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Comment by weehobbes | Hacker News Reader

I have a teenager who is at an academically rigorous college prep school. He is incredibly bright and one of the best students in the school. But he has an accommodation in math for extra time because he has a form of dyscalculia which makes him very prone to misreading and mixing up in working memory the numbers, symbols and other formulas. He understands all the concepts well, but his disability results in calculation/mechanical errors unless he has the extra time to check his work multiple times for these errors. I believe this kind of disability and accommodation is legitimate, but I understand why others may disagree. He even says he often feels guilty for getting extra time when others don't. I am sure there are also people who abuse the system and get accommodations when then don't actually need them.

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Why can't everyone get extra time?

That's a much bigger meta question, like what's even the point of putting timing constraints on any test?

Logistically, my kid has to go a testing center at the school during his free period and/or lunch periods for his extra time. I can imagine that if everyone got extra time, it would be a logistical nightmare.

But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.

> But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.

That's not stupid. Speed does in fact matter in the real world. To illustrate the point, let's consider an extreme example: what if it took me an entire year to do something that someone else could do in an hour? My results would be so slow that nobody would tolerate me as an employee or partner. On the other extreme, if someone takes 1h1s instead of 1h it's not really a big deal.

I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a line somewhere and say "if you can't do it this fast, you haven't learned the material adequately". The tricky thing is where to draw that line, not whether such a line is ok at all.

Ok, in the extreme case, that's a fair point. Tests can't be unlimited in length. But I don't think it's actually that tricky to draw the line. If a typical school test is 1 hour during class, just give students the option to come in at lunch or a free period for an extra period for extra time if needed. That seems easy and reasonable enough to me.

Because there must be some time limit, particularly for an in-person exam which win probably become even more common thanks to LLMs and such.

Yes. It depends on whether the time pressure is an integral part of the test. If it isn't then people should get as much time as they need. If it is, it's not clear why people should get different amounts of time.

Doesn't satisfy the ADA. Department of Education would sue such a college for failing to accommodate disabled students. An accomodation that is available to everyone isn't an accomodation.

Not anymore, they laid off all the lawyers who would do that.

Everyone who runs out of time does actually need extra time!

Agree!

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