Some parents who once fretted over SAT prep classes are now fixated on something else: who gets more time to take the test. In the Wall Street Journal, Tara Weiss reports on growing anger among families who suspect that some wealthier parents are gaming the system to secure testing accommodations their kids don't truly need—by shelling out thousands (as much as $10,000, per Weiss) for neuropsychological evaluations or even hunting down doctors willing to cite issues like anxiety or bowel problems to justify extra time or breaks. One Long Island dad calls it "cheating" that leaves his kids at a disadvantage.
The numbers do reflect an increase: The ACT says 7% of test-takers received special accommodations—which can also include their own distraction-free testing room—last year, up from 4.1% in 2013; for the SAT, the percentage has jumped from 2% to 6.7% over the last decade. Parents of students with real learning or medical issues say they're being unfairly judged. As one mom puts it, "Having an extra half-hour on the test is not going to get your kid into Harvard." But one Atlanta-based clinical psychologist recounts parents who got angry with him for determining their junior "functions really well" and didn't need an accommodation. As he puts it, "Not finishing the SAT is not a disability."
Read the full story here, or check out this December piece from the Atlantic, which looks at how the test-taking issue persists in college. As Rose Horowitch writes, "The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school's low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms."
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