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Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no po

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards? I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.

wisty 11mo ago
Lots of people think a test should measure one thing (often under the slightly "main character" assumption that they'll be really good at the one truly important thing). Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one. It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though. Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  > Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense. Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group. And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours. I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
  - wisty 11mo ago
    There can be a genuine need to make it fair. Some students with anxiety can take 10 minutes to read the first question, then are fine. ASD could mean slower uptake as they figure out the exam format. So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety. As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
    - jaredklewis 11mo ago
      If thinking speed is determined to be important and made one of the evaluation criteria, then it's important whether or not you have clinical anxiety. If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?
    - koolba 11mo ago
      > So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety. We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
      - LiKao 11mo ago
        Well, that is kind of what we do. We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions. Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.
  - ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
    > All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours. This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly. Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text. With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
- darth_avocado 11mo ago
  Well that’s the core of the problem. Either you’re measuring speed on a test or you’re not. If you are, then people with disabilities unfortunately do not pass the test and that’s the way it is. If you are not, then testing some students but not others is unfair. At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
  - LiKao 11mo ago
    Tests usually do measure the speed. And often they should. But the question here is "the speed of what?". And how do you measure the speed without also measuring the speed of something else as an error? If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this. We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we? That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement? You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students. It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.
- bawolff 11mo ago
  > Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one. Why are you trying to measure speed though? I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else. Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.
  - schnable 11mo ago
    Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok. Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts." [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
    - LargeWu 11mo ago
      My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
      - peterfirefly 11mo ago
        Can he build more advanced concepts on top of the ones he supposedly masters? Can he do that well? Is he likely to continue to be able to do that as he progresses to the stuff that is actually hard? (My guess is that the answers are yes (so far), no, and definitely not.) Take slow processing is a really good symptom of something that needs more practice time.
TeMPOraL 11mo ago
Eliminating time limits on standardized tests is infeasible; it would require changes to processes on a state or national levels, and mindsets in education as a whole. It's also a complex enough issue that you'd have factions arguing for and against it six ways to Sunday. It's not going to happen. In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time. But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.
  - ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
    But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task? In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?
    - jaredklewis 11mo ago
      I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone. I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit. I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.
bradlys 11mo ago
The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages. It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs. This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial. If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.
  - bradlys 11mo ago
    Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.
    - jaredklewis 11mo ago
      Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.
bawolff 11mo ago
> An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles. The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated. The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  The braille example you give makes absolutely perfect sense. The blind student is being evaluated same as the other students and the accommodation given to the blind student (a Braille version of the test) would be of no use to the other students. But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test. If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?
  - bawolff 11mo ago
    > But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test. That depends on how the test is designed. Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test. However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill. Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns. If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on. So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone. Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit. > why don't we just give it to all students then? I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.
skeeter2020 11mo ago
>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  That makes sense to me, but in that case I also just don't understand why one group gets more time than another group. If the test is meant to evaluate thinking speed, then you can't give some groups more time, because now it doesn't evaluate thinking speed anymore.
munchbunny 11mo ago
Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair: * You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription. * You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits. * You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations. I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway. The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.
- jaredklewis 11mo ago
  Those are all great examples where I agree that an accommodation seems uncontroversial. But to quote the article linked in the parent comment: > The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons. One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis. Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.

wisty 11mo ago

Lots of people think a test should measure one thing (often under the slightly "main character" assumption that they'll be really good at the one truly important thing). Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one. It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though. Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
> Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense. Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group. And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours. I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
- wisty 11mo ago
  There can be a genuine need to make it fair. Some students with anxiety can take 10 minutes to read the first question, then are fine. ASD could mean slower uptake as they figure out the exam format. So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety. As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
  - jaredklewis 11mo ago
    If thinking speed is determined to be important and made one of the evaluation criteria, then it's important whether or not you have clinical anxiety. If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?
  - koolba 11mo ago
    > So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety. We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
    - LiKao 11mo ago
      Well, that is kind of what we do. We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions. Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.
- ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
  > All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours. This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly. Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text. With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
darth_avocado 11mo ago
Well that’s the core of the problem. Either you’re measuring speed on a test or you’re not. If you are, then people with disabilities unfortunately do not pass the test and that’s the way it is. If you are not, then testing some students but not others is unfair. At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
- LiKao 11mo ago
  Tests usually do measure the speed. And often they should. But the question here is "the speed of what?". And how do you measure the speed without also measuring the speed of something else as an error? If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this. We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we? That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement? You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students. It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.
bawolff 11mo ago
> Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one. Why are you trying to measure speed though? I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else. Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.
- schnable 11mo ago
  Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok. Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts." [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
  - LargeWu 11mo ago
    My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
    - peterfirefly 11mo ago
      Can he build more advanced concepts on top of the ones he supposedly masters? Can he do that well? Is he likely to continue to be able to do that as he progresses to the stuff that is actually hard? (My guess is that the answers are yes (so far), no, and definitely not.) Take slow processing is a really good symptom of something that needs more practice time.

TeMPOraL 11mo ago

Eliminating time limits on standardized tests is infeasible; it would require changes to processes on a state or national levels, and mindsets in education as a whole. It's also a complex enough issue that you'd have factions arguing for and against it six ways to Sunday. It's not going to happen. In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time. But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.
- ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
  But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task? In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?
  - jaredklewis 11mo ago
    I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone. I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit. I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.

bradlys 11mo ago

The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages. It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs. This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial. If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.
- bradlys 11mo ago
  Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.
  - jaredklewis 11mo ago
    Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.

bawolff 11mo ago

> An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles. The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated. The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
The braille example you give makes absolutely perfect sense. The blind student is being evaluated same as the other students and the accommodation given to the blind student (a Braille version of the test) would be of no use to the other students. But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test. If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?
- bawolff 11mo ago
  > But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test. That depends on how the test is designed. Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test. However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill. Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns. If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on. So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone. Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit. > why don't we just give it to all students then? I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.

skeeter2020 11mo ago

>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
That makes sense to me, but in that case I also just don't understand why one group gets more time than another group. If the test is meant to evaluate thinking speed, then you can't give some groups more time, because now it doesn't evaluate thinking speed anymore.

munchbunny 11mo ago

Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair: * You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription. * You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits. * You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations. I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway. The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.

jaredklewis 11mo ago
Those are all great examples where I agree that an accommodation seems uncontroversial. But to quote the article linked in the parent comment: > The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons. One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis. Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.