Last night, Tuesday, May 19th, I found myself sitting in bed reading a Wall Street Journal article about the growing backlash surrounding SAT and ACT accommodations, particularly extra time.
Almost instantly, I was transported back to my own testing experience as a student with ADHD and slow processing speed, wondering if the people around me thought I had somehow been given an unfair advantage.
As someone who received extra time on the ACT because of ADHD and slow-processing speed, I read the article from two perspectives: first as an educator working in student experience and enrollment, and second as the kid who once sat in a testing room feeling embarrassed that his accommodations made him look “different.”
There is an uncomfortable truth inside this conversation: yes, systems can sometimes be manipulated by families with money, access, and resources. Multiple reports over the years have highlighted disparities in who receives accommodations and how affluent communities are often better positioned to navigate those systems.
But there is another truth that gets lost when the conversation becomes reduced to “fairness” debates.
Many neurodiverse students are carrying invisible challenges long before they ever walk into a testing center.
What people often do not see:
- rereading the same sentence four times
- processing information more slowly despite understanding it deeply
- mental fatigue from trying to keep pace
- anxiety caused by the clock itself
- the exhausting pressure to appear “normal”
For many students with ADHD, learning differences, anxiety disorders, or processing challenges, accommodations are not shortcuts. The College Board’s own guidance on extended time states that accommodations are intended for students whose disabilities substantially affect testing pace and processing ability.
Extra time did not magically raise my intelligence. It simply gave me enough space to demonstrate it.
That distinction matters.
As someone who now works in boarding school admissions and student engagement, I think this debate also reveals something larger about education: we still struggle to understand invisible differences. Schools have historically been built around a fairly narrow definition of how students should learn, process, communicate, and perform under pressure. Students who fall outside that framework often spend years masking, compensating, or quietly questioning their own capabilities.
The hidden challenge of being neurodiverse is not always the diagnosis itself. Sometimes it is the constant fear that support will be mistaken for weakness, advantage, or excuse.
And that fear follows students everywhere:
- classrooms
- dorm rooms
- athletic teams
- college applications
- standardized testing
The best educators I have known understand something important: equity and advantage are not the same thing.
A stopwatch cannot measure how hard someone worked just to stay in the race.
At Beyond the Bell, we often talk about belonging in schools. Belonging is not just social. It is also psychological. It is whether students feel safe enough to learn without apologizing for how their brains work.
That conversation matters far beyond the SAT.
Sources
College Board Accommodations Overview: Extended Time Guidance
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