The College Admissions Scandal from the Disability Perspective

The Hollywood testing scandal broke this week, and to be honest, it played on every single one of my interests-hollywood and the education system.

Here’s a very basic gist of the scandal for anyone who hasn’t been following it.

Certain Hollywood celebrities were paying people to give rights answers on their childrens college entrance exams. The way it worked was the kids would take these tests, and then the parents would pay people to fix the wrong answers ensuring them a higher score and a chance to get into a higher ranking school. Students were also given extended time on their exams, a common accommodation for many students with documented learning disabilities who more often than not have undergone testing to determine that they indeed have a learning disability. “Full House” star Lori Loughlin was involved in the scandal, as was “Desperate Housewives” star felicity Huffman.

Coaches at certain colleges are also involved in the scandal as they were paid money to get the celebrity’s children on sports teams…..at the colleges when their children weren’t even athletes. Huffman’s husband, “Fargo” star William H. Macy was not indicted in the scandal. Loughlin, a star of many holiday tv movies for the Hallmark Channel, had her contract with the network pulled. The scandal involves schoois such as UC Berkeley, Yale Stanford and Georgetown.

The scandal came to light when a financial executive being investigated in a different case gave the authorities information about the college scheme in hopes of gaining a lighter sentence for an unrelated offense.

There is of course, a disability aspect of this story, which to me personally makes it all the more interesting as someone living with a disability.

Huffman and Loughlin made sure their kids also got accommodations when they took the tests, like extended time, that never should have been available to their children unless those children had a documented learning disability (which they didn’t.) Preferential treatment may have been given to students whose parents made significant financial contributions to universities in the past.

As someone with a documented learning disability who struggled through the college testing process, the scheme smacks of elitism and dishonesty. I took the ACT myself, got the score I did, and then applied to colleges who accepted students with scores in the range where my score fell. This is the right, honest way for one to go about it.

Celebrities, first of all, were using their wealth to get unfair advantages for their kids, advantages they didn’t really need or earn. Some kids who don’t have learning disabilties test better than others, and there’s nothing wrong with it-that’s just a reality of life. But when you have a learning disability that causes you to process things slower, or you have a visual perceptual problem that makes it harder to fill out a scantron which could lead you to filling in the wrong answers when you know what the right answers are, you may very well need extended time for test taking, or for someone else to be able to record your answers on the scantron. Acomodations for students with disabilities don’t necessarily given them an advantage so much as they attempt to level the playing field between them and their peers without learning disabilities. For those with learning disabilities, these accomdations are certainly necessary. For those without, they are not.

“Whether students have an up to date plan or must get the documentation before taking the admissions tests, the process of approval for accommodations can be “very adversarial,” for families trying to prove a disability to a testing company…”

Parents fight long and hard for such accommodations for their children, and special ed teachers may try to assist in advocating for these accommodations. As someone who had accommodations for the ACT, I know all of this to be true, because I lived the experience. Some students with learning disabilities may decide to take the test over for a better score, and in the end even with the accommodations ensured which may be beneficial, testing for six hours is draining and exhausting, and if you’re not a Hollywood celebrity, you can’t just pay someone else to do it for you.

This is why students who have been through the testing process with accommodations are particularly outraged by this scandal. Some have argued that the scheme may make it harder for those to get accommodations who truly need them, and that would be a terribly unfair consequence for students who had nothing to do with the scandal.

Yes, I can understand that all these Hollywood wives may be standing around comparing notes about their kids accomplishments, but wouldn’t they rather their kids go to a college where they’re more likely to succeed based on their test scores, versus one where because of their falsified the work may very well be over their heads?

It truly isn’t fair to students who took tests in an ethical way, worked hard and got stellar grades throughout their high school careers to be denied admission to a school because of money exchanged or test scores submitted that didn’t reflect the true academic abilities of celebrity’s children.

Another thing-college isn’t for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to best for your kids, but you should go about getting whatever that is in an honest way, and not to the detriment of other hard working students who want their chance to succeed at a quality school. So if these kids of these celebrities are better off going to a community college first, or they have an idea for their own business that their parents may want to help them start, that’s great. Success can be defined in many ways, and there are many different paths that can be taken to get there they don’t involve criminal activity.

There’s nothing wrong with going to a college that’s just ok so to speak, as the children of Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman may have done if their parents hadn’t interfered. Test scores are one piece of a much larger puzzle, and I would like to think that hard work and a passion for doing what you love are the true pieces that will make a student’s future success fit together.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admission-cheating-scheme/index.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/31634324002