Desert Fox wrote:apl6783 wrote:krasivaya wrote:glitter178 wrote:
interesting. you have no problem making a snap judgment about me, regardless of your line of work.
i'm not against real-world accommodations for those who need them. give me a break. we're not talking about eliminating the budget for wheel chair ramps and special education classes from public schools. we're talking about a test for professional school, which is designed, as so many other things in life, as a gatekeeper (a diminishing one, at that).
You're not even talking about accomodated testing that will allow you to get into any law school-- a la Thomas Jefferson. you're talking about HYS, which nearly EVERYONE is kept out of by virtue of some genetic or other shortcoming.
Academic and exam accommodations are some of the most important accommodations provided by ADA. Without them, many people with disabilities would be effectively excluded from higher education.
And I'm asking about HYS because I've always been shooting for HYS. I can tell you though, that without accommodations, I wouldn't finish and would probably get like a 135 which would certainly keep me out of just about everywhere. If I'm intellectually capable of T14, there's no way in hell I'm going to Cooley because I'm not physically capable of rapidly filling in bubbles.
I want to go to Harvard too. I can tell you though, that without accomodations, I wouldn't have time to both finish the test AND get enough questions right to score high enough to get in. If I'm physically capable of filling out the bubbles fast enough though, I'm not going to settle for Cooley just because I'm not smart enough to answer all the questions correctly in the allotted time.
So, I should be accomodated with both aderall and extra time. Oh, and don't try to say that my disability isn't real because it is. I was born dumb as a rock. I can still be a lawyer though, I'll just have to put more hours in than other lawyers because it takes me longer to think about things. Firms will like that, though, because I'll bill twice the hours!
^ is an example of a gray area. How smart a person is almost entirely genetic, or the result of how they developed early in life. Getting extra time because you are dumb as rocks makes no sense because everyone who scores under 150 is dumb as rocks. Hell the entire point of the LSAT is to separate people on their natural ability. And the whole point of accommodations is to avoid punishing people for disabilities that don't harm their intelligence, but harm their ability to perform with the speed necessary.
Agreed.
One thing that I think many people don't realize is how the extra time is actually utilized. My son has cerebral palsy, which makes holding a pencil and filling in something small like a bubble on a scantron extremely difficult and even painful. However, he has perfectly normal intelligence and can type faster than most people I know, so it's not as though he would be incapable of working as an attorney (or any other professional position) since, as far as I know, business people generally aren't required to draw tiny images with pencils.
When he has extra time on a test, which has been EXTREMELY difficult for him to attain, it's used to fill in the bubbles, not to figure out the answers to the questions. While you and I can write without even thinking about it, he has to really concentrate and think about which muscles to move in order to grip the pencil and then how to move that pencil carefully enough as to not go outside the lines of those tiny bubbles. That's how the extra time is used, to fill in the bubbles not to think longer about each question.
How anybody can justify denying him the time necessary to fill in that dang scantron is beyond me.