Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because
> Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.
buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.
I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).
edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.
Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.
Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.
If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.
The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating.
The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation request letters to anyone who makes an appointment and asks nicely.
There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.
Once it becomes widely known that getting a diagnosis is the meta-game to getting housing priority, nicer rooms, extra time on tests, and other benefits the numbers climb rapidly. When the number is approaching 38%, the system has become broken.
It's a real problem for the students who really need these accommodations. When 38% of the students qualify for "priority" housing, you're still in competition with 1/3 of the student body for those limited resources.
> There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.
This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).
The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these accommodations directly, or perhaps via some kind of auction. Acceptance to such a school will be the “basic economy” of attendance. If you want to pick your seat, you can pay to upgrade.
Or just operate so that everyone gets the academic benefits.
My roommate in the 90s was ahead of the curve, he memorized the Cosmo quiz “do you have ADD” went to the student center, got a script that he sold or snorted, and got to take his test in a comfortable room at a time scheduled centrally.
Just randomize assignments to rooms all over campus.
> This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).
Yup. A few years ago in California, go to a weed store in Napa. "Oh, you need a medical card" "Oh, sorry". I get handed a business card, no worries, just call this doctor here, it'll be $x (can't remember) and you can get a medical card and just come back in. I had my medical card within 5 minutes on the phone on the sidewalk outside the store.
Was having stress related ED issues a fews ago. Hit up Hims, fill out the questionnaire. Physician reviews it in our online chat. "If these are your answers, I would not be able to prescribe for you. If your answer to Q3 was x, Q5 was Y, then I would. Would you like to review your answers before re-submitting?"
Great to know we're basically raising an entire generation without any integrity.
Can't wait to be in a nursing home where all the staff are trying to meta-game for lowest amount of responsibility rather than caring for the elderly.
And believe me, I'm the last person to disparage the truly disabled or those down on their luck. But 38% in a developed country is just straight up insane. Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?
I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?
There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
That's what you get in a world where damn near everything is measured against some objective criteria, analyzed by a 3rd party or tracked by the government or someone at the behest thereof
None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.
The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.
Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
It's not 38% of the entire population/generation, it's 38% of a tiny group who have gotten into an elite, highly selective school, and have the massive resources (not just education) to do so. But as someone else said, these are probably people who are much more likely to get placed into positions of power and authority.
Better yet, many of the graduates will become politicians, journalists, or prominent tech figures who will be pontificating about morality and regulating it for others.
My stepdaughter just started college. She told the tale of a boy and a girl who tried to claim that a cat was an ESA or service animal for both of them. The one cat. For both people. Just so happened that they were a couple in high school, and this was their effort to game the system to get assigned to a dorm together (the university generally wouldn't allow a co-ed dorm assignment like that, and had rules about relationship "overnights" in the dorm.
universities should have their own experts who give final diagnosis and are unapelable and thats it, all the psychopathic circus which is abusing real disabled people would be out
Why are frequent attendance exemptions granted? I'm totally blind and when I went to college my lack of attendance had nothing to do with the fact that I was blind and everything to do with the fact that I made poor choices like other college students. If I didn't have the mobility skills to get to class then I shouldn't have been granted an exception, I should have been told to get better mobility skills before going to college. I think the only time I asked for an attendance exemption was during finals week. There was a blizzard at the same time as one of my finals and the sidewalks and streets were not plowed. This made it incredibly dangerous for me to go to take the test. I just emailed explaining the situation and took the test the next day.
My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.
Sort of like having any kind of strong interest in any kind of niche topic apparently now magically teleports you onto the autism spectrum. No, that's not how that works . . .
Don't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore.
I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
Autism spectrum highly favors jobs where it's basically person with data. I have seen estimates that a *majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum. I suspect I lie at the mild end of the spectrum--and I see programming as playing to my strengths and against my weaknesses.
Before software paid as well as it does now, the percent on the spectrum was definitely a high double digit %.
Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)
If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.
"High-functioning" is contextual for most autistic people. (The trick is to remain in those contexts, while developing skills to push the boundary a bit further out: get good enough at it, and even your closest friends will say "wow, that meltdown came out of nowhere!".)
Same here. My logic is that my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria, which is kinda gross but also not that different from a lot of other surfaces and environments, and that it's going to collect some amount of stuff floating around. A quick rinse is going to dislodge a good fraction of what has accumulated over the course of a day.
I thought I was just being logical, but apparently I also have a deficit of attention. Okay, then. I guess I'd rather bear that burden than brush my teeth with shi... sorry, I probably should terminate that sentence before I get carried away.
I just assumed a bit of water in advance would prevent toothpaste from directly/easily adhering to the bristles, keeping more of it "in useful circulation" as it were.
> kinda gross
A few months back I needed some hydrogen peroxide, but the available bottle was more than I was likely to use before it degraded into H20... So, naturally, I started messing around looking for other applications. (It worked great on certain oily gunks that resist isopropyl.)
One weird outcome from that is I've been putting a drop on the bristles of my toothbrush, although it's more of an idle experiment to see if the foaming action dislodges visible crud (i.e. toothpaste near the base) in-between uses, as opposed to a disinfection right before use.
IIRC the regular hydrogen peroxide didn't do much against those discolorations.
One of the niche magic ingredients to look for is TSP. Alongside bleach (consult proper sources for actual ratios) the combination becomes more powerful against mildews.
ADHD is nothing but an excuse for lack of discipline. I used to doodle during class, and I still do on interminable conference calls. We used to call it boredom. But there are no convenient meds for that, nor does anyone cut you any slack for being merely bored.
Ban pharma from advertising and watch mental health improve. Never going to happen, of course, corruption - sorry, "lobbying," have to use first world terms here - is rampant in the US.
>Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.
Yep. Speaking from experience, top colleges will give students with ADHD or similar conditions as much as double time or more on exams. One college I know of sends them to a disability services office to proctor it, in which they simply don't enforce time limits at all.
Coincidentally, there's an overwhelming number of students with ADHD compared to before these kinds of accommodations became standard.
> Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.
Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can do something.
In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. I suspect there is a correlation between people who think things through and people who do well in school.
> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly.
Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.
In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.
This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.
It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.
I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.
But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.
I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.
I remember a Linear II test where we had to do Gram-Schmidt on a few large matrices and the prof was a stickler for showing steps. I'm not sure if writing was the limiting factor but it was definitely a major factor. Quantum mechanics is also one of those where there can be a lot of intermediate steps if you don't have things like group theory under your belt (and you usually don't if you're in Griffiths).
I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.
When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays.
Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.
I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.
> the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint
Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.
I had an abstract algebra exam where for the last question, I couldn’t remember the theorem to do it in a sensible way, but could see that the brute force approach only needed ~40 modular multiplications. That came down to the wire!
Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.
I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper.
Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
Caltech had timed exams (2-3 hours) and infinite time exams, at the discretion of the professor.
The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it.
Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.
In the upper division of my undergrad physics degree that was really common. Open book, open everything except peers. I personally loved those exams and my grades went way up. I could walk away for a few minutes if I was stuck, maybe grab a beer to relax, and get back and solve the problems. But I think this is much harder to do and getting even more difficult. I was at a small university and you really couldn't google the answers. It was really easy to write google proof questions. But a key part was that the classes were small, so it was pretty obvious if people were cheating.
I went to grad school in CS after a few years of work and when I taught I centered the classes around projects. This was more difficult in lower division classes but very effective in upper. But it is more work on the person running the class.
I don't think there's a clear solution that can be applied to all fields or all classes, but I do think it is important people rethink how to do things.
That's how my parents taught. Design questions to make the students apply their knowledge rather than regurgitate it. Forget a fact it's being applied to, look it up. Don't understand the concepts, you're stuck. Know the material, piece of cake. One time I was in my father's classroom because he was showing a film he wanted me to see. There was a quiz afterwards, he knew it wouldn't be alien to me and had me try it. 5 minutes later I turn it in, the class thinks I gave up. Then he says I aced it. But I graded an awful lot of his tests, I know that when I didn't know the material I wouldn't stand a chance. The day I found a question that I could guess was notable enough to me that I asked my mother about it. (A case of not knowing the fact. Her supplying the information that the tribe in question was a stone age culture in the New Guinea jungles made the why apparent.)
One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake.
A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. The trick there was to know how the Fourier transforms (based on sine/cosine) were derived, and just substitute in sinh/cosh.
If you were a formula plugger or just memorized facts, you'd be dead in the water.
I do think that's one of the reasons it's easier to do in physics. You're taught to see math as a language and therefore need to interpret it. With that in mind who cares if you memorize formulas and can churn out some algorithmic computation. You'll memorize formulas "accidentally" as you use them frequently. But if you don't know how to interpret the math you're completely fucked and frankly probably won't do well as a physicist. Much of the job is translating back and forth.
I actually loved my classical mechanics class. The professor was really good and in the homeworks he'd come up with creative problems. The hardest part was always starting. Once you could get the right setup then you could churn away like any other (maybe needing to know a few tricks here and there).
Coming over to CS I was a bit surprised how test based things were. I'm still surprised how everyone thinks you can test your program to prove its correctness. Or that people gravely misinterpret the previous sentence as "don't write tests" rather than "tests only say so much"
A couple of my upperclassmen professors used open-everything exams, notes, textbook, even the Internet was allowed. Although time was tight so if you felt like you had to Google something, you better not have to do it a second time.
That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.
At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock.
Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.
I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and their answers are still correct.
They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor.
If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.
But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.
In this context, time constraints are measured in hours and are very informative regarding the student’s capacity to prioritise, plan and carry out their work under pressure.
It is actually very informative when one person can
Agreed. Frankly test taking doesn't correlate to job performance well by any metric.
For example, get 90% on a test, that's applauded and earns a distinction. In a job context, 90% gets you fired. I don't want a worker who produces "90% well soldered boards". I don't want software that runs on "90% of our customers computers". Or a bug in every 10 lines of released code.
A test puts an arbitrary time limit on a task. In the real world time is seldom the goal. Correctness is more important. (Well, the mechanic was going to put all the wheel nuts on, but he ran out of time.)
College tests are largely a test of memory, not knowledge or understanding. "List the 7 layers of OSI in order." In the real world you can just Google it. Testing understanding is much harder to mark though, Testing memory is easy to set, easy to mark.
Some courses are moving away from timed tests, and more towards assignments through the year. That's a better measure (but alas also easier to cheat. )
I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant?
I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
"I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference?"
I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...
That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.
I'm always surprised by comments like the gp's. Even working on different types of programming jobs I would be surprised if the majority of time is spent on actually writing lines. The majority of my time is spent on understanding the codebase and how the new requirements best fit in there. I do see people jumping in straight to /a/ solution, but every time I've seen that happen it is hacky and ends up creating more problems than solutions.
I'm also surprised at how common it is for people to openly discuss how irrelevant leetcode is to the actual work on the job but how it is still the status quo. On one hand we like to claim that an academic education is not beneficial but in the other hand use it as the main testing method.
I think why I'm most surprised is we, more than most other jobs, have a publicly visible "proof of competence." Most of us have git repos that are publicly available! I can totally understand that this isn't universal, but in very few industries is there such a publicly visible record of work. Who else has that? Artists? I'm not sure why this isn't more heavily weighted than these weird code tests that we've developed a secondary market to help people optimize for. It feels like a huge waste of money and time.
Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.
If I'm paying a professional by the hour, yes, it matters if he can do it in one hour rather than two.
I once hired a civil engineer to do a job for me, and he started billing me for time spent learning how to do it. I refused to pay him. (There was nothing unusual about the job, it was a simple repair task.)
That's a tricky one that I find myself pondering a lot as a contractor.
I've ultimately decided that if it's something I'm required to learn for this specific task then I'm billing for the time spent doing that. But if it's something that I figure I should know as a person being hired to do a task in this particular domain then I won't bill for it.
To me it's the difference between hiring a mechanic to 'rebuild an engine' and 'rebuild a rare X764-DB-23 model of an exotic engine.'
It's reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild an engine but it isn't necessarily reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild that particular engine and therefore it's reasonable for that mechanic to charge you for their time spent learning the nuances and details of that particular engine by reading the manual, watching youtube tear down videos, or searching /r/mechanic/ on Reddit for commentary about that specific video.
It's important to strike a balance between these kinds of things as a contractor. You don't want to undervalue your time and you don't want to charge unreasonable rates.
I agree with your assessment. In my case, I am a mechanical engineer and what he was billing me for smelled of being scammed - he thought I was ignorant. I confronted him on it and he backed down.
I've had similar experiences with auto repair shops. Recently I got a BS estimate for an alternator replacement, and a BS explanation. Fortunately, I had done my homework beforehand and knew everything about how to replace the alternator on my particular car, and the service rep knew he was outmaneuvered and gave me a fair price.
Women believe they are targeted by auto mechanics, but they target men as much as they can, too.
Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place?
Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good?
Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards?
I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.
Lots of people think a test should measure one thing (often under the slightly "main character" assumption that they'll be really good at the one truly important thing).
Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.
It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though.
Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
> Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.
