Faking Dyslexia and ADD for SAT scores
Freaknomics fans should find this Slate article fascinating. It appears that children in affluent neighborhoods are faking ADD and dyslexia in order to take the SAT without a time limit, in the hopes of improving their score.
The distortions worked on the SAT and other standardized tests are revealed in data winkled out of the College Board last year by Sam Abrams, a young researcher at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Nationwide, only 2 percent of students who have taken the SAT over the past 10 years have done so untimed. Most of these students' diagnoses are presumably genuine. But in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent.I haven't met a teenager in the past two years who hasn't claimed to be ADD or dyslexic. Maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I think the overdiagnosis of this is apalling.
6 Comments:
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I welcome you to come and meet my dyslexic son anytime. I'm afraid he is the real thing. Want to carry his or our burden for a while? You are welcome anytime. Let me guess ...you don't believe in the Holocaust or men landing on the moon, either. Until you have waked a mile in a dyslexic's shoes you have very little to comment on. There are always fakers and they should be weeded out but for those who truly suffer comments like yours are entirely uncalled for.
You may be reacting a bit sensitively. I feel for you Diane, but he was only reporting an interesting statistic. Not sure if that qualifies him as some sort cynical prick.. But I agree, I have "real" ADD but can't get a 504 since I tortured myself staying up until about 2 a.m every night to get A's and B's. As far as test taking goes,, SAT'S have been taking me almost twice as long as the time actually permitted.
I know people who have faked such things, especially in middle school, to get more time on tests.
As a person with ADD, I find this rather insulting. I'm great at English. I love it. The Critical Reading section of the SAT is a snap for me-- without time restrictions, however. I have to read even the simplest of instructions over and over to be able to understand it. It's not about me not knowing the answer, but rather, about me not being able to understand what's being asked of me. People cannot possibly understand how low my self-esteem is because of my disorder, and how much it affects my life.
So when I read this article, how could I not be miffed?
I will be taking the SAT in May and have gotten a diagnosis for ADD to get meds (or academic steroids) and extra time. In my school in NYC, its not uncommon at all to get a fake diagnosis for extra time so I feel like I would be at a disadvantage by not doing it myself. I guess this is unfair but I don't blame anyone for trying to get an upper hand. The test is such BS to begin with when someone from a middle class family can take a good thousand dollar prep class and have a huge advantage over someone who couldn't afford to have any extra help.
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