aaand this is a good thing in high acuity medical specialties how???
A test is a task, being unable to maintain focus on the task at hand is not a good thing in many areas, not just medical. Little things like oh driving?
Personally, I have medication to handle my own ADHD. Also, different people have it to varying degrees – perhaps enough to be a problem in the high-stress situation of taking a test, but not enough to be an issue while driving, which can be trained into you.
My impression from reading this thread is that some folks are not very familiar with the ADA or how a person comes to have a documented disability. “Not liking math,” for example, is not sufficient. Nor is simply stating that you have a disability, at least at the college level. Being alcoholic is not a disability under ADA; having been alcoholic and now being abstinent, you are covered by ADA but do not receive any accommodation; however, I can’t kick you out of my class for being alcoholic if you’re not drinking.
A reasonable amount of evaluation/testing is necessary. In addition, ADA provides for reasonable accommodation, not extraordinary accommodation, and still requires that the student (or worker) be able to perform the work, with accommodation, to the requirements of the job (or class). A person’s accommodations are not boilerplate, but determined on an individual basis. I’ve had students with the same disability but different accommodations because their testing demonstrated a different pattern of strengths and weaknesses within that diagnosis. Similarly, at times I’ve had students with the same physical disability (such as hearing loss) in the room with three different accommodations: One read lips and needed access to my notes (which I provide to everyone), one used an amplifier and recorded class, and one had a sign interpreter. Yes, there are some jobs they won’t be able to perform, just like the students with LDs. Yes, if they can complete the assignments with accommodation, they should have the opportunity to do so.
I’m not a big believer in education as competition. I’d rathger find ways for people to do as well as they can at both school and work. I see this as a mutual effort of student/worker and instructor/supervisor.
Some people would say that one aspect of intelligence is the ability to look at a busy, noisy set of information, and pick out and focus on what is important, and process it quickly.
Here’s a word problem that I invented just now:
Do you think that a student with ADD would need more time to solve this problem correctly?
Placed in a very ADD unfriendly environment (typical school setting), yes. In real life applications no.
Why?
What’s a real life “application”? I’m just talking about giving somebody a problem to solve.
This was my roommate in college. I guess he needed an excuse after being a 5th year junior.
He could focus just fine on beer, parties, band, work, and bedding freshman girls, but evidently not a simple math problem. Hell that was one of his pickup angles, “Wow you’re smart! Do you mind coming over and helping me with my math homework?”
You are not wrong. A standardized test should be…standardized. That includes processing time.
This notion that people with assorted real and scammed disabilities should be able to report their scores as if they used the same standard as everyone else is ridiculous.
There is a simple solution: have the extra time reported as part of the result, and have an associated reason which the test taker has the option of having included.
Example: Score 760. Time: 2 Hours additional; private room Reason: Documented visual handicap; aide present
Example: Score 680. Time: 3 Hours additional; private room Reason: Undisclosed documented disability
This whole thing is a pitiful attempt to smooth us all out and make us all equal. We are not ultimately served by this approach, and we do not serve the cause of the disabled by pretending they have no disability. Moreover the approach you describe lends itself to substantial abuse.
I would think that a lot of colleges and employers wouldn’t want to receive this information, for fear of being sued for disability discrimination.
Are you being serious? You’d actually give a fuck about how your doctor and accountant did on standardized tests? I understand that timing matters in some professions, but I don’t think standardized test scores actually measure whether or not you can do anything related to your job. They test whether or not you can do math problems or literature analysis in 25-minute blocks, that’s about it.
Sigh. If a policy such as this were to be adopted, there would be a prominent line on which the examinee or its guardian would sign stating accord with the policy that if the accomodation offered is accepted, scores will be reported this way. There would be a policy on the college end as well. “Disability discrimination” relates to policy. If the policy were different, the policy would be different.
Would you get rid of the MCAT and LSAT?
Absolutely. I wouldn’t want to hire an accountant who needed twice as long to complete work - most accounting is done under a time crunch and even good competent efficient accountants work 12-18 hour days over tax season or close or during audit (whatever type of accounting they do).