And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
There can be a genuine need to make it fair. Some students with anxiety can take 10 minutes to read the first question, then are fine. ASD could mean slower uptake as they figure out the exam format.
So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
> So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
> All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly.
Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text.
With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
Those examples seem like reasonable, narrowly tailored accomodations to me. But the article linked in the parent comment says:
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.
The accommodation process shouldn't be easier. I had to provide documentation to an employer per ADA rules.
For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.
I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.
I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)
Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.
1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.
Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:
- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.
- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.
- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.
- Find out the position of the hour hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Tell myself the hour number.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Find out the position of the minute hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.
- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.
- Both remembered.
- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.
- Hour and start time need to be remembered.
- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.
- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.
- Remember everything
- Two math operations.
Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.
- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.
I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.
I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.
I am very sympathetic to your situation. It just seems that like either the time should matter or it shouldn't.
Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.
Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.
Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.
Now, I can imagine two situations.
1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?
2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.
just to go off of this, I'm not bipolar but I feel we need to also consider more severe mental disorders. For example I have multiple personality disorder
Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body
Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok.
Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."
My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
> Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it
That seems like a big assumption that i don't believe is true in general.
I think its true at an individual level, as you learn more about a subject you will become faster at it. I don't think its true when comparing between different people. Especially if you throw learning disabilities into the mix which is often just code for strong in one area and weak in another, e.g. smart but slow.
Well that’s the core of the problem. Either you’re measuring speed on a test or you’re not. If you are, then people with disabilities unfortunately do not pass the test and that’s the way it is. If you are not, then testing some students but not others is unfair.
At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
Eliminating time limits on standardized tests is infeasible; it would require changes to processes on a state or national levels, and mindsets in education as a whole. It's also a complex enough issue that you'd have factions arguing for and against it six ways to Sunday. It's not going to happen.
In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.
Eliminating time constraints is entirely reasonable. Leaving exams early is generally an option in most standardized testing systems - though usually with some minimum time you must remain present before leaving.
Taking what is currently scheduled as a three hour exam which many students already leave after 2, and for which some have accommodations allowing them 4 hours, and just setting aside up to five hours for it for everyone, likely makes the exam a fairer test of knowledge (as opposed to a test of exam skills and pressured time management) for everyone.
Once you’ve answered all the problems, or completed an essay, additional time isn’t going to make your answers any better. So you can just get up and leave when you’re done.
I think one challenge would be preventing professors from taking advantage of the time to extend the test. I suspect the professors would generally like to extend the test to be more comprehensive, and are limited by the time limits of the test, and tests will naturally extend to fill whatever default time is allotted.
You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time.
But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.
But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task?
In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?
I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone.
I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit.
I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.
Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair:
* You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription.
* You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits.
* You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.
I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.
The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.
Those are all great examples where I agree that an accommodation seems uncontroversial.
But to quote the article linked in the parent comment:
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons.
One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis.
Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.
> An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths
If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles.
The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated.
The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.
The braille example you give makes absolutely perfect sense. The blind student is being evaluated same as the other students and the accommodation given to the blind student (a Braille version of the test) would be of no use to the other students.
But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.
If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?
> But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.
That depends on how the test is designed.
Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test.
However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.
Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns.
If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on.
So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone.
Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
> why don't we just give it to all students then?
I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.
> However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.
Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?
> Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
I think almost all of my high school exams and at least half of my college finals had >90% of students remaining in the exam hall when the proctor called time.
> Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?
Perhaps this comes down to definitions, but i would say that in general, no, speed is not part of mastering material in intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes it might be correlated though. Other times it might be negatively correlated, e.g. someone who memorized everything but doesn't understand the principles will have high speed and low mastery.
If you saying a good test measures skill and not speed, what is the rationale for withholding the extra time from some students? I'm not saying you have to use all the time. I finished many a college exam early and left. No biggie.
I'm just saying if you are going to let some kids stay longer, let everyone stay longer. And you seem to agree on that point.
>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained?
A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.
That makes sense to me, but in that case I also just don't understand why one group gets more time than another group. If the test is meant to evaluate thinking speed, then you can't give some groups more time, because now it doesn't evaluate thinking speed anymore.
The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages.
It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs.
This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
> This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
Wouldn't say this is an accurate description of the US economy.
> > we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.
> Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking
Not sure about "power" there. In my experience you get power by having a lot of free time and dedication to something else other people don't care about… which yes includes billionaires obviously, but most of the people meeting that description are just middle class retirees, so they're outnumbered.
> > This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
> Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
It does not show it "every year", there are long periods of stagnation and some reversals. I would say it shows that recessions are bad and we should avoid having them.
nb another more innocuous explanation is: there's no reason to have a lot of wealth. To win at this game you need to hoard wealth, but most people are intentionally not even trying that. For instance, you could have a high income but spend it all on experiences or donate it all to charity.
When I graduated HS in 1982, the top 1% had 34.7% percent of the wealth. Today, the top 1% has 71.1%. So yeah, I'd say he's spot on. There have been a few dips and valleys, but the trend line is pretty strong.
Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial.
If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.
Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.
Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.
Probably started out as an exception for truly difficult situations but like everything else became routinely exploited once widely known about and eventually became a defacto norm and just part of the protocol.
A lot of things start like this. You need someone with an aggressive backbone to enforce things - which these institutions won't have.
If your rant is about the USA: Are we really going to try to turn this into a war against the ADA?
I counter: If students are requesting specific accommodations en-mass, maybe schools should rethink overall decisions. Maybe housing shouldn't be shared. Maybe the workload should be relaxed.
Disabilities are far more commonplace than you might imagine. The number of disabled people per 1,000 likely hasn't changed, but our recognition of disabilities such as autism, anxiety disorders, etc. has gotten better.
I'm sure a very small amount of folks do abuse the system, but I'd bet money that most actually have disabilities.
If you still think otherwise, think again: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid 30s, and with autism in my mid 40s. This is through extended, multiple hour testing. Nobody told me I had these issues. I was simply told I was a terrible person that didn't do his school work and behaved poorly at school. Now, with an understanding of autism, ADHD, and the new anxiety disorder I have thanks to a recent brain injury, I'm able to finally address this stuff.
I also aced higher level, computer centric stuff, and set a record for one of the quickest to graduate in my state at a technical school (2 months instead of 2 years).
Bottom line is that you should not be making poor assumptions about people abusing the system without evidence to prove it.
On "parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability" -- for the purposes of standardized testing we've found it extremely difficult and feedback we've heard from others on message boards echoes our experience.
I do feel like a test that is so focused on speed rather than ability seems like it loses a lot of its utility. There's a bunch of math I can't do. It doesn't matter if you give me an hour or two -- I won't be able to do it. But distinguishing between the ability to solve a problem in 30s versus 40s seems to be missing the point.
the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation, not just time and half on tests. If you had carpet replaced in your dorm because it gave you an allergy, it would be included. So, this is just an article that is just flat out bullshit.
> the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation,
The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.
Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.
25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:
> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.
it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?
this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.
the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case
it's on their website. Along with all the other details.
where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.
And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.
The Atlantic journalist talked to Stanford Professor Paul Graham Fisher who was co-chair of the university’s disability task force, so I imagine they either got it from him or someone else at the school.
They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.
The number isn’t sourced. But the article does say 24% were receiving academic OR housing accommodation. So 38% registered disabled but only 24% receiving any type of accommodations sounds suspiciously like bullshit. It would require people registering and not using the thing they registered for.
But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here.
Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.
There are any number of reasons for that to be the case.
1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.
> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.
you are talking complete nonsense, sorry. Nobody pays full tuition at Stanford unless you are rich, it's literally free for families making less than 150k a year.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.
N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.
It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.
Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.
You are nitpicking. By that logic, since we can never know the precise number because that number is always moving, we simply don’t know what the number is and all this is moot.
Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey.
This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:
> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-profit institutions, 7% at for-profit institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.
Imaging (brain scans) cannot be used for ADHD diagnosis. There is no standard for it. There were a couple quack doctors who pushed the idea (Dr. Amen is the famous one) but it's not an accepted medical practice.
I think someone misunderstood, or they were telling you a lie.
They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.
It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.
> Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.
My research was done a long time ago. I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless. Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?
Regardless, your overall point is interesting. Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm. If that ostensible harm isn't reflected in reality, and there is a net benefit in having a certain age group accelerate (and, presumably, deepen) their education, perhaps this type of overwhelming regulatory control is a mistake. In that sense, it's a shame that these policies are imposed federally, as comparative data would be helpful.
I went to university at a time that Adderall was commonplace, and am now old enough to see how it turned out for the individuals. At college, it was common for students to illicitly purchase Adderall to use as a stimulate to cram for a test/paper etc. It was likewise common for students to abuse these drugs by taking pills at a faster than prescribed pace to work for 48 hours straight amongst other habits.
In the workplace, I saw the same folks struggle to work consistently without abusive dosages of such drugs. A close friend eventually went into in-patient care for psychosis due to his interaction with Adderall.
Like any drug, the effect wears off - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years. As I recall, the standard dosages of Adderall cease to be effective after 7-10 years due to changes in tolerance. Individuals trying to maintain the same therapeutic effect will either escalate their usage beyond "safe" levels or revert to their unmedicated habits.
In my experience, Adderall does lose effectiveness but Vyvanse is much hardier. I’ve been receiving treatment for ADHD for about 4 years. My current Vyvanse dose is marginally higher than my original Adderall dose, but I’m considering reducing it down to below my original Adderall dose.
Cognitive behavioral therapy does excel at treating ADHD! But 5 years of therapy is what, 16 times more expensive than 5 years of medication? Maybe more? Not to mention the time commitment.
But adderall and vyvanse aren’t the same drug at all. You cannot directly compare dosages. 50mg of vyvanse is roughly equivalent to 20mg of adderall. As a prodrug, Vyvanse must be processed by the liver for it to function.
Adderall doesn't particularly have long-term tolerance. If you're developing tolerance to it, you have a magnesium deficiency and should take magnesium threonate supplements. (Not oxide, the cheap ones, that doesn't work.)
And then remember to drink water, exercise and get enough sleep.
You get addicted to modafinil? I've tried it. It doesn't cure ADHD but it is remarkably like if those boomer newspaper comic jokes about coffee were actually real.
But… it's not addictive at all. Taking it made me not want to take it again. I was just like damn, I kind of smell like sulfur now.
> Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years.
Apropos of anything else, 5 years of weekly CBT to get to the same result is a _lot_. 260 hours of therapy that, on my current health insurance would cost nearly $12,000 in copays. And during that 5 years you're still dealing with your ADHD to some heavy extent.
Imagine posting “sorry that the facts bother you” and then linking to
- A study with a sample a size < 50
- A study that says that medication improves outcomes over CBT
- A study that says that evidence for CBT improving ADHD symptoms comes from studies with such small sample sizes that the conclusions could be the result of bias
The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them. The first two don’t really say that and the third one literally refutes that position.
> Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.
> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?
Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:
> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.
> I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless.
There is no conclusive research on humans, but you have these backwards. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is thought to have less risk for neurotoxicity than Adderall (amphetamine). Amphetamine enters the neuron and disrupts some internal functions as part of its mechanism of action, while Ritalin does not.
Both drugs will induce tolerance, though. The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.
There are also some entertaining studies where researchers give one group of students placebo and another group of students Adderall, then have them self-rate their performance. The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test. If you've ever seen the confidence boost that comes from people taking their first stimulant doses, this won't come as a big surprise. These early effects (euphoria, excess energy) dissipate with long-term treatment, but it fools a lot of early users and students who borrow a couple pills from a friend.
> The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.
They lasted me 12 years so far. Same dosage.
> The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test.
A feeling of euphoria means your dosage is too high, and people without ADHD probably shouldn’t take these drugs.
If the studies involved people that were on the drugs normally, it’s also not a particularly surprising result. The drugs induce a very real chemical dependency, and you will not feel like yourself or that you are performing when you are off of them.
That is honestly my only complaint. Without the drug, I am essentially a vegetable. If I go cold turkey, I can barely stay awake. However, it’s still a lot better than my life was before.
Trying amphetamines classically gives short-term euphoria and confidence boost.
There have been a few studies on this. If you give college students amphetamines they will report performing dramatically better, but their actual performance is maybe slightly improved at best and some measures are worsened: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/6/3/58
The notable thing is that they all report doing much better despite the actual results not matching their self-assessment.
So don't "try some" and then think you're going to be speeding around like a superhuman for the rest of your life if you get a prescription.
there is so much wrong with the first few paragraphs of this article
1. some of the things they list as "disabilities" are sicknesses which _can_ be disabling but not per see disabilities
2. all of the things listed aren't one/off but have not just huge gradients, but huge variations. You might be afflicted in a way which "disables" you from living a normal live or job but still might be able to handle university due to how it differs.
3. non of the things list is per-see/directly reducing your ability to have deep understanding in a specialized field. ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university. It's also might make more "traditionally structured jobs" hardly possible for you and bad luck with how professors handle their courses is more likely to screw you over. Anxiety is often enough more topic specific, e.g. social anxiety. This means it can be disabling for many normal jobs but not affect you in universities which don't require you physical presence, but if they do you basically wait out the course and then learn after being back home. In rare cases it can also help with crunch learning before an exam. Etc. etc.
