Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.
It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though.
Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.
And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
Why are you trying to measure speed though?
I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else.
Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.
Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?
This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly.
Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text.
With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
That seems like a big assumption that i don't believe is true in general.
I think its true at an individual level, as you learn more about a subject you will become faster at it. I don't think its true when comparing between different people. Especially if you throw learning disabilities into the mix which is often just code for strong in one area and weak in another, e.g. smart but slow.
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.
For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.
I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.
I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)
Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.
1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.
Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:
- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.
- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.
- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.
- Find out the position of the hour hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Tell myself the hour number.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Find out the position of the minute hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.
- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.
- Both remembered.
- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.
- Hour and start time need to be remembered.
- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.
- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.
- Remember everything
- Two math operations.
Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.
- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.
I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.
I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.
Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.
Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.
Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.
Now, I can imagine two situations.
1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?
2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.
Put another way, if my brain works at a slower rate than the genius in my class, is it then unfair if my grades don't match theirs?
In general these seem like reasonable differences to consider when hiring someone for a job.
We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body
Hello I'm a tiny babby
We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions.
Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.
One Problem is, that we first have to clearly define the construct that we want to measure with the test. That is not often clear and often underdefined. When designing a test, we also need to be clear about what external influences contribute to noise / error and which are created by the actual measurement. There never is a test that does not have a margin of error.
A simple / simplified example: When we measure IQ, we want to determine cognitive processing speed. So we need to have fixed time for the test. But people also may read the questions faster or slower. This is just a typical range, so when you look at actual IQ tests, they will not give a score (just the most likely score) but also a margin of error, and test theorists will be very unhappy if you don't take this margin of error seriously. Now take someone who is legally blind. That person will be far out of the margin of error of others. The margins of errors account for typical inter-personal and intra-personal (bad day, girlfriend broke up) etc occurrences. But this doesn't work here. So we try to fix this, and account for the new source of error differently, e.g. by giving more time.
So it highly depends on what you want to measure. If you are doing a test in CS, do you want to measure how well the student understood the material and how fast they can apply it? Or do you want to measure how fast the student could do an actual real-live coding task? Depending on what your answer is, you need a very different measurement strategy and you need to handle sources of error differently.
When looking at grades people usually account for these margins of errors intuitively. We don't just rely on grades when hiring, but also conduct interviews etc so we can get a clearer picture.
If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this.
We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we?
That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement?
You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students.
It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.
An excellent way to git gud at something is to do timed practice again and again. Aim for 100% correct answers AND for fast answers. Answers that took to long should be identified and practiced again (and maybe some of the theory should be re-read or read from another textbook).
Don't settle for 100% correct during practice.
Can he do that well?
Is he likely to continue to be able to do that as he progresses to the stuff that is actually hard?
(My guess is that the answers are yes (so far), no, and definitely not.)
Take slow processing is a really good symptom of something that needs more practice time.