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.