I have less understanding of how doctors work, but I do understand that they need to read the current literature, update records, and see patients, and they can’t possibly fit all that into a standard eight hour day. They need to be able to read and comprehend the literature quickly, quickly and accurately update records - or patient care suffers.
Yup. And I expect that a lot of colleges and employers would prefer not to receive the extra information.
I’m a doctor and I care deeply.
The cruel truth is that while it is not the only indicator, standardized test results do a better job of correlating the bright with high scores than anything I can think of offhand.
All of us who are physicians have taken hundreds–thousands?–of standardized tests of one type or another. There is an occasional stupid person who does well on tests, but for the most part it’s a pretty good screen, and for the most part the brightest individuals do the best on them.
You are welcome to have your neurosurgeon be standardized-test-free. I want mine to be the one who knocked 'em out of the ballpark–in a standardized timeframe.
A ADD person is just not designed to excel in a classroom environment, put that person in a malfunctioning space capsule and I would give the ADD person much better odds then a non-ADD person IMHO. You are testing them outside the environment they are made for.
If your problem is basically boring and really meaningless, then the non-ADD person has a advantage, but if it’s a critical problem the ADD person will be better at solving it, especially if it’s a something that is ‘outside the box’ and takes creativity to answer.
On the new SAT, it helps tremendously. Students are given only 25 minutes to complete an argumentative essay. Most students have to rush their essays, or do not complete them, or at do not have time to revise them. More time would allow a longer essay to be written, and consequently, a higher score (Cite: Longer SAT essays yield higher scores).
What specifically is present or absent in a classroom environment that is so problematic for a person with ADD?
I’m talking about the exact same problem in either case. A simple problem that isn’t very interesting.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding over exactly how ADD/ADHD affects people. Honestly, those of us with ADD are the last ones to need extra time on a standardized test.
In ADD, the cerebral cortex is understimulated and does a poor job of screening out distractions. Under most circumstances, concentration actually causes to the cerebral cortex to shut down, making ordinary distractions even more powerful. This is why those with ADD have such a difficult time in a standard classroom where there are auditory, visual, tactile, and olfactory stimula all around.
However, this changes when a person with ADD is placed in a situation of unusual stress, like being a nurse in an ER, a cook in a busy kitchen, a soldier during combat, or a student during a highly important test. The cerebral cortex kicks into high gear and is capable of screening out nearly all distractions, allowing the person to maintain abnormally high focus for an extended period of time. Adults with ADD are known to be adrenaline junkies, because the high stress allows them to stay focused for much longer and get an enormous amount accomplished.
I have ADD. It wasn’t diagnosed until I was 34 (at which point, all my friends smacked their foreheads simultaneously and said “Duh!”). The last thing I ever needed during a test was more time. I was usually, and still am, the person who handed in the test first or second. Most people with ADD that I know are the same way.
This doesn’t, however, address different instructional needs of learning-different or learning-disabled students. Schools have long been modeled on factories, and they work best for those children who fall in the middle of the bell curve. For those who fall on either end, it can be an abysmal failure.
Does this mean we are coddling students who don’t end up in the 80% super-majority that do fine with regular instruction techniques? Absolutely not. It means we aren’t leaving them twisting in the wind. It means that we are eventually benefiting ourselves by allowing those students to learn to the best of their abilities. They will learning coping mechanisms to deal with the way everyone else does things, but if their needs are never acknowledged or met, then those coping mechanisms will also be starved.
Yes, some students and their parents abuse the system. Yes, we have lost sight of the notion that “normal” does infer “not special”. In the end, though, those students will find that they aren’t helped by extra allowances. They will fail, and they will need to determine how to get up and succeed on their own.
Don’t take away allowances truly needed by other students, don’t expect them to learn the same as everyone else, and don’t expect them to have nothing to offer.
Do you disagree that some students diagnosed with ADD are asking for and receiving extra time on tests?
Do you have a cite for that? It strikes me as a little odd. You are almost saying that ADD-kids have trouble focusing, except for times when they don’t have trouble focusing. Aren’t most people like that to a certain extent?
Here’s a question: How would I test whether somebody has ADD?
That may be so, but from your description of ADD, it seems like ADD-students don’t really need extra time on tests.