Actually if we go a step future all of the named health issues can make it more likely for you to end up in high standard universities. Hyper focus on specific topics from ADHD might have started your journey into science even as a child. Anxiety might have lead to you studying more. Since might have been an escape from a painful reality which later lead to you developing depression.
If we consider how high standard universities can cause a lot of stress which can cause an out brake of anxiety or depression in some people it just is another data point why we would expect higher number of health issues (if you lump a bunch of very different issues together like they do).
Later they then also throw in autism in the list of mental issues, even through autism always had been higher represented in academia due to how it sometimes comes with "special interests" and make socializing as a child harder, i.e. it can lead to a child very early and very long term focusing on scientific topics out of their fully own interest. (But it doesn't have to, it can also thoroughly destroy you live to a point "learning to cope with it" isn't possible anymore and you are basically crippled as long as you don't luck out massively with your job and environment.)
Honestly the whole article has a undertone of people with "autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression" shouldn't be "elite" university and any accommodations for them should be cut.
Now to be fair accommodations have to be reasonable and you have to learn to cope with your issues. Idk. how they are handled in the US, but from what I have seen in the EU that is normally the case. E.g. with dyslexia and subtle nerve damage making hand writing harder I could have gotten a slight time extensions for any non-multiple choice exams. I didn't bother because it didn't matter all (but one) exams where done in a way where if you know the topic well you can finish in 60-70% of the time and if you don't even 3x time would not help you much (and the extension was like flat 15min). That is except if my nerve damage or dyslexia where worse then I really would have needed the time, not for solving questions but for writing down answers. There was one exam which tested more if you had crammed in all knowledge then testing understanding, in that exam due to dyslexia and my hands not being able to write quite as fast as normal I actually last some points, not because I didn't know but because I wasn't able to write fast enough.
The point here is if done well people which don't need accommodations shouldn't have a huge benefits even if they get them, but people needing it not getting it can mean punishing them for thing unrelated to actual skills. Live will do so enough after university, no need to force it into universities which should focus on excellence of knowledge and understanding.
>ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university.
"Hyperfocus" is a clinical term for focus that is excessive enough to be an impairment. People often conflate it with the term "Special interest" used for Autism, but it's completely different, it refers to the inability to pull focus away from something despite wanting and needing to. It is, definitionally, without benefit. If there's a benefit, it's not hyperfocus.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. ADHD is characterized by poor ability to direct attention. People know about it causing a lack of attention to things that need attention, but it can also cause attention to things that don't need it.
and I'm aware that people with ADHD don't really have any way to direct it
and that it can easily lead to them neglecting everything from them self, over work to social relationships
so it will help more then it hurts in university
but it still can matter before, even if it's just a parent mistaking a hyper focus on some science topic with a special interest in it and then exposing you to more science related stuff earlier one in life
Given the current pace of changes and levels of uncertainty about the labor market 5-10 years from now, this may actually be the most useful skill-set the university is teaching students today.
I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.
What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is:
- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)
- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.
through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
It really seems strange to me that single rooms haven't become the norm, especially in light of how many people clearly prefer them. It's one thing to share a kitchen or bathroom in an apartment, but after college, how many people ever share bedrooms with anyone except a partner?
I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.
It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.
This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.
Still shitty privileged behavior, and any doctor providing a diagnosis just to get a kid a better dorm room, should immediately have his or her license revoked.
I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
not even moral decline! I’d personally feel like a fraud every day if I “made it“ by using 5 different _unnecessary_ accommodations. Where is the satisfaction in that?
I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters.
People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.
I had a bad roommate who when I asked the people in the house to turn the music down he would tell them to turn it up, and he constantly had annoying guests in our tiny room. Fuck Patrick you know who you are..
i remember being woken up at 3am by him vomiting in the middle of the room. In the morning he used my swiffer to clean up his vomit. I told him to keep the swiffer .
On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.
Yeah fair fair. It's high variance. My roommate once had a bunch of his highschool friends over for a weekend and one of them sleep-peed onto my roommate's stack of books.
It would be interesting to test that maybe by looking at the disability rate before and after the honor code was changed recently. If there was an increase in disabilities, it might be because other cheating options on exams were limited.
For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.
It means that the action we should take in response to this article is "building more dorms with singles" rather than "we need to rethink the way that we are making accommodations for disabilities in educational contexts".
That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
I worked in residential life while in college and can tell you that placing freshmen in singles is a horrible idea. It leads to isolation and lets mental health issues fester. Some need it but you do not want to place anyone who doesn’t into a room alone especially in their first year.
Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.
I agree in that freshmen should get the "experience" at least once. However, the way Stanford has arranged housing has meant that a good number of students will not live in a single for any of their 4 years.
Yet here in the UK it's perfectly normal. When I went to uni in 2000 in our halls there were 15 rooms per floor ber block, 2 of which were twins and 13 were single.
The people in the twins were not happy - they hadn't asked for them.
I knew one person who dropped out in the first 3 months (for mental purposes), and that was someone who shared a room.
I would not classify it as anecdata. This was research backed policy adopted by most US universities. Residential life and the Dean of Students office are usually doing a lot to cooperate with other universities. This part of US colleges is not competing with each other so they routinely share data, go to conferences together multiple times a year, and res. life directors move from college to college every few years so they all know each other incredibly well.
The point is that everyone who gets a single is super happy about it the same way that a drug addict is always happy when they get their drug of choice for free: of course it’s great. Of course it isn’t the best thing for you in the long run. I say this as someone who hated being in a double my first year and spent the next three in a single.
As far as I am concerned having apartments of 4-8 students where each has their own small room but shares a common space is ideal. But usually this is reserved for sophomore year and later.
It depends on the person. I lived alone in my last year of undergrad and it sent me into a deep depression. I figured out that living alone was too much isolation for me and moved back in with a roommate. That helped to pull me out of my depression and be able to finish my degree.
True, but unfortunately the response from Stanford has been to introduce triple and quad rooms ;)
This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).
I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.
The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.
The diploma or credentials should be marked with the conditions of admission. That would prevent abuse from those who don't or shouldn't qualify for special admission conditions.
In the context of academics I’d call it manipulating, exploiting or scamming the housing system, rather than cheating. Just because academic cheating is the center-of-gravity for this type of conversation, and, IMO, a much much bigger deal.
If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.
So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.
That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
Donald Trump won twice. Republican party is mostly cheering everything he does. Ho won by lying a lot. Media mostly sanewashed it. Meanwhile, GOP complained they did not sanewashed it enough.
HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago.
The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.
Compared to what Trump does, what his voters cheers on, what the whole his party defends, those students are still basically saints. It is profoundly hypocritical to look at who gets to win and lead, to look at what does not bother his voters at all and then complain abet ... check notes ... someone getting single room on some exaggerated claim.
And frankly, with HN praising Uber, Tesla and the rest of SV constantly breaking laws and rules companies, again, those students are practically saints.
OP worried about this:
> Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
Trump winning second time, the people who lead government and GOP, the critical mass thing already happened. There was no moral already among significant share of population. Trying to pearl clutch over students is almost funny in that context.
> If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
It isn't, but if I'm on the hiring end and I know you play games like this, I'm not hiring you. I can work with less competent folks much better.
Cheating to get limited housing benefits starves those limited resources from truly disabled students who actually need them.
Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.
I reviewed incoming applications during one Oxbridge academic application cycle. I raised some serious concerns, nobody listened, and therefore I refuse to take part on that any longer. Basically, lots of students are pretending to be disabled to enhance their chances with applications that are not particularly outstanding, taking spots from truly disabled students.
All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system.
I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks.
Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
I use the word "cheating" like I use the word "hacking." The connotation can be either good or bad or contextually. You are defeating a system. The intent of the cheater/hacker is where we get into moral judgements. (This is a great sub-thread.)
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
The direct result of this thinking is that people who need the accommodation face difficulty in getting it.
You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.
But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)
Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.
You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.
I think you're reading more into what I said than what I intended.
I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.
There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.
The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.
Some levers are accessible to everyone, but the implied social contract is that you only pull it if you actually need it, because the system doesn't have enough resources for everyone to do it.
Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.
If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.
The problem is that people simply have no investment in a community anymore. This is a direct consequence of globalization and capitalism. Travel to a foreign land, exploit the locals, and return home. Westerners are just now realizing that they're on the receiving end of it now.
> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
I live in liberal cities. Nearly every car drive and bicycle rider has the attitude "F everyone else, I'm going to break every law if I find it inconvenient to myself. Who cares if it affects others"
This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"
People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.
I worded it in a way flexible to meet everyone's morals. Absent someone trying to performatively live a truly philosophically deontological life every person has some line where they will avail themselves of some available lever to remove some awful situation even if someone else might call it "cheating".
Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.
Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.
No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).
The problem is the promotion of values and behaviors that plague a low-trust society. I think making excuses for it is truly inappropriate and immoral.
I agree with you that cheating is a loaded word, but the question at the end here that the rules or standards enable users to work around it therefore it's not cheating is a bad semantic argument. We can use the exact same argument to excuse every kind of rule breaking that people do. If a hacker drains a billion dollars out of a smart contract, then they literally were only able to do so because the coded rules of the smart contract itself enabled it through whatever flaw the hacker identified. That doesn't make it less illegal or not cheating for the hacker. It feels like victim blaming to point the finger at the institution being exploited or people who get hacked and say its their problem not the individuals intentionally exploiting them.
Stealing from work was so normalized in the former USSR that it wasn't even considered stealing, just "carrying out". Jobs in meatpacking facilities were highly desired because even though nominal wages were low, workers could make so much more by selling on the black market. The entire system was rotten from top to bottom.
And when everybody else does it (and all assume that everybody does), it really ends up being true. That's why it's so hard to get out of this hole - telling people to "start with yourself" won't cut it, they need to see that others are doing the same as well rather than trying to benefit from the opportunity.
If you lie (or exaggerate) about a disability and claim a benefit, you could be denying somebody with more serious disabilities getting the help they need.
My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".
The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.
Being born to rich white people doesn't provide positive reinforcement for sleazy behavior at an age where people are likely to take the lesson seriously.
So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;
Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things.
The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias...
I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions.
[rant]
Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about.
[/rant]
So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you?
[0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis.
[1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased
[2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM)
[4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say?
[5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.
>> I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet
Maybe, but my single data point: I'm on the board for a condo corporation and even though we spend a lot of time dealing with pet policies and the damage pets (read: dogs) cause, we have a total of ZERO pets registered (and paying the monthly fee), and these are overwhelmingly owners not renters who might be excluded from having pets to begin with.
I appreciate the insight, I'm definitely conjecturing there and I'm sure there's a lot of variables.
I'm curious, is this a few bad owners ruining it for everyone or commonplace. My suspicion is the former, as those things typically follow power distributions.
But I think the complete lack of options forces people's hands. If you're a pet owner, what do you do? The option of paying a pet deposit and monthly fee is either simply not available or extremely limited. So I think it is a bit natural that the abuse of the ESA system happened. My options are get rid of my cat or get an ESA. It's an obvious choice. And with the ESA you cannot deny me rent nor charge extra. That's why I call it the nuclear option. I've always offered to pay a deposit but when told there's a no pet policy it turns into "oh, sorry, I 'forgot' to mention she's an ESA". Most people I know with ESAs never make the first offer.
Truth is that there was an arms race and the pet owners won. The question now is if it is more profitable to charge for pets or get no extra money for ESAs. Either way people will not give up their pets. I have a legitimate rec but I know you can get them for pretty cheap. So whats the move from here? I suspect the best move is for landlords to at least try to get money for the pets that are there anyways.
Note: the ESA issue is only a minor part of my comment. I don't personally care about this issue beyond keeping my cat. But the other uses I'm much more concerned about
I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this.
As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.
That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.
Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.
Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture
Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.
Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.
For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
> maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that
You're really close to getting it.
Students in school do not have this flexibility. They are required to be there, an 8th grader has no control and little influence over how their time is spent, or whether their tasks are a good match for their abilities.
So the only option in school is accommodation. There are some who continue to expect that into adulthood, but the vast majority of kids diagnosed with ADHD do not seek accommodation in their professional life.
Why? Because they do exactly what you propose. They find careers that match their disposition.
This is an important distinction. Indeed, many behaviors (ie attachment issues) that are maladaptive for an adult can be adaptive to a child and it is important to not change those without taking into account the environment a child is in.
An 8th grader may not have control over how their time is spent, but an attuned response from the people around them will help the child adapt.
A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb'
vs
A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb' and a caring figure in their life explaining to them 'you show traits of ADHD, this commonly makes it harder for you to focus on things like a math test. it really hurts when you fail the test and you wanted to get an A. Why don't you try again at the same problem at home, I believe in you. And maybe I will talk to your teacher about some extra time for the next test. We can't always get this, and even if you don't pass the test it's ok.'
> It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
They're both two sides of the same coin though. You can get a neurodivergent person to a level that they're able to function in life, but they won't thrive or be happy.
