Extra Time on Tests – Necessity or Luxury?

An Examination of Accessibility, Equity, and 'Luxury' in Education

When I was growing up, there was stigma attached to academic accommodations. Admittedly, I thought it was the stupid kids who were taken to a different room to take tests, and I was relieved to not be among them. Today, as a neuropsychologist who specializes in learning and attention disorders, I am thrilled that this stigma no longer exists to the same degree. Kids don’t seem to be so ashamed of their diagnoses; they embrace those labels as tools to help understand and describe themselves and to advocate for their needs in school.

That said, it’s interesting how academic accommodations have been turned into a luxury good in many school settings.

It seems like parents with enough money and knowledge believe they can go get their kids tested by a clinician who is happy to provide a diagnosis and a recommendation for extra time in exchange for a few thousand dollars. I find this trend to be disturbing and misguided for a number of critical reasons.

First, it worries me that people think diagnoses and accommodations are things that you can buy. I want to implore my fellow clinicians to adhere to our ethical guidelines when conducting psychoeducational and neuropsychological evaluations and to be thoughtful and discerning about the feedback we provide to families and schools. Otherwise, we risk damaging the integrity of the profession and calling into question the validity of similar recommendations for kids who really need these supports.

Second, extra time is meant to level the playing field rather than to give certain kids an extra advantage. Assuming tests are designed properly, most kids should be able to demonstrate the full depth of their knowledge in the standard allotment of time. I, fortunately, was one of those kids. If a math test was designed to take 45 minutes, I’d be able to complete that test in 45 minutes; sitting there for another 22 or 45 minutes was not going to help me magically know more math. If anything, I might use the time to overthink and second guess my original answers that were, more likely than not, already correct. I imagine most of you can relate, but this experience is not common among kids with atypical learning profiles. Those kids need more time than their classmates do to show what they know: perhaps 1.5 or 2 times the amount of time to demonstrate the same amount of knowledge on paper. If you subscribe to the notion, as I do, that most tests should assess students’ ability to demonstrate mastery of content rather than output speed, then extended time should make perfect sense; it should seem helpful and fair to allow the accommodation for the kids who need it. The kids who don’t need it should gain no additional advantage from extra time, and therefore, seeking it out is pointless.

Third, most kids who need extra time show evidence of cognitive deficits—and, assuming kids have access to high-quality services, the need for academic accommodations is flagged by a medical or educational professional—when they are young. Neuropsychological profiles are relatively stable by the middle of elementary school, and learning and attention disorders don’t appear for the very first time out of the blue in middle or high school. Therefore, most teenagers who really need accommodations will have already been using them for years. That’s why most standardized testing companies require a documented history of a disability and related accommodations in order to approve accommodations for adolescents and young adults. I tell many families that there is no point in getting a teenager evaluated for the very first time in high school in the hopes of getting extra time on the ACT or SAT, especially when the kid is generally doing well in school. It’s just not going to work; the request for accommodations will almost certainly get denied, as it should.

At the same time, though, I frequently see kids who really need extra time—particularly kids with ADHD—get denied, and that’s upsetting, too. Lots of schools do extra time “trials,” and if kids don’t show improvement right away, then they refuse to grant the accommodations long-term. This strikes me as premature and unfair. Also, lots of school psychologists deny requests for extra time because they say the research doesn’t support extra time for kids with ADHD. This isn’t really correct. Let me explain.

It’s important to keep in mind that many kids with ADHD don’t immediately benefit from extra time; they first need to learn how to use it. That’s because many of the strategies to make extra time useful call upon executive functioning, and since kids with ADHD have core deficits in executive functioning, explicit instruction is necessary.

Regarding the research: I agree the evidence on this topic is equivocal and unconvincing. But, the truth of the matter is that the research kind of stinks. This isn’t anyone’s fault: academic accommodations for ADHD isn’t exactly a topic that attracts a ton of research funding, so the few studies that do exist are pretty small and methodologically limited. But we have tons of anecdotal evidence to support that extra time can be a game changer for kids with ADHD, so let’s put our faith in that and give these kids their best shot. At the very least, the potential benefits here seem to clearly outweigh the costs, and since we should never be thinking about school as a zero-sum game, there should be no harm in attempting to help a kid who is struggling.

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I hope many of you, like me, are counting down the days to the release of the film adaptations of The Color Purple and Wicked, so in order to hold us over, here is Cynthia Erivo singing “I’m Here.”

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