issue; indeed, the more one learns about how ADHD diagnoses are made and treated pharmaceutically, the more suspect it is.
Finally, as a person with lifelong OCD, the idea that anyone should receive a special academic accommodation in college because of this issue is flat-out shocking to me. Again, people need to take responsibility for themselves. Everyone has issues. The “real world” doesn’t care how long it takes you to finish the memo or get to sleep at night. When a young child has these issues and a school can help, that’s wonderful. But when you’ve arrived at college, there’s no reason that OCD means you should get academic treatment that the other students do not. Medical treatment or counseling? Absolutely, why not? But academic extensions and special favors? Unbelievable.
December 13, 2009, 11:07 pmAnonymous says:
Been there, took that, scored significantly below normal. Trying to look into it more seriously. I assume it comes in degrees. Doesn’t impact most of my daily functions, just socially embarassing sometimes. Whatever the reason I don’t recognize people I try to consciously compensate. It doesn’t require more time to take exams.
December 14, 2009, 12:59 amChrisTS says:
SuzY:
I’m inclined to think – as are our support folks – that a college student who has not yet be helped to find ways to cope with OCD has been failed by someone earlier on. Most likely, it was the family, which insisted on accomodations rather than adaptation.
December 14, 2009, 3:26 pmleo marvin says:
That sounds like an invitation for disabled students inclined toward manipulation to test every teacher’s boundaries, getting maybe less accommodation than they need from some and more than is helpful from others. What purpose is served by the administration not defining an exception to be applied as consistently as possible? That would create clearer expectations for the affected student, and I’d think seem more legitimate to the others.
December 14, 2009, 5:09 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
For those who think that gaming the system is limited to upper middle class students:
Seminoles helped by ‘LD’ diagnoses
December 14, 2009, 5:22 pmChrisTS says:
Leo:
I agree. We are in just such a tough situation with the law, savvy and litigious parents, our imprecise understanding of these conditions, and our own commitment to undergraduates. It is an ever-increasing problem, as more and more young people either do have problems or are diagnosed as having them.
And, although my small liberal arts college is especially committed to helping each student as an individual, we are not alone in facing this rising tide. I honestly do not know what should be done. Let’s face it, most faculty were never trained for this. I was trained in philosophy, not how to navigate learning and behavioral disabilities of students!
By the way, I don’t want anyone to think the support folks are unaware of how dicey this all is. Our own chief support person is really concerned for faculty and constantly says, “I wish I could just say do this or that.”
As a point of interest: in our hypothetical, Q is now debating – entirely by email, of course – with the support office about not having turned in paper work for taking exams with them.
I actually feel sorrier for them than for myself. They know far more than I do about all these issues, but even they have to dance this dance of fairness. And, they can be fired outright.
As much as I disagree with some of the comments in this thread to the effect that everyone should just tough it out – as you and I did – I am really conflicted about how to determine any principled stance.
Ah well. I should be grading. :-)
December 14, 2009, 7:11 pmChrisTS says:
Laura:
I saw that on Inside Higher Ed. It almost made me feel better. But, note that is the coaches who are gaming the system for their players.
December 14, 2009, 7:13 pmleo marvin says:
I haven’t seen anyone here suggest otherwise.
That’s the popular wisdom, and I don’t dismiss it, but neither have I seen a reliable basis for assuming “most” is an accurate description. Regardless, whether and how often a condition is overdiagnosed is a separate question from how to treat those who have it.
Based on the handful of people I’ve known with OCD, that sounds plausible, but couldn’t there be more severe, disabling cases than yours?
I’m not suggesting it’s wise or practical to accommodate every affliction, but in an ideal world where such accommodations were cost-free, I don’t see why anyone would object, so long as the accommodations were fair to the other students. My conception of a fair accommodation is one that unpacks the current grading system which conflates and distorts a disabled student’s performance. In other words, give that student a finer grained, and thus more accurate assessment of her abilities and limitations.
To illustrate, consider a “B” exam grade. That’s really shorthand for saying the student got a blended grade of “B” for her ability to:
1. read the question;
2. comprehend the question;
3. spot the issues;
4. organize the issues;
5. compose a clear, persuasive answer;
6. show command of the course material;
7. write, type or otherwise record the answer;
8. do these things under exam and time pressure.
Now take Al, Betty, Chris and Denise, all identically able on items 2 through 6, but Betty is blind, Chris has disabling hand arthritis and Denise has disabling OCD. If all four took the exam under standard conditions, Al would get a “B” and the others would fail. What’s wrong with allowing them the additional time and reading/transcription devices necessary to get the same “B”, provided their records indicate they were only tested under the same conditions as Al on items 2-6, so their abilities on the other items are at best undetermined?