Do we think it's enough for people do be a productive worker or do we actually want to give them the ability to live their life to its fullest?
I don't see how you spending time in ways that work well with your challenges is different from your job providing accomodations, except that if your employer is willing to work with you then you don't have to randomly roll the dice until you come up with an employer where things happen to work in whatever way you wanted.
It's not like one of the accomodations on the table is "not doing your job"
1. The career I would like to have, and the life I desire to live, is my free choice. Once I've made that choice, the community's responsibility is to give me whatever I need so that I can apply myself to that career and live the life I imagine for myself.
vs
2. I have certain capabilities and limitations. The community has certain needs. If there's any way for me to do so, it's my responsibility to figure out how my capabilities can service the community's needs, respecting my limitations, and it's the community's reciprocal responsibility to make sure my contribution is fairly acknowledged so that I can live a secure and constructive life. I'll figure out the rest from there.
The difference is how you relate to the job providing accommodations. If you know certain employers are more willing and able to provide accommodations then you can consciously weigh that piece of information when considering a job/career field.
By consciously accepting who you are and how you work with the world, it lets you navigate better in it. For some people that is just feeling it out and ending up in a career that fits them. For some people, it might be getting a diagnosis. The end result might be the same.
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
Hmm ..the irony is that jobs that require the least amount of credentials have the least accommodations. White collar jobs, especially in tech, seem to have so many accommodations or delays and extra time. Think how often employees come in late or delay work. HR exists to accommodate these requests. College, and school in general, has far fewer accommodations and flexibility than seen in most work environments, save for low-skilled jobs where puantiality is necessary.
> Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
This stuck out to me, because even in tech, especially after being diagnosed with ADHD (out of desperately failing to adapt, despite technically being reasonably competent) my career and statistically that of many others is normally anything but stable. An overwhelming percentage of jobs and disciplines do not have any real affordances for just a little variation from the norm, and people broadly still do not believe the condition presents anything but hilarious superficial differences, but that otherwise if the person shares one skill with other employees they should be capable of being an arbitrary cog like any other.
"Other people are capable of showing up on time, why can't you!?"
"Well, I have ADHD, I have to take medication to regulate my dopamine levels and struggle with time blindless, it's a real problem that I wish I didn't have, but I do my best given regularly switching contexts and priorities"
"Ya, great, that's cute but show up on time, are we on the same page?"
"No, but I'll say yes because you can't understand, I have no choice, and I'll continue doing what I'm doing until you fire me for not meeting your expectations, even if they have nothing to do with the skill I do actually have and gravitate towards, and would like to continue applying in service of company growth or whatever"
"Great, then we're on the same page, and I'll just start checking in on you more frequently because clearly you're retarded, thanks"
----
The only people who do realistically get accomodations are either in super niche fields, are absolutely exceptional in their niche field, or are just on their own or in industries that require none of the normal things associated with their discipline.
> But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
... provided that that gauntlet hasn't stuck a label on you that makes everybody think you're unsuitable for any role, and provided that it's bothered to develop the abilities you do have, and provided that other people aren't being unnecessarily rigid about what roles they'll allow to exist.
Sure, maybe it's stupid to frame it as "THIS counts as being disabled and THAT doesn't"... but we have a world where many systems have decided to do that, and may act slightly less insanely inflexible if they've put you in the "disabled" bucket.
If everybody has some limitations, maybe everybody should get some accommodations. You know, so that they can actually contribute using their strengths. But I'm not holding my breath.
> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
I agree with almost everything you say here. However, I wanted to point out that you make the same mistake the articles author does. "Disabled" and "Diagnosed" are not actually the same thing, even though we do describe ADHD and the like as "learning disabilities."
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
That doesn't fit the authors narrative, or trigger the human animals "unfairness" detector though so it makes a far less interesting article.
A majority of the 38% are receiving accommodations:
> This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.
Mind, the disability rate for 18-34 year olds is 8.3% in the US, so even 24% is shockingly high. That's the same disability rate as 65-74 year olds.
You are actually landed on the difference between “impairment” and “disability”! They’re often used interchangeably (along with “handicapped”), but they have specific meanings.
The article is pretty clearly someone trying to drag disability on to the stage of the culture war because it's another group that's easy to other, imo.
This is the common gag reflex, but multiple things can be true at the same time; there can be a greater need for support of disabled persons AND a shocking abuse of the systems by priviledged students. Ditto for the need to support women & minorities at the same time as white males are doing poorly and need help.
Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
On pretty much every "culture war" issue the "left" fails to adequately grapple with bad actors and those that abuse empathetic policies to harm others or unfairly advance themselves. Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.
> Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
Of course it's terrible for the genuinley disabled. That said, I would rather accidently assist an able person than accidently fail to provide the required accommodations for a genuinely disabled person. The default should be acceptance.
Those who abuse these systems should be given an all expense paid trip to the surface of the sun. Ripping off the disabled is about as low as a person can get, and that is what they are doing.
The stats are thin because not everything from private universities (where the disability numbers are highest) is reported. However they did get this:
> L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator at Ohio State University, told me that 36 percent of the students registered with OSU’s disability office have accommodations for mental-health issues
Note that's only accommodations for mental health issues, so exclusive of the numerous other disability types.
I nearly failed high school and I flunked or dropped out of college four times. I just absolutely cannot work within the framework of modern schooling.
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.
The way my brain works is just fundamentally incompatible with school. Starting from fundamentals and building up just doesn't work for me. Especially when we spend six months on fundamentals that I grokked in the first three weeks. The way I learn is totally backwards. I start from the top, high-level concepts and dig down into the fundamentals when I hit something I don't understand. The tradeoff is that the way I think is so radically different from my colleagues that I can come up with novel solutions to any problem posed to me. On the other hand, solving problems is almost a compulsion.
That said, if I had the option I'd choose a normal childhood over being a smart engineer. Life has been extremely unkind to me.
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.
lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.
I have a friend like this he is absolutely the smartest I know, maybe not the most effective. My point is that most people have drawbacks. I much rather work with an autistic myself you learn to handle the quirks.
Not only is this such a cringe term (we may describe poor aptitude in an area as an exception but exceptional?) it's also not accurate. If you want a milquetoast label call them "spikey" to denote the array of dimensions and the variance, or multimodal or similar.
I mean, I didn't invent the term--but the literal definition of "exceptional" doesn't necessarily mean that something is positive, only that it's outside the norm.
Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.
> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge.
Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their career.
A new patient who tries Adderall will feel a sense of euphoria, energy, and motivation that is temporary. This effect does not last. This is why the Reddit ADHD forums are full of people posting "I just took my first dose and I'm so happy I could cry" followed a few weeks later by "Why did my Adderall stop working?". The focus part is still mostly working, but no drug is going to make you feel happy, energized, and euphoric for very long.
> Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
You're confusing two different things. Registering with the school's disability office is orthogonal to getting a prescription for anything.
Everything can be abused or used incorrectly. If you drink too much water you remove salts from your body and get sick.
With Adderall (or Vyvanse) good protocol is to get small dose, like 5-10mg early morning once every one or two weeks. Then you’ll get boost when really needed and feel uplifting for few more days.
Abusing adderall can obviously go wrong, but if you do it right you take it once every month or so and have minimal long term effects. Stanford students arent using it for the euphoria, theyre using it so they can study all night without getting distracted. Its also not a miracle drug, you have to be in the right mindset for it to work and a lot of the people who use it dont understand that.
Utter bullshit engineered to convince students not to do drugs. Adderall doesn't make you magically better at solving the knapsack problem, it's not NZT-48 from Limitless. That's not why anyone takes it.
This is actually another growing problem: TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it. Among new TRT patients, a large number of them didn't even have bloodwork drawn before receiving their first prescription.
Many of the TRT clinics also hide the fact that going on TRT results in testicular atrophy and lifelong dependence. The forums and Reddits are full of people who decided that injecting testosterone every couple days for the rest of their life isn't all it's cracked up to be are realizing that it's not so simple for everyone to get off of it, even with all the HCG, SERMs, and PCT in the world.
TRT is one of those things which requires precise and active management. But it also increases quality of life and well-being so much for 45yo and beyond that it’s insane not to use it. (And same thing with HRT for women).
Your choice is to die chronically ill, weak and depressed for decades, or feeling great and enjoying your later years.
The issue of course is "medical science" has continually lowered what is normal. Men 50 years ago had significantly higher testosterone than today. The blood work normal CI reflects this decrease. In reality, any man lower than 600 should probably be supplementing TRT. However, you're not likely to get it prescribed before you are below 300, and even then, it'll be just enough to get you back over the curve. There's basically no risk to it as long as you keep your total test <= 1000 ng/dL (and probably <= 800 ng/dL tbh).
The median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL. 20 years before it was ~550 ng/dL. 20 years before that we were above 600 ng/dL. Men are falling ill with more chronic illness, having more sexual dysfunction, and have more feminized features. We should probably be asking ourselves why this is happening rather than adjusting blood work CI's down.
where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
Then accommodations should not be needed if they are so easy, unless I am missing something?
Accommodations don't have to be used in all classes. They might need accommodations in an English class and no accommodations in the scientific or math classes. Usually this isn't evaluated per class, it's evaluated per student and then it's up to the student to use or not use the accommodations for the various classes they take.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway.
There are certainly way more neurodivergent people in tech. But 38%?? I don't think so. And I think you're conflating HN nerdery with actual medical issues that mean you need extra time on tests. I'd believe that e.g. 30% of HN are pretty weird nerds, but there's absolutely no way that means they all need extra time on tests.
> As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
Somehow it is impossible for people to blame the system, but instead they diagnose physical deficits in children based on their inability to adjust to the system.
Maybe the random way we chose to mass educate children a couple hundred years ago isn't perfect, and children are not broken?
Blame the system is only useful if there is a different/changed system that would be better. The current system isn't perfect, but if you can't handle it I'm not aware of any change that would be worth it - there are a lot of changes that would get worse results (sometimes for everyone, sometimes for a different subgroup of people). Remember results is not how well you do in school, it is how well you do in life after school that counts. (economics is only one measure of this, it is important because wealth is a good proxy for a lot of useful things like enough food)
TL;DR: Disability is not inherent in difference, but rather a combination of the difference and an environment in which that difference is not well-supported. For an analogy - a deep-sea fish is blind, but not disabled by their blindness. Similarly, a kid who "can't sit still" isn't disabled unless we put them in an environment where they have to.
Ok but such a person who thinks this way is definitionally in need of help; who would waste any brain wattage caring about this? Do they also need government subsidies to pay attention to their own lives?
Cheating is the malicious interpretation, same way steroids are considered cheating in other competitions. (college admission is a competition, there are fixed number of seats and you cheating to get a seat hurts someone else.)
>If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.
>Not rocket science.
Yep. I see adverts for Psoriasis and so, of course, I developed Psoriasis although I never had it before I saw the adverts. I see adverts for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and, of course, then developed it because I am a "potential market."
Even better, I see adverts for tampons, sanitary pads and "feminine' deodorants. As such, I underwent gender reassignment surgery so I could then purchase said products because I'm a "potential market."
Yes, the above is satirical. And no, I don't purchase products because " they spend that money advertising"
If I show you an advert for brassieres, are you then forced to purchase them because of all the money spent on such adverts? Are you even slightly tempted to do so?
If I show you an advert for literal snake oil as a cure-all, are you then powerless to stop yourself from purchasing it?
I hate to break it to you, but we Americans aren't slaves to, or required to spend money based on, consumer advertising.
Heck, I don't drink Coca-Cola or Budweiser. If what you say were true, I'd literally be drowning in that garbage.
Please take your ridiculous stereotypes elsewhere.
One example of a malicious explanation would be: people are lying about having a disability to get some sort of benefits they don’t need, likely at the expense of someone who does need those benefits.
Taking the drugs legally, maybe; it is very much illegal to sell the kind of amphetamines used to treat ADHD. Ritalin, for instance, is a schedule II drug, and it is a felony to sell without a prescription.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
> there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
How do you know this?
Do you have access to their medical records?
Are you in HR and have access to any accomodations they may have filed?
Do they even have accommodations filed at work? Neither I nor many of the people I knew in university who had accommodations needed them in the workplace because the structure of an undergrad course setting is wildly different from that of an actual workplace.
I have told HR at basically every place I've worked that I had filed for accommodations during university and that I generally manage my disability well but that I may need to file for formal accommodations at some point in the future. This isn't something that I've necessarily told people I work with and it's not visible or obvious. Most disabilities aren't.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Were you a solo founder of 5 companies? I literally cannot fathom that you worked at 5 even very modest-sized tech companies and never experienced a colleague with some level of what we’d call neurodivergent.
I can’t validate that the rate is 38%, but I find it hard to believe it’s under 5% and if it’s 5%, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid crossing paths across 5 companies and 15 years.
I'd say 30-40% is definitely in line with what I saw at various FAANG employers. Though it may be that other types of employer optimise less for those attributes.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
Have you considered that you yourself may be neurodivergent?
