The College Board’s new accommodations policy – a sharp change of direction

After my recent post about the College Board’s announcement that students already receiving accommodations in school would automatically be granted equivalent accommodations on all College Board exams beginning on January 1st, 2017, I started wondering whether/how the test-taking population receiving extra time, etc. had changed in recent years. 

As I was browsing the web searching for information, I came across an interesting 2006 article by Jed Applerouth of Applerouth tutoring. 

Written just after the previous round of changes to the SAT (2005), the article details the effects of the College Board’s (forced) decision to stop flagging the scores of students who had received accommodations. Unsurprisingly, requests skyrocketed (the percentage of students taking the SAT with accommodation grew about sixfold between 1988 and 2004), and the CB responded by granting accommodations more sparingly.  (more…)