I realize the current system probably isn’t that precise. I don’t know, but I assume the ADA prohibits qualifying Betty, Chris and Denise’s test results with the special allowances made, in which case it’s an imperfect and somewhat unfair solution. But assuming the process I described, isn’t that a more accurate, and thus prefereable result to simply giving Betty, Chris and Denise an “F”?
December 14, 2009, 7:59 pmTexas Lawyer in DFW says:
Fit well with David Chesler’s comments at #207. I had an advanced statistics test designed with that sort of thing in mind that they administered to all the sections at once. They got the proper clustering on the bell curve, that is the normal cluster of As. One student ten points better, a clear outlier. And one other student ten points better than that — the student that the test had been designed to measure. The profs all stood around in the hall celebrating the test results as they rolled in as they had worked together to get a test that would properly measure the outliers while still letting them grade the rest.
I’ll note that I was diagnosed with ADD at about age 52. I’m 54 now. The change has been dramatic for me in how much easier it makes things. It is as if a layer of chaff has been swept away in everything I do. My stress level dropped dramatically. The only down side is that I can now see it when the yard needs to be mowed and can see the need to bag the lawn clippings. My sudden diligence to yard work amused my wife.
So, yes, I’d been successful as part of a 500 person or so law department before, but the difference 20 mg Vyvanse makes is incredible. My doc suggested a much higher dose, but I’ve learned a lot of skills relating to compensating for my issues and I’d rather not experience side effects.
Though I never needed extra time during tests. That was the one time the distraction level was a good deal less. I admit to pushing my luck once or twice (I took my last tax final and my goal was to finish it an hour early. I did, but my grade barely broke the top 10%. If I’d taken more time I’d have probably not messed up the one problem set I missed getting the extra part of the answer on).
But I appreciate that some people need the help. Some people game the system.
But when my daughter was diagnosed with Tourrette’s Syndrome, that got them looking at the rest of the family, with positive side effects for me. Would extra time for her tests have gotten a couple of her 99% grades up to 100% grades on the latest semester report cards? Who knows, I haven’t asked for the consideration, she seems to be doing ok. Will she need that later? Good question.
December 22, 2009, 1:26 pmSchuylar says:
As someone with a math language learning disability that has been fully diagnosed, I am thankful for the option to seek and receive accommodation.
I agree there are abuses to the system, but that does not mean we should scrap the concept. Nor does it mean, that everyone else should get more time too in all honesty. I currently attend school online at Liberty University and agree with those who have issues with the timing of tests. We need to be tested on what we know, not how fast we can recall it. Further, I see no reason to time ONLINE exams! There is no proctor in such cases who has to worry about making it home in time for dinner.
I am not a law student, but do you have to present an oral argument in a bar exam? If not, I don’t see a reason for any time limit on that either since you never have a time limit when actually trying a case (unless you are a defender attempting to keep the needle out of someone’s arm).
As for a post relative to relating accommodation of loosening the time pressure on testing to restricting use of elevators to only those certified as having useless legs, I applaud both concepts. I have Spina Bifida with Hydrocephalus, and use a wheelchair. So many folks who CAN use the stairs are just too doggone lazy to do so, so folks like me who need the elevator have to wait for an elevator with enough room to maneuver. I believe those who need the extra time to complete a test just to make even the average grade (which shows they would have no more advantage than any other and is usually the case to begin with) should get it. Remember too, that just because one does not need extra time in one course, does not mean they do not need it in another. I have severe math problems due to my physical disability (double-shunted, I suspect neurodoc could probably appreciate what that entails). I have almost as much trouble with sciences (abstracts and visuo-spatial issues). However, when it comes to History, Language Arts, and similar subjects, the problems have been mild to non-existent. I have learned to compensate for what few troubles I have in those areas.
At 6 years old, I had a college level vocabulary and by age 12, could read at a college level. I currently am seeking accommodation by way of either a math class waiver or a computer class which also deals in some of the same concepts (formularies and the like). At this moment, I hold about a 3.7-3.8 GPA.
As for the athletic building ‘problem’. It is likely cheaper to build an ADA compliant building than it was for the original to be built. The property owner simply needs to look a bit harder at finding the right builders and taking advantage of the tax cuts provided by the government to make the building affordable.
December 26, 2009, 7:16 pmJeff Hall says:
And is there also a way to salvage the lives and bodies of women who are treated by doctors who are unable to keep up with the voluminous medical research literature?
January 5, 2010, 2:10 pm