Ah, you accidentally showed your hand there. DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes. Whether or not that is appropriate, or if the system was unfair, is arguable; fictitious "benefits" are not.
No one gets a DEI check from the government. But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities, we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.
> DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes.
So it is not a benefit to be hired for a role over your peers because you satisfy an ethnic requirement needed for an arbitrary quota? I dont know about you, I'd sure love to have that on my side.
I don't know how you can define DEI without enumerating benefits these policies provide to certain groups of people, some of which, like the ones being discussed, have very flexible boundaries.
> No one gets a DEI check from the government.
We are discussing private institution(s). But if left unchecked that could expand to local governments.
> But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities
Oh, I've seen plenty of people who had disabilities for the purposes of draft/mandatory military service.
> we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.
Your ability to figure out other people's information sources is most certainly no better than my ability to figure out if people have mental disabilities.
Have you considered the fact that you may be neurodivergent? Your assumption that you’ve never met a neurodivergent co-worker is surprising.
From what I understand, some autistic people assume everyone has the same worldview and agenda as they do, they lack a theory of mind. I’m not making this accusation about you, I’m bringing it up because I find it surprising that everyone you’ve worked with is neurotypical.
I can usually tell if someone is neurodivergent or not within the first minute of meeting them, usually just from eye contact and body language.
> I’m bringing it up because I find it surprising that everyone you’ve worked with is neurotypical.
So there are two potential explanations there. The one where I don't see neurodivergence where it does exist and the other one where you do see it where it does not. Would you be OK with 50/50 probability each of these options being right as the baseline assumption?
> Have you considered the fact that you may be neurodivergent?
I scrolled through some of their Reddit comment history (it's linked on their profile) and I think I would peg them as probably autistic. Their patterns of emphasis, placements of sentence breaks, certain turns of phrases and pattern of emotional expression seem to closely match a few autistic friends I have & a few autistic coworkers. Research on this hasn't fully developed though so I can't really offer references (other than the preprint that inspired me, https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...)... I still don't really have a non-ambiguous way to call the different types.
> > The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Just another anecdote, but where I work (tech startup) there are at least 7 other employees (that I know of) and I can identify every single one as autistic. Three are one type, another three are another type, and I think the one other as well as myself are the same type.
Research in the space hasn't advanced enough yet for this to be consensus, but in my opinion this preprint is exactly correct, and is what taught me that there are even subtypes to recognize at all: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...
There are, of course, plenty of non-neurodivergent tech companies. These are typically boring corporate ones, though I think there are some non-flashy ones that are perfectly respectable. I don't think Microsoft would count, though; Asperger's can look a lot like a lack of neurodivergence if you don't pay close enough attention.
My company is about 100 people. I regularly interact with maybe 12. I'm AuDHD and so are at least 5 others---4 that I have regular interaction with and have told me, and one who I do not have regular interaction with but told me anyway. There are also at least 3 pure ADHD people.
> Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
The person is clearly retarded themselves. Let's not judge too harshly
“Smart kid” who did “poorly at school” is a fascinating doublespeak. School is where you demonstrate you are smart. Skilled is different from smart btw. Not being able to do an integral but being able to tune a holly four barrel carb are not the same thing. It’s just baffling that you would make this claim.
I don't know about Stanford students' actual disability, so I can't say much to that. I went to shitty high school and decent middle school in relatively poor middle class neighborhood. Now, I live in a wealthy school district. The way parents in the two different neighborhood treat "learning disability" is mind blowing.
In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.
In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.
>Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids
Sure it does, those extra teachers don't work for free. I think kids should get the help they need, but it's silly to pretend that it doesn't cost money that could be going towards other things.
I'm in a upper-middle neighbourhood and my kids go to public school. Not having a individual learning plan is the exception (I think that makes me double-exceptional). Classrooms DO NOT get more education assistant resources and combine this will the move to integrate kids who ehsitorically wouldn't consider attending regular school means teachers spend all their time managing the classroom and the parents.
>> the older one doesn't talk in school, period.
If the kid is completely non-verbal there's no way they should be in a class with regular kids. This is extremely unfair to the class.
My kid hated school in kindergarten as well. As did I. I didn't get any kind of intervention, and I feel like that set me on a terrible course.
My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.
I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.
> Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits.
There is a limited amount of money in the school system. When resources are assigned to one place they are taken away from somewhere else. The kids in the class without IEP students are getting boned by this policy.
I do. I still subscribe to your ideals or at least mostly follow them. But for lack of playing such games, I saw my children’s opportunities slip away.
My kids are not that old, so it hasn't come to a head yet. I presume you're talking about school performance - particularly closer to high school?
At the same time, we may need to adjust our baseline on what we call "opportunities".
I've lived in other countries, and one of the nice things about the US is how uncompetitive school is. One could (and likely still can) get into a decent "average" university without much difficulty. In other countries, not so. You could be in the top 10% academically and end up in a really low quality university. I would understand playing such games there.
>I've lived in other countries, and one of the nice things about the US is how uncompetitive school is. One could (and likely still can) get into a decent "average" university without much difficulty. In other countries, not so. You could be in the top 10% academically and end up in a really low quality university. I would understand playing such games there.
The difference is you're going to pay nosebleed prices or take out extortionate student loans in the US.
Yes, but you get to go. In plenty of other countries, there are far fewer seats than students graduating from high school. Being merely above average means no college degree.
(Well, except they also have private schools, but the cost to income ratio is much higher there than here).
>> But for lack of playing such games, I saw my children’s opportunities slip away.
Examples? I most certainly don't play these games and believe my kids are further along in developing the most valuable, lasting characteristic: grit. So many things in life require you to grind, and the only way to gain this is to practice.
Children were passed up for elementary school admissions. Whereas the schmoozers and their kids got in.
I can’t provide proper education and practice. There is no grit or grind. They’re just falling further and further behind the ones who actually got access to good schools and teachers.
One who tested highly gifted (145 IQ) after years of educational neglect now tests at 120. It’s pathetic. And even if I spend all my time and money I cannot reverse the decline.
Because I can’t access good schools and teachers. Because I didn’t schmooze to the admissions directors and other gate keepers.
I should’ve worn better clothes, driven a Porsche, and displayed the right shibboleths. Except that even now I’m too immature and stupid to know what they are.
>Except that even now I’m too immature and stupid to know what they are.
This is the bigger problem, not the type of car or clothes you drive. I dress like a schlub and drive a Toyota and don't feel any of the social pressures you're talking about. I think it's in your head.
>145 -> 120 IQ decline
You're also putting way way too much emphasis on this test. The methodology of IQ tests is also entirely questionable. I'd hardly be judging myself as a parent based on this.
It may be, but it also could be the community/town he lives in. I certainly do know schools where you need to play games to get admission, and dressing like a schlub would exclude you (which is fine, given I have alternatives - he perhaps doesn't).
> The methodology of IQ tests is also entirely questionable. I'd hardly be judging myself as a parent based on this.
Fully agree on ignoring the IQ (why would one even get it tested?)
However, I suspect he does see other signals of decline, and sees those who went to the school achieve more.
from my understanding of educational outcomes, the BIGGEST factor in a child’s success in school is their home life. At least for K-12. Multiple studies come to this conclusion.
Obviously “home life” encompasses many things like parental involvement, stability of family relationships, socioeconomic status, etc. And it’s not the only factor of course.
So the question is hardly uncalled for IMO. Could have been worded in a less accusatory tone though! The person was pretty rude.
Opportunities to be among the insufferable nepo baby cohort?
The most revealing example of this was when I found out how many of UK's 'elite' school children were molested, grew up and proceeded to do everything they can to make sure their children attend these very same 'elite' schools.
If you don't mind sharing, which country do you live in? I'd imagine the ability to play fairly and still get ahead varies a lot based on local cultures/norms.
Interesting. I'm glad it worked it for you, but unfortunately that's very different from what my personal/anecdotal experience with America has taught me.
I think one has to be a bit careful in picking one's goals and priorities. I'm not saying "going the straight path" will lead to success in all endeavors (likely not at Wall Street, for example).
In my case, it so happened that the goals I was pursuing (e.g. job in tech industry) had lots of opportunities that didn't involve playing many games. I think it's still the case today.
But if your goal is "I have to go to an elite university, and become a senior exec at a FAANG", then my way may not work out.
The one variable that's hard to control, though, is how things are growing up (childhood/teen years). You can't control these - your parents/school do. If you grew up in an unfair environment and had poor parents, you may have to play those games. My point is that once you get past those stages, you don't have to convince yourself that you need to continue playing those games.
Yup, a few bad apples start things off, and then after that many others who would have never been the first to do this decide to jump on the bandwagon (lest they be left behind). If it weren't for the shameless folks at the beginning, it wouldn't happen. But once they kick things off, it's a domino effect from there.
For all of human existence there has been competition for limited resources. Until all resource scarcity is eliminated competition will remain in the natural world.
Counter theory: for all of human existence people have shared resources and traded among each other. Yes, for truly scarce resources trade breaks down.
So is "good housing" a scarce resource on Stanford's campus? Or is their default resource allocation schema too anti-human so it's turning something that should be a simple trade and negotiation problem into a knife-fight?
Thats true, but I think the blame is more on "American society" and not the kids working through the system.
50 years ago, college was cheaper. From what I understand getting jobs if you had a college degree was much easier. Social media didn't exist and people weren't connected to a universe of commentary 24/7. Kids are dealing with all this stuff, and if requesting a "disability accommodation" is helping them through it, that seems fine?
That seems naive, it would be like if we started dumping tons of deer food into the woods and the next year when deer are grossly overpopulated we thought "why are there so many deer now?".
Humans are as a mass dumb animals, if we give them the opportunity for individual gratification at long-term cost for the group they are going to take it immediately.
Failing out of college can be life-ruining. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-interest non-dischargeable debt and employment opportunities completely nuked.
Come on, let's be serious. Most Stanford undergraduate courses aren't that tough, grade inflation is rampant, and almost anyone who gets admitted can probably graduate regardless of accommodations or lack thereof. We're talking about the difference between getting an A or A- here. And Stanford has such generous financial aid that students from families earning less than $150K get free tuition so no one should be leaving with huge student debts.
Depends highly on your field. There are plenty of military personnel and commercial pilots hiding things or avoiding being seen for any kind of treatment, because a diagnosis could lose them their jobs.
Rolling out electronic health records has been a disaster for military recruiting, because such a large portion of kids flat-out lied on the medical screening, and 60+ percent of the population is already disqualified.
Long ago I remember reading society in China was like this. There's SO MANY people that you HAVE TO cheat the system to even maintain pace with your peers, much less get ahead. And cheating is so rampant that it's expected you will do it.
Really sad that mentality seems to be normalizing world-wide.
But, like—isn’t the bleaker thing that that seems so existential of an outcome? The vast majority don’t go to Stanford. The vast majority of those aren’t valedictorian.
And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war…
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories,
I’ll buy this
>professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system,
I doubt this. Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
That is not to say things are worse than before. But humans view the world in relative terms, and they seem to expect more than reality can offer. And whereas before there was ignorance, today, there is widespread knowledge and visibility into the gulf between the have nots, the haves, and the have even mores.
> Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
Healthcare sure, but for Americans, it is culturally and institutionally seen as a core part of justice that the guilty have their future destroyed. That it affects those dependent on the guilty is a part of that destruction, it's trying to isolate them from others. If you still have your family around, has your life truly been destroyed? Among American people it might not be universal, and may seem absolutely barbaric, but the extreme malignance of American justice is more or less consistent with a wide swath of attitudes Americans have, especially when they're the ones who have been severely harmed.
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war
By those metrics yes, but not by the more important metrics IMO of: buying a house, having a stable job, starting a family, etc.
Can we stop designing society like people won't game the system? I swear every social program or benefit or corporate relief program we roll out is designed to be exploited. In fact they use specific requirements (a doctors note, a set income level, etc.) and not direct oversight/discretion so it is even easier to game because you just need to tick the right box.
I was happy enough getting into the second best uni in my country on my own merit- I know that I could have gotten into the best if I talked about family members and pets passing and personal challenges like all my friends but that doesn't benefit anyone.
True but I don't think that's out of the norm. The upper echelons of American society always consisted of a bunch of fake status games and abuses, a legacy admission is basically a socially accepted form of disability. Or non-ability, I guess.
America never had a rigorous meritocratic national system of education, it's a kind of half developed country in that sense that became democratic before it modernized (that is to say patronage survived) so you have this weird combination of family clans, nepo babies and networks competing with people who are where they are based on their performance.
>If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
This isn't even true either. In the past there was a huge emphasis and effort made toward character. Going out of your way to do the right thing and be helpful and NOT getting special treatment but choosing the difficult path.
Now everything is the opposite it's about getting as much special treatment as possible and shirking as much responsibility and this isn't just people it's throughout the corporate and political system as well.
I'm aware. See for instance, VC Arielle Zuckerberg's comment that when deciding which founders to fund she looks for "a little of the rizz and a little of the tis" with "rizz" referring to charisma and "tis" to autism.
One could argue that mythologizing a particular characteristic is itself a form of stigma.
