by Penny Reeder
In a major victory for disability rights groups, the Educational Testing Service announced that, beginning in October of this year, the company will stop flagging the test scores of students who, because of their disabilities, have been allocated extra time. The policy will apply to the four tests over which the ETS has control, including the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and the Praxis, which evaluates teachers’ academic skills, subject knowledge, and classroom performance.
According to Tom Ewing, a spokesperson for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ, the company agreed to alter its long-standing practice of identifying students who had received extra time as a testing accommodation as a result of the settlement agreement reached in a bias lawsuit brought by a California man whose results were flagged after he received extra time on the GRE.
Ewing said that the ETS, which administers a number of tests, reached the settlement agreement only for the four specific tests over which it has control. Consortia of law schools and medical schools control the LSAT and MCAT admissions tests. The advanced placement tests, as well as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the PSAT are owned and controlled by the College Board, and although the settlement agreement does not apply to flagging of scores on those particular tests, a “blue ribbon” panel is being convened to examine and make recommendations regarding the College Board’s flagging policy.
Gretchen Rigol, Vice President for Higher Education at the College Board, explained that the company is in the process of recruiting members of a panel to investigate and make recommendations on the policy of flagging the scores of disabled students. She said that she expected to be contacting Charles Crawford, Executive Director of ACB, within the next couple of weeks to discuss ACB’s participation on the panel. The panel’s report is expected to be available in March of 2002, Rigol said.
Visually impaired students often request a range of testing accommodations, including braille, large print, readers and scribes, and according to ETS spokesperson Ewing, the policy change has no relevance to these accommodations.
“We haven’t flagged for other types of accommodations since 1985,” Ewing said. “Nor does the College Board flag for any testing accommodations other than extra time.”
On the other hand, Rigol said of the College Board tests, “As a practical matter, any student who needs the accommodation of braille, large print, a reader or scribe will need to spend more time completing a test.” She also stated that she could not predict whether the College Board would cease flagging the scores of students who require more time than their non-disabled peers to complete her company’s standardized tests.
“Educators have believed that results cannot be considered comparable if testing conditions are not standardized for all test-takers,” Rigol said. “We need more research to determine if that belief is, in fact, valid.”
Rigol stressed that, if a student with a disability has been taking tests with identified accommodations throughout his or her school career, then it would be a mistake not to request the same accommodations on a college-admissions test. “A kind of mythology has grown up about all standardized tests,” she continued. “Whether or not a person gets into a certain school is based more on sheer numbers than anything else. We do not believe that flagging the scores of disabled test-takers has any real impact on whether or not a person is accepted by a particular school. We do acknowledge the need to conduct more research into the whole subject of testing accommodations on standardized tests, and that’s why we’re convening the panel.”
Computer-Based Tests Can Be Especially Problematic for Blind Students
Ewing said that the Educational Testing Service has recently been approached by blindness organizations who are interested in securing accommodations which are specifically applicable to computer-based tests. The Graduate Record Exam is one such test.
According to Melanie Brunson, Director of Advocacy and Governmental Relations for ACB, the American Council of the Blind is working closely with the National Alliance of Blind Students (NABS) to get a better idea of what ETS policies actually are for determining how to handle visually impaired students’ requests for testing accommodations.
“In response to ACB Resolution 2000-45, which was passed by the 2000 ACB national convention,” Brunson said, “we are attempting to learn how ETS actually determines whether a student qualifies to receive testing accommodations, and what the ramifications of those accommodations may be. This settlement agreement has dealt with the issue of flagging the scores of disabled students, and that’s an important step in the right direction. We hope to get a dialogue going to address these other issues within the next few weeks.”
ETS’ Ewing said, “We are willing to do whatever it takes, including paying for readers, making ZoomText available, increasing the size of fonts or changing background and foreground colors. We will completely clear out a computer center if that’s what a blind test-taker needs to concentrate.”
NABS has compiled a list of suggestions, according to April Shinholster, a graduate student at Western Michigan University who is president of the blind-students alliance. Shinholster said that the organization believes the way to resolve the issues surrounding standardized tests is to have a cooperative relationship with the companies who control and administer them.
NABS members say their concerns include the excessive time it can take a visually impaired student, using braille or readers and scribes, to complete standardized tests.
Jeremy Johansen, treasurer of NABS, and a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who recently took the Graduate Record Exam using a braille copy of the test and the assistance of a reader, says, “While non-disabled students [typically] take 30 minutes to an hour to finish an ETS computerized exam, it can take visually impaired students as long as seven hours to complete the paper version.” Johansen has stated that the computer-based accommodation which ETS offered him was virtually useless. “The only software they provide is ZoomText, and that has no speech output,” he explains.
NABS believes that students should be able to use a device that converts digital data to a braille display, which is especially useful for reading comprehension or verbal analogy questions. In addition, GRE scores compiled and reported on paper often take several weeks to reach colleges, while those completed on the computer can reach colleges within hours. This kind of discrepancy can put visually impaired students at a great disadvantage if they want to attend a college with only a few slots for incoming students.
Current test-preparation materials are not very helpful to blind students, says Johansen. “A lot of strategies in printed manuals don’t totally apply to working with the reader,” he explains.
Furthermore, according to Johansen and others, it is difficult to find out exactly what accommodations may be available, and the ETS is not exactly responsive to requests for information from disabled students. Johansen applied to take the GRE in October of 2000, but did not receive any responsive communication from the Educational Testing Service until January of 2001.
Both April Shinholster and Melanie Brunson are optimistic that the ETS will welcome the involvement of blind students and their advocates as solutions to these and other problems are sought. In conversations with spokespersons at ETS and the College Board, I found a similar attitude.
“The Educational Testing Service,” Tom Ewing said, “welcomes the advice and specific suggestions of people who are blind. We want to do essentially whatever a student needs to succeed.”