To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Feb. 9, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/2000/02/09/test Buying time Disability becomes fashionable among the prep-school set when it equals extra time on the SAT. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Michael Scott Moore Should the Scholastic Aptitude Test be scrapped? Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California Board of Regents, thinks so: "I would like to replace the SAT with the high school exit exam," he said in response to a Jan. 9 Los Angeles Times report on a growing trend of white, male high school students from affluent families being given "extra time to complete the SAT because of a claimed learning disability." The article, headlined "New Test-Taking Skill: Working the System," told of how savvy parents find a psychologist willing to make a diagnosis based on small or nonexistent quirks in their child's testing habits. The University of California is reviewing how it handles scores from learning-disabled students. The College Board, which administers the SAT, says its test isn't the problem, since any standardized test can be abused. "I didn't really believe this before I started consulting for the College Board," says San Francisco educational psychologist Jane McClure, who has reviewed some of the phony diagnoses. "But there really are some psychologists who will take differences that are within the normal range and call them a learning disability." The Times found a high concentration of "learning disabled" accommodations in wealthy neighborhoods, especially among prep-school students, and a much lower concentration in poor neighborhoods. An accommodation usually means 90 extra minutes for the test (four and a half instead of the usual three hours). The total number of accommodations has risen by 50 percent since 1994. Most accommodations are for valid disabilities, such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, but McClure says that recognizing a dishonest diagnosis can be tricky. "When those reports go to school people who don't have expertise in this area," McClure says, "it's hard for them to tell whether it's legitimate." Any "disabled" diagnosis from a medical doctor carries weight with high schools, testing organizations and colleges, she adds, because no one wants to get sued for assuming a student isn't disabled. A visit to an educational psychologist, legitimate or not, can cost more than $2,000. On Jan. 19, the University of California president's office announced that its admissions people would review how they read learning-disabled scores (which are flagged with an "N" for nonstandard administration) and reconsider the College Board's criteria for "disability." Throughout the country, only 1.9 percent of students gain extended time, and only a fraction of the diagnoses are found to be dishonest, so the problem is small. But since the end of statewide affirmative action in 1997, the University of California has been pressured by minorities to prove that its admissions process is fair. "We need to find out now if our admissions officers even [notice] nonstandard test scores," says Carla Ferri, director of admissions for the UC system. "I didn't think that they even looked at the piece of information," meaning the "N" beside the number. Extended-time scores, in other words, may have slid by without a second glance. Admissions counselors at Harvard and Stanford also say an "N" next to an SAT score would probably go unobserved in the applications-process blizzard. According to Margot Carroll, Harvard's senior admissions officer, "We probably wouldn't notice, just because tests are only one of the things that we look at. And the other parts of the application, such as teacher recommendations and grades, are so important." Jean Lippman, Stanford University's senior associate director of admissions, adds, "I think admissions folks always fear that kind of trendy behavior popping up" -- like unexplained "N's" next to a test score -- "but we're not seeing it." The Times counted 47,000 nonstandard tests, out of 2.5 million total, and estimated that only a small fraction -- "hundreds or perhaps thousands" -- were administered to disingenuously disabled kids. The clue lies in the percentages: While the nationwide fraction of nonstandard tests is only 1.9 percent, the number jumps to nearly 10 percent in some New England prep schools and wealthy districts in California. "This really pisses me off," says Paul Kanarek, who owns a Princeton Review test-preparation franchise in Southern California. "My fear is that the pressure will build, and kids who are legitimately disadvantaged won't be given the time of day by universities." Kanarek, a sworn enemy of the Educational Testing Service, says he runs prep classes to undermine the idea that the SAT measures "natural" aptitude. Wealthy families in Orange County pay him to teach their kids tricks to improve their scores, but he also offers free courses for the underprivileged. Kanarek has a single refrain about the test: "Please just acknowledge the fact that the SAT responds well when you throw resources at it. And if one group has them and another one doesn't, it's not fair." The SAT is one of the only national measuring tools around, according to Ferri, the UC admissions director. Her office is mulling a few alternatives such as the American College Test, as well as the exit exam mentioned by Atkinson. The exit exam is a fashionable idea among governors who want to improve accountability in their high schools, and it lies at the heart of Gov. Gray Davis' education reform plan in California. But officials at the College Board argue that any standardized test will be abused. "I think there's probably more manipulation by schools on state tests than there is on our SAT test," says Beth Robinson, who handles student-disability issues for the College Board. Robinson says that a California exit exam won't compare with applicants from other states and says that the furor over wealthy families exploiting the learning disability label makes "a mountain out of a molehill." According to Robinson, such incidents have declined in the past three years, taking account of the fact that the overall number of tests has risen. "And it doesn't matter what test you're taking," she adds. "If people can find a way to give their kid an advantage, that family will do it, whether it's the SAT or something else." In his new book, "Standardized Minds," journalist Peter Sacks argues that standardized testing is an invalid measuring stick. Sacks describes how former school Superintendent Rudy Crew fooled most of Tacoma, Wash., into thinking he'd conjured up an educational miracle when the city's dismal test scores spiked to improbably high levels. Tacoma is a working-class town with high unemployment, but Crew declared that social conditions were no excuse for low numbers. "I refuse to accept that students are not capable of doing the work," Crew said. He then engineered a set of high scores by ordering that grade-school kids be taught intensively toward Washington's comprehensive test of basic skills. The experiment succeeded, for a season. Test scores soared, the town rejoiced and Crew, who had delivered on the bottom line, got a renewed contract and a $10,000 raise. Later that year, the New York City school system offered Crew a $195,000 salary and an expensive home to be its chancellor. After Crew moved east, Tacoma test scores plummeted and never recovered. Since Crew wasn't open about his tactics, residents felt tricked. "I call it buying achievement," Sacks said in a phone interview. "And it seems to me that [test-score] achievement that's bought in this way is so ephemeral, it's kind of a fraud on taxpayers." In any case, Crew was sly enough to realize that parents, universities, school boards and newspapers respond to test scores the way shareholders scrutinize profit margins. Late last year, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani forced Crew out of office after a long feud. Sacks thinks this "corporate model" of measuring minds is false. "It's kind of a losing argument to say that we just need to get rid of all standardized tests," Sacks says. "But in the book, I do argue that we need to create a new paradigm of merit, based on evidence of actual accomplishment." He says evidence from SAT-optional schools like Bates College in Maine shows that a more well-rounded (and expensive) admissions strategy -- using grades, essays, portfolios and interviews -- brings in freshman classes that are more diverse in race and class and stronger at maintaining high grade-point averages. The same trend exists not just at private colleges with small application pools but at large public institutions that have de-emphasized standardized tests. "At least in the college admissions context," says Sacks, "schools and counselors can finally stop using the excuse that test scores are the best measurement. This is the richest nation on Earth: Maybe we can hire a few more admissions counselors" to give applicants more personalized attention. State schools such as the University of Texas and Boalt Hall, UC-Berkeley's law school, have expanded their admissions process in the past few years. The death of affirmative action in those states led to embarrassingly homogeneous freshman classes, and the schools had no choice but to stop using standardized testing as a rigid bureaucratic filter. And the recent mini-scandal over pseudo learning-disabled students may lead to more attention paid to applicants' achievements during high school, at least in the UC system. To Sacks, however, it's a tiny development. "Scrutinizing whether somebody is truly disabled gets into such minutiae," he says. "You have to ask the larger question: What are the tests really telling us in the first place?" salon.com | Feb. 9, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Michael Scott Moore writes about theater for San Francisco's SF Weekly.