Performing well academically is not at all mutually exclusive with ADHD or Autism. In fact, it is possible for those to manifest in ways that benefit academic performance. It also isn't really surprising that students in a highly competitive environment would suffer from anxiety and depression.
I suspect that many of these people would be able to make it through college with good grades regardless of accomodations, but at the cost of reduced emotional and mental health.
And there are also probably others who legitimately have ADHD or Autism, but don't really need any special accommodation to do well academically.
I go to one of those elite universities now, and I get academic accommodations. I think some of the increase is truly from greater awareness about disabilities among teachers and parents. My mom was a teacher, and she was the one who first suspected that I had dyslexia. I repeated kindergarten, and I was privileged that my parents were able to afford external educational psychology testing. Socioeconomic status is a large part of my success. Even seemingly small things like the fact that my parents could pick me up after school so that I could go to tutoring was something that other kids didn’t have, because their parents were working or didn’t have a car.
So you are a long way from Kindergarten to an elite university. I mention this because it is odd to me that you picked your 4 to 5 year old self to validate why you are getting accommodations in your teens/twenties at a self-described elite university.
My own kids have some issues and varying levels of accommodations, but those have evolved and lessened over time. As you would hope they would! You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations now as you did 15 years ago?
Sorry, I am trying not to be offensive here but I am genuinely confused.
The point they made about grade school, to me, points more towards early recognition now leads to more kids having a shot at top schools.
Not because they have a 'disability' or a particular type of accommodation, but because it was caught early enough and worked with by people that cared, that now they have a model for learning that better suits them. It was never an issue with intelligence, only that some of us* run into walls because the standard learning lane is pretty narrow. Crashing into those walls in grade school is likely what kept many people* from going to top colleges (or any college) -- but now that it's better understood and worked with at an early age we are seeing people show up who can do the same correct work, but do it in a way that's different.
* Im also dyslexic, but from the days that wasn't a thing in my mediocre public school. I was simply a slow reader that couldn't spell (or pronounce or "sound out" words) or read out loud, but somehow had high scores in other language/comprehension test.
You incorrectly drew an implication. The authors words only actually imply that some accommodations are still needed, not that they are the same accommodations.
This conclusion is obvious given that the underlying condition is not curable.
You inferred or assumed that...OP didn't say it. It's common sense that accommodations would be different for children just learning to read vs. university students.
I think they mean to refute the article's suggestion that tiktok and misinformation are the cause by highlighting that they received accommodations at a young age.
>You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations
They didn't share the nature of their current accommodations.
No offense taken. My first point was that some of these students were legitimately diagnosed with learning disabilities long before grades, the SAT, or college admissions were even a thought. I also should have been more clear that I wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD until I was around 9, so I went from needing to repeat grades to being more successful in school as a result of getting the support I needed.
My overall point is that learning disabilities like dyslexia have no impact on intelligence, and accommodations just level the playing field. I imagine that if I hadn't been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, I wouldn't have made it to the same school.
But for people who truly need academic accommodations, the playing field will never be level, because every aspect of school takes them longer. I don't get more time to study for exams, and if it takes me twice as long to read and comprehend the same chapter of a textbook as someone without dyslexia, I have to study twice as long just to get through the same content. I think it's fair that I get to take notes using "prohibited technology" during lecture when it is impossible for me to decode what the lecturer is saying fast enough to turn it into handwritten notes.
However, I agree with the article that the percentage of students who claim to have disabilities has gotten out of control. Almost 60% of the students in the extended exam room finish the exam in the standard time anyway. It does make it appear as though everyone with accommodations is gaming the system.
Having ADHD and dyslexia is not "quirky" or fun. It consistently ruins my life. It is not something I make part of my identity.
This will probably get me voted into oblivion, but reading your posts here, I wonder how you would do if accommodations were taken away from you entirely in your elite university.
Maybe I am completely wrong, but I suspect rather strongly you would do just fine based on what I am reading here.
And before people flame me into oblivion, in addition to my own kids I know lots of others with significant learning disabilities. They have one thing in common: they don't write like this.
Yeah I suspect that people are being over-diagnosed, but I also suspect we're catching dramatically more cases than we were previously. An overcorrection if you will.
The "left handedness" graph change that occurred once we stopped punishing people for being left handed. Same sort of thing here. We'll stabilize once we get good at diagnosing it and stop stigmatizing it. We're in a period where the graph is changing, and that change is disruptive, but it'll level out.
Sure. We're also changing rubrics and even inventing new conditions, and we don't really try to graduate them. On top of that, there are perverse incentives. Amphetamine is an amazing drug, and since some people get it, those who don't find it hard to compete. So, we have to give them a way to get it, because the side effect of not doing that is popping them with felony drug trafficking charges at the airport. I don't blame anyone for playing the game.
Suspecting is reasonable. So is suspecting it is under-diagnosed.
Ranting about how all these diagnoses are fake is not.
Time may revise our opinions of the current state, but with the exception of malpracticing professionals, the diagnoses are valid for given state of medical health knowledge.
Typically means more time to take tests than the standard allotment, but could mean other things- a digital version with a screen reader that speaks the questions to you, or something else specific to your disability.
This sort of scamming has been going on for a long time, by rich kids particularly. I remember 20 years ago I was surprised to learn that one of my friends, a very clever guy from a very well off family, was supposedly so profoundly disabled that he could do all of his tests overnight and at home. When I asked him how he got such a sweet deal, the answer was "My dad's a doctor."
I'm mostly a law professor these days. When final-exam time rolls around (as in, this week), I raise my eyebrows when I'm sent the list of students who get 50% extra time. I wouldn't presume to judge the propriety of any given student's accommodation. But many of the accommodated students seem to have done just fine in class discussions during the semester.
FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth."
FWIW, consider that some of these students may need the accommodation specifically because of the pressure of the final exam. Many mental health disabilities will become worse with stress. A low stress environment and a high stress final exam could trigger entirely different symptoms.
For example, I have OCD (real, diagnosed, not the bs "omg im so ocddddd"). I have extra time accommodations because I have to spend time dealing with my OCD symptoms. With treatment, they tend to fade into the background. They re-emerge only in high stress situations. I would seem like a perfectly normal student in class, but then clearly start struggling with these symptoms if you watched me take an exam. Consider, many other students you teach may have these same experiences.
> some of these students may need the accommodation specifically because of the pressure of the final exam.
Success as a lawyer often requires the ability to handle a certain amount of pressure. Timed exams are one way of screening for that ability. But it's by no means a sure-fire predictor of success: Legendary trial lawyer Joe Jamail [0] flunked his first-year Torts class at UT Austin [1], yet went on to become a billionnaire.
Then they don't belong in the law field or wherever, simple as that. My son has OCD pretty bad, and I know there are roles he is unsuitable for. One of the things he does is confesses about every little thing that happens--he can't keep a secret or tell a lie. It's socially debilitating.
I don't see how getting 50% extra time on exams is anything remotely close to cheating. Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.
> Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.
An unpleasant fact of law-school faculty life is that, at least at my school, I'm required to grade students so that the average is between 3.2 (a high B) and 3.4 (a low B-plus). Because of the nature of my course [0], a timed final exam is about the only realistic way to spread out The Curve.
If everybody gets extension, say a 2 hr test becomes 3 hrs, then eventually there will be someone who claims 3 hrs is the new normal time and still demand an extension over that.
It really depends on the perception of whether the goal of the extension is to give disabled students an edge over "normal" students or to give everyone a fair(not necessarily equal) opportunity to complete the test.
New York Times had an interesting podcast recently where they talked about how so many children are being diagnosed with autism to the point where it's hurting the severely autistic student population (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/podcasts/the-daily/autism...). There's a finite set of resources pooled for special needs students, and now most of these students have relatively minor symptoms compared to those with "profound autism" (which is a severe disability associated with the inability to speak or live independently).
I suspect this is similar - rich parents are doing anything for an edge in their child's education and can get any diagnosis they desire. It's an unfair system.
For those with more mild issues, they should really be realistic about what the needs are.
I was diagnosed in my 40s with ASD and ADHD. It may have been helpful to know earlier (though I could debate both sides of that), but I didn’t need any special classes or helpers that would take resources from others. I’m wondering if some kids are saying they need this stuff to justify the condition or to play up the sympathy, to make the condition their personality.
It is interesting how accommodations can reveal dysfunctions in educational practice. In my courses, requests for accommodations generally change the course design for all students. This is because the accommodation does not alter expected learning outcomes, but it is clearly something that aids students with difficulty learning the material succeed. My goal is that all students succeed in the expected learning outcomes. I don't want the course to be challenging for the wrong reasons. So often the request reveals something I was doing that is unnecessary and makes the class more difficult for little reason. That isn't to say that there are not learning environment that should add additional stress. Sometimes such conditioning is needed so that one can succeed in the challenges they are being trained for. That isn't the case for my students.
> the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
Isn't that... good? What else would be expected if you have a disability, and need accomodations?
The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article:
> In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.
So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
Being diagnosed with the disorder does not automatically qualify as a disability. This article, and many people in this thread seem not to be able to distinguish between the rising rate of diagnoses, and being disabled or needing accommodation.
I have been diagnosed as being several different types of neuro-divergent, but I am also not qualified as disabled and do not need or want any special dispensation. I would say that I have been relatively successful in life by almost anyone's metrics without it.
There is still an enormous advantage in understanding yourself, even without the expectation of accommodation or medication. I was also, sadly, not diagnosed until my mid-40's.
I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
>I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
When I have thoughts like this, I like to theorize about causality. If I had had an easier time when I was young, would I still have developed the qualities that helped me get to where I am now in the first place?
Have you gotten one of these notes yourself? It's not trivial. It's a huge pain in the ass, and everyone along the path is saying, "I don't believe you".
I have, and my experience does not match yours. It was extremely trivial and was little more than (1) booking a psych appointment, (2) filling out an intake ADHD questionnaire at home (which can easily be filled out to give whatever diagnosis you'd desire), (3) meeting the psych & getting a formal diagnosis, and (4) picking up my Rx from the pharmacy.
This is not what they're describing. Have you ever gone through the process of receiving an accommodation at a university? It is significantly more challenging than just having a diagnosis. They will look for every single possible excuse to refuse you access. They will require you to repeatedly book new doctor's appointments to get extremely specific wording for any accommodation you may need. Your doctor will have to fill out multiple forms for the university. Then, for each class, you will have to meet with every professor you have to request your accommodations. Many of these professors will try to talk you out of using them, or find ways to get around them.
Dx out here required all those steps plus attestations from family and teachers, historical accounts, written narratives, a check in with the GP, bloodwork and blood pressure, and ongoing follow ups at least quarterly.
Plus all that happens before you get an accommodation, which is a wholly separate process.
If it turns out half of all people have something, it's just normal human stuff. Today's ADHD is likely a symptom of tiktoking your brain's serotonin out or some other chemical
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
You've missed the point. How does Stanford end up with 38% of their students claiming to have a disability while other schools only have 3%? Are the other schools illegally discrimating against these students, so that their only alternative is Stanford? Or is it possible that something anomalous is happening at Stanford?
While it doesn't explain the whole difference, it's not surprising that Stanford has a higher rate. First: the more demanding the environment the more likely you are to find (got example) milder ADHD to impact your life. Second: the more well off you are or more access to resources you have, the more likely you are to actually care to get diagnosed. Third: stressful environment can actually cause serious issues, suddenly. For non-education reasons I suddenly gained panic attacks while I was at uni and they took years to go away.
On the contrary, it’s very surprising. There’s no way that 38% of people are disabled by any definition of the word. 10× differences between the disability rate between schools simply should not exist.
Where does the idea/reasoning that highly academically successful students cannot have a disability come from?
I would go a step further and say there is probably a high chance that neurodivergent students are more academically successful, iff they did get to that level of education. And it's not impossible that they are overrepresented in that group of people.
And people may be intellectually gifted, and yet experience strong behavioral and social difficulties. Not that my own observation counts but I've met multiple people on the spectrum who were highly intelligent and "gifted" yet faced more adversity in life, i.e. for social reasons. It's controversial because it directly goes against the idea that we exist in a meritocracy.
People are going to cheat no matter what. To me, it's more important that the people who do need and deserve accomodations are able to get them though!
Nobody said that. They are saying or insinuating that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled. That certainly was not the case as recently as a decade or two ago. People have not changed drastically, so what gives?
Change in diagnosis criteria, that doesn't mean people before weren't disabled.
You need to understand people with ADHD usually overcompensate to meet the academic performance needed and it is not sustainable in the long run.
It also doesn't mean they need accommodations, just that they are categorized as disabled in some way or form.
> They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled.
Which is an unreasonable claim.
I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.
The necessary doctor's note can be trivially purchased without any meaningful evidence of disability. I know a number of children of wealthy families with these notes. They don't even pretend to be disabled, possession of the note makes it beyond question.
Buying an advantage for your children in this way is widespread. This article suggests that it is even more widespread than I imagined.
So, let's say we make it more difficult to get "proof" of disability, something that requires more than just a doctor's note.
