“I know people need extra time…but there’s also people who admit that they are abusing the system… There are students who are capable of [completing tests without using extended time], and they just choose to abuse [the system] and in these cases it’s unfair,” junior Conor McGuire said at a senate conversation about extended time. McGuire’s point was just one of many not in favor of extended time.
“All the Students who get extended time are getting easier tests as the time crunch is what makes some of the tests hard, and having more time is easy,” junior Oberon Goldman said.
Meanwhile, other students supported some students receiving extended time. “Extra time is for processing information,” junior Beatrix Hirsch said.
“We’re not listening to students with the time. We should genuinely listen to what the students with [Learning Resources] need,” freshman Siobhan Tran said.
Senate is a time used to discuss important topics each week chosen by the Senate heads. On April 1, the topic was extended time, a widely debated accommodation that some students at Parker use. “This is an important conversation because many people feel passionate about this topic, and although it is a sensitive topic, it is also one that needs to be discussed,” Senate head and junior Lilah Weed said.
The Senate heads, Trisen Phillips, Aragon Goldman, Lilah Weed, and Tallulah Koenig, chose extended time as a topic because “multiple people told us this was an important issue for them, and they believed that things needed to change,” Weed said. Because of this, she and the other heads expected the conversation to be slightly heated. They followed up saying that the conversation went as they expected. “As expected, there was a divide in the room when it came to what extended time means for people and how it shows up at Parker,” Weed said.
This divide primarily showed up between students defending their extended time to those without extended time who have critique about the policies. “People have had extra time for years, and now it’s just becoming an issue,” junior Noah Harris said. While Weed thought that the senate conversation was healthy, “there was also disrespect that should not have been in the conversation about people’s needs,” Weed said.
Harris thinks that the reason students with extra time face disrespect is because “schools [are] getting ultra-competitive, and people want extra time who don’t need it so that they have the ability to do better,” Harris said. “They think it is unfair even though extra time is made for it to be fair.”
McGuire didn’t believe that the criticism surrounding extended time was aimed towards anyone who has extended time who needs it. “There are people who have it and they need it, and if that’s you, don’t worry yourself with this discussion because it’s not aimed towards you,” McGuire said. However, he said that he noticed that there is no easy way to distinguish between the students who need extended time and those who don’t.
While students are unable to diagnose if their peers need extended time or not, McGuire has had peers tell him that they don’t need extended time. “I’ve had peers of mine tell me to my face, ‘I know I don’t need extended time, but it’s helpful for me to have…on these standardized tests, and also just in school tests,’” McGuire said. “That’s really frustrating, because I think everyone should be subject to the same rules surrounding these tests, and it’s different if someone actually has these learning differences, but for people who don’t, everyone should be on an even playing field.”
This is why he worries that the tool of extra time is being misused. “At elite schools like Parker, where there are lots of resources provided, the resources have been misused,” McGuire said. “People have extended time who don’t really need to have it, and they’ve just used it as another way to get ahead.” McGuire provided the example that at Chicago magnet and magnet-like schools with “even slightly less resources,” the number of students with extended time was around 8% in 2025 according to the Illinois Report Card found online. Through this website, McGuire looked at the percentage of students at each school with Individualized Education Programs (IEP’s). Then, he multiplied each number by 0.6 (60%) which is the average percent number of people with IEPs who have extended time for a final percentage. In 2025, an estimated 5.9% of students at Lane Technical High School, an estimated 5.4% of students at Walter Payton Preparatory High School, and an estimated 5.3% of students at Jones College Prep High School had extended time. While Parker is a private school and does not need to disclose any numbers to the public, McGuire estimated that the percentage of students with extended time is three or four times that based on what he has noticed and heard.
Extended time was first made as a tool for those who need additional time to process information. “Extra time is for processing information,” Hirsch said. The need for the accommodation was to be diagnosed by a doctor and enforced at school. However, during the senate conversation, students argued that students who don’t actually need extra time to process information are getting and using it to get ahead. “In advanced classes I think it’s unfair on how they treat [extended time]. I just took a test and I couldn’t answer everything, and everyone without extra time didn’t finish, and those with extra time did finish,” junior Rohan Liew said during the senate conversation.
Students in senate also said that students are using extended time to cheat. “In my math class,” McGuire said, “students with extended time get to take the full time in class on the test, and then turn the test in, and then if they wanted to, they could just look up the answers on ChatGPT or the internet and then come back to the test knowing all the answers to the problem and just change previous answers.”
This raised the question of what the solution for extended time should be so that everyone is getting exactly what they need. “I think a page system where you take one page at a time and you can’t leave in the middle of the page would fix [the cheating] problem,” McGuire said. As for a solution for who gets extended time, McGuire still hasn’t thought of a solution. “It’s hard to tell someone that they’re not fit for extended time when they are struggling to complete tests,” McGuire said.
“I think the only system that would really make sure that’s equitable for everybody, is that everybody has the time they need,” McGuire said. “In freshman year math, everyone could take as much time they needed on the test. I think that way there would be no issue of extended time. Everyone would just have it.”
While the senate conversation acknowledged that there is a problem, no solution has been seriously proposed yet.
