Have College Testing Accommodations Gone Too Far?

John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Commentary

According to Psychiatry Online, psychological counseling services suffuse institutions of higher education: “1,700 U.S. postsecondary institutions offer mental health services, making campus services a sizeable mental health services sector.”

Data indicate that more than 80 percent of community colleges provide such services, paid for by all students and citizens of the state in which they reside.

Moreover, approximately 11–20 percent of college students avail themselves of such psychological “help,” or, in the eyes of some, dependence. Reports from students in counseling indicate that a majority feel that their counseling centers are helpful for their grades or keeping them on the path to graduation.

But maybe this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having taught undergraduate and graduate classes for a little more than half a century, I saw the growth of counseling centers and their influence on students—and professors. I told my classes that if they had the blessing of the counseling center, they could have certain dispensations, such as taking tests in quiet non-classroom settings, with the timing of their test-taking supervised, presumably by the counseling center.

All professors felt a certain intimidation through the infusion of third parties and “stress-free” environments into the testing regime. To fail a student means more work, more conflict, and more professor-student negotiations, wherein the professor has to calculate how much time to allow to assuage the fears of eight to 10 students in a class of, say, 75 students, the typical size of my classes over the years.

In February, psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled “Therapists have become too accommodating.” This could almost have been written by my mentor and friend since the 1970s until his passing almost 15 years ago, the preeminent critic of medical psychology and psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz.

Alpert quotes a “top university administrator” who says, “No one gets in trouble for accommodating,” referencing a student who was lobbying for “extended deadlines and modified grading for anxiety.” The article goes on to describe what I report above, that counseling services have increasingly grown to become a means for giving students easy ways to make their matriculation problem-free. Therapy, Alpert concludes, “was never meant to function as a licensing authority for exemption from ordinary demands.”

But that is exactly what so many students seek it for, and they induce accommodating college and university therapists in this de facto conspiracy. When students rave—and not all do—about the great “help” they have received from university counseling, they are merely reaffirming the competitive advantage that school therapists provide them. Some students, not receiving this advantage, resent it. The system of competitive advantage also relieves professors from making judgments about the quality of work that the students who receive therapy provide.

If you’re in a baseball game and the umpire is your kin, the game may be less stressful for you and easier to win. But it doesn’t mean you are playing better or that you will play better when life levels the playing field.

Originally published on The Baltimore Sun