Won't these rich people also be able to trivially acquire these, while people who actually need accomodations will continue to struggle because it's difficult to prove they need something?
Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it.
Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.
And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that.
Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to.
But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict.
Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious.
Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing.
And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints.
So, what do you do then?
> then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled
Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action.
Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
I wouldn't hold that against him that much--the overabundance of handicapped parking spots is reason enough to game that one. It's ridiculous. My wife could have qualified for a placard because of her cancer and she was in a wheelchair for awhile, but we didn't bother getting one.
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.
Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.
---
To the edit, I can agree.
We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).
ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.
If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
This question lacks nuance. Where do you draw the line? I'd draw one at suicide thoughts that you can't stop on your own and before seriously considering using any kind of psychoactive drugs for self-medication. Anything else IMO needs about as much medical intervention as a low fever case of common cold.
Oh, and once these two lines are back at comfortable distance you stop.
That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it.
Right. What I'm saying is that we've probably screwed up by creating a system that incentivizes people to "be disabled" even if they really are stretching the definition of disabled
I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
I don't think you understand my position and you're certainly reading tone I didn't intend into my words
I am nearsighted, I am ADHD, I am hearing impaired in one ear, I am celiac. All of these are lifetime conditions that are not going anywhere
If glasses didn't exist, I would certainly be disabled. But let's be real, no one considers glasses a disability, even though glasses are just as important to a vision impaired person as a wheelchair is to a walking impaired person
Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely, for one, so perhaps I'm more of an authority on this subject than most commenters here. I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I had a rather difficult time despite obviously having it (ie was late to the intake appointment). In particular it involved a questionnaire about current and childhood symptoms, and both myself and my parents had to answer it.
> I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I'm not sure about this one, but there is no treatment for ASD and so no particular reason to have a diagnosis, so there is probably less interest in giving you one.
> have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely,
And that makes you competent to determine the value of the disability claims of others and the appropriate accommodations such folks should receive?
Really?
Then again, you are the eminent galaxy-wide expert on such things, aren't you bananalychee.
Will you honor my request to impregnate my wife and daughters so they can carry offspring that's so much more valuable than anyone else on the planet? Pretty please!
> I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely
That's awfully convenient isn't it. The 38% of Stanford students claiming to be disabled must have a good reason for it while those of us who understand how easy it is to be diagnosed with a so-called "disability" must be lying. Do you honestly believe that roughly half of the people you meet need special accommodations to study and work?
Yes, because half the people I know do need special accommodations. Maybe if you didn't go out of your way to avoid disabled people you'd notice us when we exist.
Are we overlooking the possibility that ADHD is skyrocketing in generations which are now entering colleges (due to cell phone use and software designed to hijack their attention, the tiktok-ification of the internet, and so on) and students at demanding colleges are more likely to seek diagnosis?
That doesn't seem outrageously high for a high cap school?
15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.
Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.
Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.
We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.
Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?
> 15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.
Stanford is not a random sample of the global population. Most notably, Stanford undergraduates are young, primarily between 18-24[1]. 8.7% of people in the US from ages 18-29 have a disability [2].
8.3% of Americans 18-34yo have a disability according to the Census department.
Stanford's rate is 4.3x higher than that.
Add in that half of all students who claim a disability have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college, all the reports of rampant cheating in school, the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal where some parents helped their kid fake disabilities to get ahead, and even people here who seem to think it's ok to defraud the system to get ahead?
I think perhaps elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics to deny them entry since the last thing the world needs is more unethical people in positions of power.
> elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics
You are perhaps mistaking which side of the line Stanford would select for. It is a school that produces and prefers sociopaths. Its engineering curriculum, almost uniquely among universities, has no requirement for an ethics course. You can fulfill Stanford's "Technology in Society" requirement by taking a course where you network with VCs for a semester. It is a factory for making jerks.
The Stanford admission process could lead to a higher percentage of people with conditions that are classified as disabilities, but give them an edge.
Albert Einstein was a smart guy and very accomplished… yet his wife had to paint is house door red so he knew where he lived. He very likely had what we would now call ASD. While he was brilliant and a top university would love people like that, he needed some accommodations, such as a red front door.
Easily wayyy more than that given both the loosening standards of what a disability is combined with over-diagnosis. But I get your sentiment. When I was a kid, disabled meant you were in a wheelchair or needed someone to physically feed you, and now it means you have an Adderall prescription.
People have different ideas of what "disabled" means.
Broadening the definition makes it less useful in many ways. I would consider "disabled" to mean one of:
- Unable to ambulate effectively (requires crutches or worse)
- Unable to look after oneself as an adult (for any combination of reasons)
- Unable to use tools and items most people would consider standard - eg. can't hold a pencil, write, type, whatever.
That's a fairly harsh definition of disabled, but all of these people unambiguously require accommodation because of their incapacity. It's also off the top of my head, so I'd happily broaden it if you want to argue the point.
If I can talk to someone for an entire day and not realise or notice they are disabled in some way, I question the definition being used - how helpful is it in deciding how we should allocate additional resources and help in that case?
> However, big caveat - it's self-reported. If you look at how many people get disability benefit it's around 10%.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US, in order to get social security disability, you need to have a documented disability and there's also income limits. If you have a disability, but you manage to find a career despite the disability, you'll lose eligibility for social security disability or at least you'll lose the social security payments. Depending on the disabilities in question, I think it's reasonable that 60% of people with a disability can find work that pays enough that they are no longer eligible for a disability payment and/or they've reached the age where they get a retirement/old age insurance benefit rather than disability.
> "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Talented students get to college, start struggling, and run for a diagnosis to avoid bad grades.
Okay, I was an undergrad at Stanford a decade ago, I graduated with two majors (math, physics) and almost another minor (CS) so I took more credits than most and sat in more tests than most, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single person given extra time on tests; and some of the courses had more than a hundred people in them, with test takers almost filling the auditorium in Hewlett Teaching Center if memory serves. Article says the stat “has grown at a breathtaking pace” “over the past decade and half” and uses “at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” as a shocking example, so I would assume the stat was at least ~10% at Stanford a decade ago. So where were these people during my time? Only in humanities? Anyone got first hand experience?
They go to other rooms. I had several friends who would not be around during the exam days. On a high stress day like final exam day it's hard to notice but they were definitely gone (so like 1-2 people in a 20ish person class). UC system, mid 2010s.
Testing accomodations are generally done at a separate time. So students with an accomodation requiring a low distraction environment or extra test time would all take their test after the main test takers.
This came with the dual advantage of providing an alternate time for students who had excused absences to take the test as well.
TLDR: You don't normally see the students with accomodations during tests unless you also have an accomodation or you had a conflict with the test time/date.
Most of my courses beyond freshman year were 10-20 people where I basically know everyone (unless they never come to class), so I would know if they weren’t showing up at exams. I’m pretty sure if these people were evenly distributed I would notice every exam for every class missing 1-2 people. So this is not it.
It really depends on the environment tbh. I know just for the "low distraction environment" accomodations, those normally aren't used for small classes but they are used for the big exams where they stuff the entire freshman class in the program into a series of auditoriums.
And of course some professors do double time accommodations by having the students take the test with everyone else and then follow the teacher to their office to finish the exam afterwards but tbh I didn't see that very often.
At another university I once had extenuating circumstances preventing me from taking an exam in one of the main exam halls. I was invited to take it in a normal classroom, where a session was being held at the same time for people who get additional time. I was able to start later and still finish with the normal allowance but without having a chance to collude with other students.
TFA is specifically about students claiming disabilities to get extra time on tests. I’m saying from first hand experience that I didn’t know a single instance of anyone getting extra time on tests, and wondering where those alleged instances were occurring. Anything that “wasn’t diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn’t good” (huh?) has nothing to do with the 38% stat, or anything else in the article, really.
The fact that this shows higher numbers than the community college kids ("...have far lower rates of disabled students...") is interesting too. Yeah, one can argue that Stanford maybe is just so accommodating that it just serves as a great attractor for people with disability. I somehow doubt that.
I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of some coaching program too. It seems too random for folks to just "stumble" on a hack. There are few of these outfits which advertise that they can "get your kid accepted into colleges" if you buy their services.
> But the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
If we take honesty out of the equation, what's the downside for not declaring a disability, if it's not that hard to get a note from a doctor? You get better housing, and more time on tests. I am surprised the number is not higher, actually like 75% or something.
Or that community college largely serves a different class of students who have worse access to mental health resources than students who attend Stanford do. The articles quoting of flippant professors and inability to see such potential obvious issues really shines a negative light on its publication.
I had neither healthcare coverage in high school nor expensive college consultants. When I got to college (Cornell) all my friends told me they had plenty of extra time on the standardized exam (the SAT) by virtue of doctors letters declaring conditions requiring accommodations. I'm sure some of these were legitimate. But practically everyone I spoke to supposedly had ADHD and resulting accommodations on the SAT. I'm not a MPH or Epidemiologist, but does 80% or 90% of the student population truly have a condition requiring accommodations?
Once 10 or 20% of students are doing this, it isnt unexpected for everyone to start doing it just to get on an even playing field. As usual, the poor students lose out because they cannot afford the doctors or expediters who can facilitate all these things.
>> You've made a much larger claim (80-90%) than the article. That is interesting. And anedata, unless you have solid evidence of your opinion.
Firstly No evidence provided and none needed as an unscientific anecdata supporting my personal shock.
- Many of these accomodations for SATs are done in high school and then it isnt required anymore, so naturally people dont ask once they have already gotten into college. The SAT used to be a singular choke point for top schools, and becomes irrelevant immediately after.
- I was speaking about SAT and the article was talking about accomodations needed for college housing and other things
1. I provided an anecdote based on friends' personal statements, not statistics based on school, you should trust the school's stats, but i'd really like to see the stats from The College Board on SAT scores, with a WHERE clause on only scores/accomodations for students going to top schools
2. I provided an anecdote that may well be wildly inaccurate being n=1
3. I entered to college in 1996, we're 29yrs off from my experience and the article
4. As I said above, accomodations in college != accomodations for SAT
If 38% of the top 1% of students have learning disabilities then I'd expect students near the mean to be 100% learning disabled, if those words have any meaning left.
It should be mention the learning disability also include dysgraphia, which include handwriting. If the motor skills is impaired, then that get classified as a learning disability regardless of how easy the person can learn a complex subject in higher education.
I view it similar to the ability to throw, kick and catch balls. Today it doesn't say much about a person ability to learn, but in the old times I can see the argument that it would be a hindrance in going through the education system. Not a learning disability per say, but a schooling disability.
You are implicitly hard-coupling work ethic and ease of learning. Especially in the U.S., it is within the realm of possibility that the students near the mean possess a comparative ease of learning but value that advantage at roughly 0%.
Aren’t some of these “accommodations” for “disabilities” things as simple as, like, asking their professors not to put them on the spot in class if they have crippling social anxiety? Because while that might “toughen up” some people, with this person, that technique amounts to just punching them in the face for no constructive purpose?
How much of this is a terminology problem—that the word “disability” serves this blanket purpose for statutory reasons rather than to signal the type or severity of impairment?
Like, at the end of the day, these students still have to perform or not. I get the impression that a lot of these accommodations are kind of just a formal way of not being a dick about obstacles tangential to the actual learning.
I went to the university half way through my undergrad to file for a disability because I have ADHD and I go through short periods where my medication just stops being effective for whatever reason.
It's not a major disability but it was a barrier to me performing at my best so I filed the paperwork and got some minor accommodations. It was basic stuff like letting teachers know during periods when I was struggling and they would allow me to take tests in a separate room (same time limit, just by my self in a quiet room) or allow me an extra 24 hours on certain assignments provided I requested it X amount of days ahead of time.
Certainly they provided a minor "advantage" but not substantially. And these were things that most teachers are already generally willing to accommodate regardless of disability but the disability system provides a formal framework for doing so and avoiding the justifying yourself over and over again (vs just getting it cleared up at the start of the semester).
Disabilities come in many shapes and sizes. Most of them are small and it's way easier to deal with an office that deals specially with disabilities to come up with accommodations that make sense for you and keep them consistent across your entire time at university than it does to try and negotiate terms with every single professor or TA.
You know that “learning disability” isn’t a synonym for “stupid”, right? We neither call people who are less academically able “disabled”, nor are disabled people necessarily less able to work academically (apart from some more debilitating mental disorders, which would be a disability). In fact, it’s quite the opposite: the word “disability” exists _precisely_ to distinguish “intelligence” – which is what the university is selecting for – and other characteristics, so in theory intelligence and disability are entirely orthogonal (apart from the exception I mentioned).
Of course, understanding what disability actually is requires considering each learning disability separately, which is something this article unfortunately fails to do. We can do this though:
- Anxiety and depression: I see no reason why this should decrease somebody’s intelligence, so the fact that there are elevated rates of such people at top universities does not seem odd. Since these are treatable conditions, they won’t necessarily affect the ability for a student to become an effective researcher.
- ADHD: This condition is marked by a lack of ability to focus, which is a property unrelated to intelligence. Some very famous mathematicians like Paul Erdős likely had ADHD, demonstrating that it’s not necessarily true this condition makes one a worse researcher.
