Health and Psychology

I get asked about accommodations testing fairly routinely.  Many people call in with questions about how much I charge for specific tests.  Accommodations testing isn't about the tests.  Accommodations testing is the data used for a psychological report that will ultimately be reviewed by an administrative law judge or an attorney involved in applications of the American's with Disabilities Act to ensure that the person seeking accommodations under the Act is not being afforded special treatment putting them in an adventageous position over others.  Accommodations testing is about the report.  The documentation goes to support the functional impairments of the person and to show that accommodations help them perform as well as non-disabled individuals.

If you are seeking accommodations for classes or for a specific test, then it helps to have someone that understands the law and can write a report.  The easiest cases are those people with a long history of having been correctly diagnosed and treated, who have benefitted from accommodations in the past.  My job is to document current functioning status and ongoing need for accommodations.  More complex cases are for people that are requesting multiple types of accommodations, have little to no past history of diagnosis of a qualifying condition, have had no treatment documented, and have never had accommodations before.  We can help those cases as well.  It just takes more time and a more carefully reasoned argument.  

We can also tell people if they would not be helped by the accommodations they think they need.  So if someone thinks extra time on a test would help them, we can document if having extra time actually worsens their performance due to anxiety, changing answers to test questions, or lengthening the entire test cycle and introducing fatigue.  We can then look at accommodations that might help them specifically.

If you are interested in being tested to see if you need accommodations, please contact our office.