Equal opportunity or unfair advantage? The impact of test accommodations on performance in high-stakes assessments

ABSTRACT There has been controversy around the practice of providing accommodations, with some suggesting that they may give an unfair advantage rather than level the playing field. If that were the case, the assessment results of students with accommodations could be inflated, leading to a detrimental effect on the assessment’s validity. This research investigated this claim by comparing the performance of students who completed high-stakes examinations with and without test accommodations. To account for group differences that could affect performance, students were matched on background characteristics. The results revealed that students with accommodations performed similarly to or slightly worse than students without accommodations, suggesting that, in most cases, the accommodations worked as intended and helped levelling the playing field.