too many people having extra time

[IrmaFayLear]

I didn't quite know where to post this, so I've tried here...

Dd came home in some distress as it turns out that 15 out of 20 people in one of her A Level classes are having extra time for exams.

Dd is upset that it now seems that rather than levelling the playing field for people who genuinely need assistance, a minority are being penalised. Furthermore some of these extra-time people are in "competition" with dd in that they are highly ambitious A* people.

Dd said that one girl told her that "slow processing" is the new watchword and they paid for a private assessment. Dd said that this girl has no processing problems when it comes to quick-fire banter on social media and it's never been mentioned before.

If the exams are deemed too short, then surely give everyone 25% extra time? As it is with this particular subject, it's a case of some people being given 25% less time.

I had a quick google and a)there are masses of sites telling you how to get extra time and how to "fail" the tests and b) Ofqual has said that it is getting out of hand.

screaming
I personally have no strong feelings either way on times Vs not timed exams.
Some of my university exams were technically 3 hours but we could leave when we were done. I quite liked that.

For GCSE and A Level the main benefit of having timed exams is that timetabling is an issue. Any amount of time for any exam would mean an even longer exam season. How schools and colleges should accommodate that would be a huge challenge given the disruption that already takes place during exam time that I don't think people outside schools appreciate.

Equally, if I think of some of my stressed out high ability students, they'd end up burning themselves out in an exam of unlimited time trying to obsess over perfect responses writing perhaps 4-5 more pages for fear of not dumping every piece of knowledge. It's far less stressful for them to say "you have X time, and let's work together to prepare you".

I don't think the solution is to mess around with exams. The solution is robust and appropriate access arrangement procedures.
For example, in schools I've worked in we have had trained assessors in house. We screen throughout school and any teacher can put a child forward. The teachers with assessment training would work with the SENDCo, teaching staff, take samples of work from different subjects, books over time, compare class work to assessments etc, diagnostic tests and then would make a decision. This meant that access arrangements for GCSE would be in place for quite a lot of students from y9 and it becomes their normal way of working. There's loads of benefits in this for the students.
Of course it pisses off the "suddenly my child has developed processing issues just after their mock exam" types who inevitably then go off to private assessors and then come waving a piece of paper or who've gone to their GP arguing their child needs to be out of the hall as the hall is triggering for them, but it means we have a really good system for SEND support. We can't take on the parental chat and how to try and game the system side of things, but we can do all we can to best prepare our students.

Yes I believe it would if it has a substantial and long term effect on doing Normal activities. If the person declared it the employer should make adjustments for that.
I know they don't all do this but legally they should.
I think we have a long way to go for people to realise what equality means, as it relates to disability.

Yes, I can see there would be logistical issues, Lola. Perhaps a more realistic proposition would be to take the maximum time that would be allowed with adjustments, and open that up to everyone.

As I suggested earlier, an 'average expected time' could be given as a guideline so that students didn't feel obliged to sweat over a 1 hour paper for 2 hours, just to fill the time.

It just seems silly that, if understanding of a subject is being tested, timed exams might stop people displaying that understanding because they happen to write slowly (although may not have a diagnosable condition).

I say this as someone who handwrites very quickly and always finished exams early, so it's not some kind of grudge on my part!

I see what you mean screaming.

I personally think secondary schools should do more on writing fluency etc. Primary schools are generally very good at getting children writing fluently, then in y7-9 it's not unheard of for students to go back to printing or obsessively neat, to the point where the fluency they had aged 10 decreases. Then they find exams difficult because printing is slow and it's hard to have slow writing when your brain is thinking about a range of ideas you need to cover.

Rightly or wrongly, I think that with changes to exams teachers need to change their approaches accordingly. I know of teachers who teach for the new specifications the same as they did the old specifications and then seem to think it was luck or nice students that meant my results were better. It wasn't. I just happened to anticipate the likely errors/issues and then explicitly taught students strategies to get round them (which is beneficial for everyone, not just those with identified SEND).

I just happened to anticipate the likely errors/issues and then explicitly taught students strategies to get round them

Isn't that teaching to the test though? Not teaching the subject? One of the reasons I have quit teaching was spending two years drilling students in exam technique. Knowing how to answer paper 1, question 2 in eight minutes exactly didn't give them any decent understanding of my subject. And they hated it. It was soul destroying.

