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To: Timeout
As recently as 2003, parental pressure caused the College Board to stop flagging SAT scores for students who had been given special education accommodations while taking the test.

"Special educational accommodations" may include someone to read the questions to the student, someone to write the answers, a distraction-free environment, and extra time on the test.

Those special accommodations will continue to be offered once the student is admitted to college. Most common is extra time on exams. I have been told to give some students 250% time on exams to accommodate a "learning disability." That, I was assured by the disability "experts" at my university, was entirely appropriate. (They never would explain how they arrived at 250%.)

I once objected that allowing a student two and a half hours to take a one-hour exam would give him an unfair advantage. Not so, said the "experts"; it merely "levels the playing field." Besides, they said, in real life (outside the university), the ability to work quickly is not important.

In other words, time is not money, and the graduate will continue to expect special accommodations on the job. Nothing could convince the disability "experts" that an engineer who cannot read because of a learning disability will be a severe liability on the job. Apparently, they expected the employer to hire a reader, provide a distraction-free environment, and arrange extended work deadlines for the learning-disabled engineer.

14 posted on 08/27/2007 4:59:51 AM PDT by Logophile
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To: Logophile

What it means is your course probably wasn’t terribly critical to anyone beyond meeting requirements for a degree.


27 posted on 08/27/2007 11:50:35 AM PDT by muawiyah
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