For over 30 years, I have prepared thousands of students for the SAT and ACT. My work spectrum is quite broad, from families with extremely low incomes to some of the richest families in the world. Private SAT tutoring and private ACT tutoring is very rewarding, but I also enjoy working with students in my in-person SAT courses and my in-person ACT courses, as well as with my online SAT courses and online ACT courses. I just want to help students in all income brackets.
I hate the abuses of the extra time option. Both the SAT and ACT allow students with disabilities to petition for extra time when they take the SAT or ACT. It’s fair that students who have legitimate disabilities should be able to get some extra time to take their tests. On the other hand, the biggest problem of the “extra time” system is what has been exposed in the college admissions scandal: Wealthy families are paying for doctors to diagnose their children with fake learning disabilities, and then these students are unfairly receiving extra time to complete their SAT and ACT tests.
At the heart of this problem are unscrupulous parents and unscrupulous doctors who have separate goals that align: The parents want their children to have an advantage over other children when they take the SAT or ACT, and the doctors see an easy way to make a lot of money.
I feel that doctors should be criminally charged if they fudge students’ learning disabilities merely so that they can make extra money. If doctors know that they can go to prison or face huge fines for creating false reports, I think most of them will start playing it straight.
The second issue is even easier to fix. When it comes to how “extra time” tests are conducted, it seems to be the wild, wild west: High schools are making their own rules of how SATs and ACTs can be administered on their campuses. At some high schools, students have even been allowed to take the test over an entire week, which means they are only taking one section per day! Many other students are permitted to take the test over a two-day period. Obviously, this is substantially unfair to the majority of other students who take the test in a single sitting.
The solution here is obvious: All students allotted extra time need to take the SAT or ACT in a single sitting. This may mean that a student with extra time will spend 6 to 7 hours taking a test instead of the standard timed format, which takes nearly 4 ½ hours from beginning to end with breaks. I know this is a long day, but it’s the only way to ensure fairness.
Twenty years ago, I spoke with a woman who had hired me to teach her daughter. This woman said that her daughter had a learning disability and would be getting extra time to take the SAT. Because I always want to know the individual natures of my students so that I can best help them, I asked the woman what the learning disability was. She stared at me blankly. It was clear to me that there wasn’t a learning disability, and that this woman hadn’t even bothered to create a proper lie to cover the situation.
Clearly, students in higher income brackets can more easily afford SAT prep tutors and ACT prep tutors. But, if my suggestions are taken, maybe we can avoid situations like the ones listed above!
This column appeared in the Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California)
