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Ever since the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, in which wealthy families were accused of paying thousands of dollars to falsify disability diagnoses for their children so they could cheat on the ACT, there have been widespread concerns that students are faking disabilities. This has become ever more topical as the number of college students with disabilities, especially cognitive and psychological disabilities, has risen in recent years. While disability advocates and researchers largely believe this is due to increased knowledge of different disability symptoms and decreased stigma, others seem determined to find more nefarious causes.
A recent article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “Accommodation Nation,” purports that this increase, especially at elite universities, is at least partially due to a torrent of rich students who fake having disabilities like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to inflate their grades by gaining extra time on exams. As researchers who study students with disabilities, we don’t see evidence that any significant number of students are faking disabilities. But, for the sake of argument, if there really are a bunch of students gaming the system, there’s still one major problem: Extra time on well-written college exams rarely benefits anyone.
Dating back to the early 2000s, research has shown mixed, or absent, benefits of extended test time for both students with disabilities and those without. The most consistent (although not conclusive) benefits of extended test time were found for extremely high-stakes exams like the SAT and ACT.
However, these exams differ substantially from the exams taken in college courses because they are intentionally designed to be time-pressured to disaggregate student performance. In contrast, many informed instructors have recognized that the exams that most effectively measure student mastery of course concepts are not those designed to be a time crunch. Instructors who rely on evidence-based teaching know that good exams are meant to measure mastery rather than speed and, because critical thinking takes longer than rote recall, should not be a rush to complete. And on these more typical, time-insensitive college exams, the research is clear: Students without disabilities don’t benefit from extra time (even in demanding courses like physics). So instead of being a shortcut to straight A’s, extra time seems more like a dead end.
What’s even more troubling than cheaters not gaining an advantage is that emerging research shows a consistent pattern: Most students with disabilities who receive extra time on exams don’t actually score higher because of it. Studies on students with specific learning disabilities, ADHD and anxiety all find that the additional minutes do not necessarily translate into better grades on well-written exams. The notable exception is for students whose disability limits their processing speed—if it simply takes longer to read and interpret questions, then it makes sense that the extra time is helpful.
But for students with disabilities without processing-speed limitations, the evidence doesn’t show a clear benefit. Yet, extended time on exams is the most common accommodation given to students with these conditions. Students with disabilities face substantial barriers in higher education, and the data suggests that we believe we are helping them by providing extra exam time—when, in practice, we are not.
Given the amount of infrastructure, paperwork, financial resources and quite literally time needed to provide this accommodation, we need to honestly evaluate whether students are getting extra time on exams because they need it or because it’s the easiest accommodation for institutions to implement. Because extended test time has become so ubiquitous, and so routinely assumed to be useful, little effort has gone into developing alternatives that better serve students without processing-speed disabilities. If institutions relied less on this ineffective catchall accommodation, resources could be repurposed to identify and provide what students with different conditions actually need to take exams.
Perhaps now is not the time to quibble over the students who could be trying to cheat the system by getting extra time, and instead grapple with the thousands who are being cheated by it.
