* First and foremost, I’d like to declare my lack of opinion on this matter – in today’s precarious political environment, one false move (or uttered phrase) can detonate landmines of backlash. I’m simply attempting to shed light on certain points of a practice that is widely accepted today, which deserves consideration, as objectively as I can.
There is much mixed opinion about tests, standardized to any degree – whether they serve the intended purpose of distinguishing the capable, and if students end up learning to perform on the test rather than learning to improve themselves. This year marked the first that all Alberta diploma exams had their time limit raised from 3 to 6 hours, for all students, a privilege historically reserved for those requiring special accommodation. This brought up an interesting question in my mind – whether advantages to certain groups of people is truly a conscientious practice.
Firstly, the real world doesn’t sink to lower standards for those who are disadvantaged. Most employers won’t consider impaired workers who require special treatment to be able to perform at the level of others. Are we really doing the disadvantaged a favor by effectively telling them they don’t need to adapt to the harsh circumstances we all inevitably face, and can rely instead on accommodations?
It’s obvious that it isn’t fair for certain people to excessively suffer, and individuals are not, unfortunately, presented with equal opportunity to succeed. One may argue in favor of extra time for someone with hyperactivity disorder, because it wasn’t her fault that she was born with the condition, and we should do our best to accommodate her. But likewise, is it the fault of the mentally unstable young man for his history of familial violence, who cannot focus properly due to his emotional scarring? And what about those who suffer from depression? Panic disorders? Social anxiety? As these conditions increase in obscurity and become more difficult to accurately pinpoint, where do we draw the line as to what conditions are allowed special treatment? How do we know which ones affect performance in tests at all?
And this brings me to my final point: the primary way to calculate how much advantages should be provided to certain groups is to allot them enough benefits so that their results meet a reasonable, or the same, average as the majority. But people can be infinitesimally divided into groups, based on any variety of factors: Caucasians, male Caucasians, male Caucasians over 20, male Caucasians over 20 but under 25 who were born northeastern European countries and have brown eyes… all the way down to the individual. And so the most extreme of accommodation on assessments may be that every individual is provided with just enough advantages so that they all end up with exactly 70%.
But this most polar scenario does not demonstrate equality of opportunity – it is equality of outcome, which strips humans of the motivations to work hard and push forwards because any inadequacies will simply be compensated for. This sort of equality is inexplicably reminiscent of communist movements that caused catastrophes in the 20th century, and is perhaps what we are unconsciously approaching in our educational system of the West.