YourOpinion Were you teaching English Language? That seems way more exam style specific than any of the other GCSEs my DD is doing.

Not teaching to the test, no. That would be soul destroying. I entirely agree with you. We're you teaching AQA English Language by any chance? Some of my colleagues who've said my results were "lucky" take that sort of approach to that exam.

Teaching the subject well so the students can enjoy it and learn.
Then teaching them how best to shine so they don't make silly mistakes that cost them.
Students are all unique so trying to expect them all to follow the same paragraph formula seems like an obvious way to limit their achievement.

Well recognised! Yes that's English Language on the new spec. It's awful to teach, awful to learn.

teen
Great minds think alike.
It sounds very much how some people teach English Language GCSE.

Sadly, it's how many schools are reaching it - it's how the exam board recommend you do it.

Teaching, not reaching. Oh for an edit function!

There seems to be way more 'teaching to the test' needed for Eng Lang, whereas the other subjects just have some 'exam technique' needed.

Students (with special educational needs/disabilities) who genuinely need the extra time to level the playing field - absolutely agree with.

Students (with NO special educational needs/disabilities) who gain the extra time purely by knowing how to play the system - totally wrong.

It's not good, especially when the exam reports suggest there's more to it than "in 8 mins do.."

If the students are weaker on processing and literacy then what they probably need (to crudely generalise) is greater exposure to a range of texts, support building their vocabulary, broad encounters with texts, teaching tension, genre etc.

The people I know who get really good results across the ability range, including SEND, tend to take the second approach rather than the exam drilling approach.

Same for literature actually. For those who struggle with exam technique (but probably don't have slow processing and may be candidates for the find any private assessor),it would be much more beneficial to help them unpick the questions and topics so they can show off what they know, rather than try and find a way to get 10% extra time.

I am an exams officer & deal with access arrangements & special consideration for GCSE & GCE exams in a state secondary school. Students are awarded access arrangements (extra time, scribe, reader) following a rigorous assessment by a qualified assessor, referral from teachers & evidence of need. Schools do NOT accept independent/private reports, the student has to be tested by the schools assessor who’s qualifications are inspected by JCQ when they do an access arrangement inspection or summer exam inspection. The schools SENCo must apply online to the exam boards & students scores must fall below a certain level & evidence of need proved for the application to be approved. The vast majority of exams officer are law abiding professional individuals who provide a level playing field for all students, regardless of their background or disability. The suggestion that schools are cheating to get students exam concessions which are not justified is quite frankly insulting. The access arrangement system is a robust, tested, inspected procedure to provide students with slow processing skills the same opportunity to access the exam papers as any other student.
Extra time is given to students with slow processing, below is an explanation as to why these students require more time than those with normal processing speed:
Processing speed is the pace at which you take in information, make sense of it, and begin to respond.
Some people have faster processing speed than others.
It has nothing to do with how smart someone is.
I hope this helps you all to understand the process.

Interesting people are saying that it is more difficult to show a need for extra time in maths eg @noblegiraffe
I am trying to grapple with this extra time thing because it is clear my daughter needs it - but it became absolutely apparent to me in the first term of year 7, when she came home with something like three of her first tests in high school, where she had only completed 70% of the paper (but had done very well in the first 70%) - and the teachers had each told her that her "weakness" was the topics in the last 3rd of the papers (even though she and I knew that some of those were her strengths), without having noticed that the last third of the paper was blank! Probably the most acute of these though, was and is maths - where she really seems to go slowly, and after jumping up and down for about six months I got the SENCo to trial extra time (starting with maths!) and with 25% extra time, she gets about 20% more marks than without (she still usually doesn't finish, and thinks she could usefully do more questions if she was given more time, but she does get to 95% of the paper, rather than 70%, and that given that most of the questions she answers she gets right, it leads to really quite high scores). She has also found that while she doesn't write that much in essay subjects, if you are sucinct, you can often get decent marks for a more limited number of paragraphs, but in maths you have to answer each question to get the marks, and the maths just goes slowly.
But it does feel like if people are going to need extra time, it ought to be showing up on test papers much earlier than A level - although maybe my daughter is extreme, I don't know, we don't know what it is, and the SENCo hasn't been very much help with that, although he has agreed that there is a clear pattern of working (she is now Year 9) (although given the number of teachers who simply didn't notice that she was consistently only finishing the first 70% of tesst, and yet getting around 60-65%, which I thoought ought to have triggered at least some sort of alarm bell, even if they didn't notice she wasn't generally finishing the work in class and having to do it for homework, at least the text papers were pretty stark, so maybe teachers are just missing these things).
I wonder what it is that my daughter has that means she is very able in maths but can do most of the problems if you give her enough time. (although very unconfident, I think this whole business has tended to knock her confidence - I discovered after the fact that in Year 6 SATs practice, she kept being sent to the library to finish off practice maths SATs papers, because everybody else had finished and she hadn't, but had more to do, and nobody bothered to tell me! and she got 105 in her maths SATs ,but with extra time in high school she moved up to Set 1 maths, and would probably have equalled her 115 English SAT if she had had it in primary),
Is it really so rare to have this in maths?
There are only three in the special needs room with my daughter out of a class of 30 when they give the extra time though - so around 10%, certainly not 75%.

