“Time is up.“Please put your pencils down and close your test books.”
All students are familiar with these words. They come at the end of every standardized test students take for college admission.
These words inspire relief and fear at the same time. Relief that a test is finally over. Time to celebrate and worry later about your actual scores. Fear because you haven’t finished a section on the test in the allotted time. You’re worried that it will affect your grade, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
For students diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), that is no longer the case.
Students with these conditions have trouble concentrating for long periods of time and are, in some cases, very active, which can interfere with test-taking since they have to be still and attentive for the entire test.
These students can request special accommodations on standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT as long as they provide documentation of their condition. Breaks during testing for students with attention problems, a smaller testing group to alleviate stress and more time on test sections, particularly reading sections, are all accommodations available for students.
Requests are reviewed and either accepted or rejected by the officials of each testing organization. And yes, there are many cases in which requests for extended time on exams are rejected.
Fortunately for Morgan McNeel, she was not one of those cases.
McNeel, a sophomore studio art major at Rice University in Houston, Texas, with ADD, received a 50 percent time extension on the ACT that allowed her to work on all parts of the ACT at her own pace with breaks when she needed them.
“These accommodations have helped me tremendously,” McNeel said in an email. “If I didn’t have extended time, I would not have enough time to finish the test. I would feel pressured by the time crunch and would consequently do worse on the problems I actually had time for.”
According to an article in The New York Times, the ACT approves about 92 percent of applicants for test accommodations, and the SAT approves about 85 percent. Most of the requests are for extended time on tests.
“For the ACT, the accommodations aim to create a stress-free testing environment, and that is certainly what it felt like,” McNeel said. “I was in my own room, could choose to move on to other sections when I pleased, and could take breaks whenever I wanted.
“For most other standardized tests, the testing is less relaxed. I was usually in a room with other people that had the same accommodations, and there would be a proctor in the room at all times.”
In recent years, the companies behind the tests have cracked down on the accommodation request process. It can take several tries for a student’s request to be approved, and there are many cases in which one organization will approve the request, while others won’t.
This might be because of reports that students are faking ADHD and ADD symptoms in order to reap the benefits. In fraud cases, those benefits include medications that treat the symptoms of ADD and ADHD as well as accommodations during exams.
“ADHD is a real diagnosis that many people suffer from,” said Cyndi Sarnoff-Ross, a licensed psychotherapist. “Unfortunately it has caught on as something that could help people that don’t have the condition.”
“To be honest, my mom filled out the necessary documents and turned in the required documentation [to apply for more time on standardized tests],” McNeel said. “I had to go through extensive testing in order to receive extended time when I switched over to public school in ninth grade, and that testing provided sufficient documentation to receive extended time on standardized tests.”
Access to the Internet and various medical sites provide students with the necessary information to fake these conditions at the doctor’s office. This allows them to get medications and also starts the documentation of their “condition,” which testing companies rely on to judge whether special accommodations are necessary.
The pressure to perform well on standardized tests is the likely culprit behind the fraud.
“The medication will actually help most people to focus, but that doesn’t mean that everybody should take it,” Sarnoff-Ross said.
But for students who actually need more time on exams, this deception is an abuse of their rights for the personal gain of others.
“I see people faking symptoms and taking unfair advantage of ADD and ADHD accommodations as cheating,” McNeel said. “It is frustrating and unfair, especially to those of us who actually need the accommodations in order to preform at our full potential.”