Accommodation Nation: At Brown and Harvard, over 20% of students have disability accommodations. At Stanford, nearly 40%
Posted by trombonist_formerly
Accommodation Nation: At Brown and Harvard, over 20% of students have disability accommodations. At Stanford, nearly 40%
Posted by trombonist_formerly
8 Comments
It’s really impressive that so many disabled students have overcome hardship to perform well at difficult schools like Stanford.
I think we should further acknowledge their achievements, by marking down on their transcripts how they were able to succeed despite having serious disabilities.
*Complicating matters is the fact that the line between having a learning or psychological disability and struggling with challenging coursework is not always clearly defined. Having ADHD or anxiety, for example, might make it difficult to focus. But focusing is a skill that the educational system is designed to test. Some professors see the current accommodations regime as propping up students who shouldn’t have perfect scores.* ***“If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,”*** *Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”*
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We all know that there are many kids with real issues who need access to disability accommodations. But at what point does your psychiatric disability make it so you can’t succeed in the job market anyway, such that the school’s enabling becomes pointless? When I was in law school in the mid-2000s I certainly scratched my head at students getting extra time to do law school finals because of ‘test anxiety’ or ADD. You aren’t going to get extra time from the court to write your brief!
Hot take: Accommodations that enable performance are good. But in education, only if with the accommodation the student will be able to realistically do the job or area of discipline. That they don’t admit quadriplegics to Navy Seal training is something I think most people can live with. There are very few such extreme cases.
It’s well known that connected kids have been gaming the LSAT for years with disability accommodations to get extra time.
The time constraint is like 90% of what makes the LSAT difficult. Getting 50% more time to answer each question is an unbelievable advantage.
It’s really not that hard to game the system to get an ADHD diagnosis, and the benefits of doing so are immense. Very unPC to say this though
Not US-based but I went to an Oxbridge university a while ago and, while not as prevalent as today, definitely saw some questionable use of disability accommodations.
I knew a handful of people who, after having performed extremely well at school and adequately in the first one or two years in university (without ever identifying as having a learning disability to my knowledge), suddenly procured accommodations in their final years which provided a material advantage in exams.
Maybe I’m being harsh and I do of course also know people who had very legitimate accommodations, but at the time it did seem like the system wasn’t working appropriately in some cases.