@Exams007 thank you, your contribution added a lot to this conversation.

I hope that changes the perception here that access arrangements are easy to get.

fan
Things have rightly tightened up in the last few years, but that doesn't mean that spurious conduct doesn't happen. It also doesn't mean that those in the know can't play it on certain things.

For every school like ours that does the normal way of working, in house assessment from y7 upwards etc, there's others that don't.

Put it this way, I could tell you that controlled assessments, when we had them, should be done as X Y Z and they're moderated and therefore were rigorous and a level playing field. Unfortunately, what was on paper and what went on in many schools was quite far removed from what the rules said. I'm aware of similar questions about certain KS2 assessment too.
Sadly that's the reality of education at the moment.

Typically local authorities have around 2-3% of pupils with a “statement”. Many of these will not be registered disabled. Therefore not disabled in respect of work one would think.

Employers also do want to know work can be completed in a certain amount of time and fit the right employee to the right job. Slow processing speed will be an issue for lots of high paid jobs. Some jobs are less time constrained but would a GP exist with slow processing skills? Or a barrister?

Exams 007 - you have described best practice. But do you truly believe that best practice happens everywhere? Why do you think "educational consultants" advertise widely, often with a little teaser about extra time in exams in their spiel? Why bother to get a private assessment if, as you say, it's worthless?

I think there is some serious blurring of lines as to what constitutes the need for adjustment eg the comment upthread about not answering the question, which another poster picked up on. Surely EVERYONE has done this?! Either answering the question they "wish" had been on the paper, or having a blind panic and steaming in too fast.

It begs the question who is "normal"? I'm sure if you tested 100% of the population everyone would have some quirk or other.

I come back to my original OP, in that when you have three quarters of the class claiming extra time, the remaining few are going to think, well, is this really levelling the playing field, or has it tipped too far?

It begs the question who is "normal"? I'm sure if you tested 100% of the population everyone would have some quirk or other.
If you knew anything about this subject you would know the answer to this. Normal is defined as being within one standard deviation. It covers 68% of the population.
My DS is in the bottom 5% of the population on one parameter. Outside the one standard deviation on another. Is he struggling enough for your requirements?

I have poor eyesight so I wear glasses to correct for this. Should I be allowed this according to your rules? Or should I just accept that I will never see the blackboard and suck it up?

The OP is not specifically talking bout your son, IDK2, she is saying that in her DDs A level class 75% are being given an advantage over the others. Bearing in mind that those doing A Levels are already selected as in the brighter end of the academic ability spectrum.

This thread is awful.
Who is ‘normal’? Even a statement like that shows how out of touch you are with this subject.

Bearing in mind that those doing A Levels are already selected as in the brighter end of the academic ability spectrum.
What has that got to do with anything? Having a disability doesn't mean that you are less academically able. Disability affects all levels of people.

The OP is not specifically talking bout your son, IDK2
True. She started by talking about her DD's class who she can diagnose just by looking at them

she is saying that in her DD's A level class 75% are being given an advantage over the others
Advantage!? It's bringing them back up to a level playing field.