- Autism: Does not necessarily reduce intelligence. We can look at professional mathematicians and see that a lot of them are autistic.
- Chronic pain, migraines, etc: Unrelated to intelligence. It’s possible this will decrease one’s ability to be a researcher, but if one is able to complete University at all, it’s likely not that severe.
I mean, I could go on, and of course there will be a couple of counterexample. However, it is still the case that generally speaking, “learning disability” and “stupid” are different things, and therefore there is no reason to expect that there would be lower rates of learning disabilities among those who are highly academically skilled.
I have been under the impression that "learning disability" means that you are less able to learn than your peers. Whether that deficit is on account of intelligence, health, etc., is a different subject.
According to your definition, you can be far superior to your peers at learning and still be learning disabled. If you are looking for stupid people, you have found one, because I don't understand that.
Because of all of the ways that students can be disadvantaged at learning, every student needs accommodations. There are no students who can't benefit from a highly responsive learning environment. Being able to benefit from that does not make any student learning disabled, just different, and they are all different.
But if you're just different, and not disabled, you lose victim cred, preferences and funding.
You can claim that “learning disability” should mean whatever, but this does not change the fact that medical experts define “learning disability” such that they do not inherently impede intelligence: https://ehvi.org/learning-vs-intellectual-disabilities/. This isn’t my definition, it’s the definition used by medical experts. A quote from that article:
> Learning disabilities don’t affect intelligence and are different from intellectual disabilities. People with LDs have specific issues with learning but have an average or above-average IQ (intelligence quotient).
I acknowledge that I was including autism as a learning disability, but I see this isn’t the case. Still, however, I hope you would acknowledge that autistic people are not inherently less intelligent than others, and neither are people with depression nor anxiety.
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.
As Scott Alexander opens his essay:
>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
I can't talk about Stanford, but STEM-related jobs (including software engineering) certainly seem to be full of people with ADHD, autism and related "neurodivergances"
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these Stanford cases are people gaming the system. But I would be equally unsurprised if screening all students of elite universities revealed that over 50% of them had some condition listed in the DSM-5, with clear correlations between condition and field of study
I know you did /s but in public school gifted programs here the gifted kids have IEPs (a document defining their Individualized Education Program) similar to what is required for special education kids with disabilities.
I have a teenager who is at an academically rigorous college prep school. He is incredibly bright and one of the best students in the school. But he has an accommodation in math for extra time because he has a form of dyscalculia which makes him very prone to misreading and mixing up in working memory the numbers, symbols and other formulas. He understands all the concepts well, but his disability results in calculation/mechanical errors unless he has the extra time to check his work multiple times for these errors. I believe this kind of disability and accommodation is legitimate, but I understand why others may disagree. He even says he often feels guilty for getting extra time when others don't. I am sure there are also people who abuse the system and get accommodations when then don't actually need them.
That's a much bigger meta question, like what's even the point of putting timing constraints on any test?
Logistically, my kid has to go a testing center at the school during his free period and/or lunch periods for his extra time. I can imagine that if everyone got extra time, it would be a logistical nightmare.
But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.
> But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.
That's not stupid. Speed does in fact matter in the real world. To illustrate the point, let's consider an extreme example: what if it took me an entire year to do something that someone else could do in an hour? My results would be so slow that nobody would tolerate me as an employee or partner. On the other extreme, if someone takes 1h1s instead of 1h it's not really a big deal.
I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a line somewhere and say "if you can't do it this fast, you haven't learned the material adequately". The tricky thing is where to draw that line, not whether such a line is ok at all.
Ok, in the extreme case, that's a fair point. Tests can't be unlimited in length. But I don't think it's actually that tricky to draw the line. If a typical school test is 1 hour during class, just give students the option to come in at lunch or a free period for an extra period for extra time if needed. That seems easy and reasonable enough to me.
Yes. It depends on whether the time pressure is an integral part of the test. If it isn't then people should get as much time as they need. If it is, it's not clear why people should get different amounts of time.
Does this number include housing accommodations? They are provided through the same disability office. I have dry eye disease, and when the relative humidity was 19% in my dorm room I requested an accommodation to have a humidifier. I’m sure that type of accommodation wouldn’t have been approved in the past.
I went to an elite school. I had undiagnosed depression and ADHD and I almost failed out.
I don't think I needed more time on tests but I definitely needed medication and counseling. The counseling resources available at the time were not adequate and medication was difficult to get.
oh dang you're right. I am throwing away my degree and my meds and canceling my therapy appointments right now and applying for regular public college.
> The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities.
What the actual... Lack of journalistic integrity rears its head once again. Executive function and social challenges do not make a person "not smart."
Going back to the core of the problem, I feel that this does need to be controlled. It's one thing to disability signal online to gain clout, it's a completely different thing to drain resources from genuinely disabled folks. Disabilities need to come with diagnoses.
Fundamentally I would be fine with this, the system exploits us so it's only fair to exploit it in return. Practically, however, my concern remains for people who need resources to support them.
> one professor told Horowitch. "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests."
This is a blunt quote, but it gets at a key part of the problem: Qualifying as having a disability can come with some material benefits in many schools.
The intentions are good: Schools are doing what they think is best to accommodate and help students with disabilities. It has been a high priority for decades. However, some of these accommodations come with academic advantages. Extra time on tests is the most common one I've seen.
Combine this with the ease of qualifying for a disability (look up the right doctor online, schedule an appointment, pay insurance copay, walk out with a note) and it became an easy, cheap, and tangible academic advantage.
One of the schools I'm familiar with switched to giving everyone the same, longer time period for taking test because it was becoming obvious that the system was being abused.
This focuses on students seeking diagnoses. But I would expect most of them have already been diagnosed long before college. Parents with high expectations of their children are more likely to seek diagnoses. If you've spent your childhood being told you are ADHD and on Ritalin, then it is natural you would self-identify as such in college.
You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.
If we don't care about time and only care about eventual recitation of the subject matter, why don't we give all of the students more time instead of only some of them?
The whole conceit of only giving some students more time suggests that timed performance is supposed to matter.
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
Well, considering * gestures broadly at everything *, I'm sure more than 38% of students are struggling with near-debilitating anxiety and depression. The future doesn't look very bright right now. I can't imagine what being in college must feel like. I've been doing this job for like 20 years and I feel incredibly uncertain about my future most days.
There was a kid in my high school physics class who went to Stanford. One time, someone broke the curve on the midterm test, making it hard for most students to get an A. The future Stanford student’s mom visited the teacher to beg for extra credit assignments. He got his A.
I suspect Stanford selects for students who are smart, yes, but most exceptional at gaming the system. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of watering down the difficulty of classes and standardized tests.
I think this kid's mom was mentioned in the Atlantic article [1] the link in the post is based on.
> Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
This is definition of “hacking” the system: YC included question on its application that asked founders to describe a time they most successfully "hacked" a non-computer system to their advantage.
Sure it is not nice or moral but that is the life now.
Performance-doping by a large percentage of students at prestigious schools has been going on for decades. Separate from the people who are wired differently and really need the chemical tuning.
Also, it seems a lot of students are on anti-depressants. (You might be, too, if you had pushy overachiever helicopter parents always pushing you. Or if the same career that paid for your affluent upbringing, including college admission advantages, came because a parent operated very selfishly in general.)
Meds seem to be a go-to solution for many affluent families.
Adderall doesn't let someone be the brightest student, but it helps them keep up with courseload, of study-heavy or lab-heavy classes -- to compete with the students who have better/more prior education/experience, better work practices, who prioritize studies over partying, or who are otherwise brighter as a student in some regard.
Of the students who didn't actually have an ADHD disability, but ended up relying on the meds anyway, they aren't bad people. They're actually generally nice and smart, like everyone else. I hope it keeps working for them, or they are able to wean off without ill effects.
One thing I really worry about is a different but related problem: a culture of cheating, most recently accelated by ChatGPT and the like. That seems to be having really bad societal effects already.
One thing I wonder about is whether some of the students on other meds, like for depression, are having too much edge of passion and creativity taken off. Although the college admissions and career prep books and coaches tell students how to give the corporate-standard performative indicators of "passion", that comes out as a very different thing, and maybe all the meds has something to do with that. (I suppose a professor who's been engaged for a few decades would have a good perspective on this.)
Reminds me of "Miracle Flights", in which dozens of people require wheelchairs to board but only a few require them to deboard. Of course, if you are in a wheelchair, you get to board first.
I got ok grades in high school with 0 effort. When I got to college, that changed drastically, as I never learned how to actually study or learn on my own. I was on academic probation after my first year and had to figure out how to study, since I never had to do it before. I never could figure out how some of my roommates could study for hours at a time each week, I didn’t really know what they were doing. One class let us make a 1 page cheat sheet for the exam, that was pretty effective for me; once I made it, I didn’t need it. So the night before an exam I would do that, even if I couldn’t use it. That seemed to be enough to get me off of academic probation and graduate in 4 years with a semi decent GPA… but that was also after switching to the business college, which was much less effort than engineering. The worst were 2 self-instructional classes I had. I forgot about them both completely. I did one of them in the last 48 hours of the semester and took 6 exams in one day.
Fast-forward 20+ years and I find out I have ASD and ADHD. Knowing may have helped give me some better ideas for strategies, but part of me is glad I didn’t know, because I didn’t have an excuse and found a way through. Though I’m not sure any of the accommodations I hear about would have been helpful. I never needed more time during tests and having to take care of an animal just sounds like more on my plate. Had I actually spent time with tutors to study, I likely would have burned out. I needed a lot of downtime away from people.
I can totally believe that some kids who excelled in high school, enough to get into Stanford, would fall apart in college without the same structure and would need some assistance. But I do question what that will do for them when they need to go out and get a job. I know companies are supposed to provide accommodations if needed, but I have to believe that will impact their career. I haven’t told my manager or anyone since I found out about my own issues. It used to not be a problem at all, as my old manager let me work my way and he may have even known before I did, he was good at picking all kinds of things out like that. Currently I’m struggling for the past 4 years or so, but I’m not sure what to do about it.
I had a friend in high school who was able to take untimed tests. I later heard a teacher griping, because they didn't think my friend needed them. (I agree.)
My friend had a very good life, until he took a job that really clashed with his, uhm, tendency to be a perfectionist. When we caught up (because we hadn't spoken in a few years,) it was clear he didn't have much insight into how his perfectionism worked against him in the job. (It was a job where quantity was more important than perfection.)
What would have helped my friend more? Not the diagnosis that he needed untimed tests. Instead, counseling where he understood his difference, how to make best use of it, and when he needed to let go and not be a perfectionist.
For hiring managers, does this devalue elite schools?
I’ve had good luck with places like Notre Dame and Cal Poly where the kids are smart, and willing to work very hard. From the Ivy League I’ve had more luck with Cornell hires than the others.
It’s a small sample size so I’m curious what others see.
Timed tests encourage wrote memorization and reflexive knowledge. They don't encourage what is reflective of the modern real world knowledge recollection. In almost all scenarios, you have a book to reference for knowledge, much less search engines (and now LLMs). Almost nothing is memorized today, in the work world. What you know, in my experience, comes from frequent usage. Your timespan to work on most things is on the order of days, not minutes or an hour.
Tests should be open book, open notes, and an extensive amount of time to do the test. The questions should be such that they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not just how well you can parrot back information.
Whilst I would love tests to be open internet, this lends itself to very easy cheating. The material being taught and what notes you take about it should be enough to answer any questions posed to you about the material. Especially those that demonstrate an understanding of the material.
Sort of. There are some things that a person entering a field is expected to know without needing to look them up, because if you don't know it you won't develop good intuition or be able to execute your work in a timely manner. Most of the stuff you learn in your freshman year is this type of thing, while the later years tend to have more open-book tests.
This is also the kind of thing that you check for in an interview - somebody who needs to look up how to write a for loop isn't going to get hired as a C programmer, and somebody who isn't familiar with Ohm's law will flunk their electronics interview. So there's a very pragmatic reason to make sure that students have the basics memorized.
With rates that high, it's a disadvantage if you don't have specialists assess your kid for all the things that could qualify them for extra testing time if you have the money to do it.
Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education.
So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highly selective school that’s by definition going to be picking gifted kids over less gifted ones, and from that group will pick those that were accommodated appropriately.
(There could also be cheating - I don’t know either way. I’m just commenting on the premise of the article. One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious that this claim is totally illogical. Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.)
Just curious: If non-neurodivergent children are given the same accomodations (which are?) do they significantly outperform their peers too? For example: it's well known that 1-on-1 instruction time correlates to better academic outcomes.
I don't know about Stanford, but in earlier schooling accomodations can include things like being allowed to sit on a bouncy chair, or use a fidget toy, or type instead of hand-write (physical asynchronous development is a common issue), or wear headphones, or take more frequent breaks.
I do think that more flexibility in educational environments might be good for most people, yes.
My current employer had me answer the question of whether I'm "disabled." I've never answered "yes" to this question since I've never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergence, though therapists have suggested that there's a good chance I'd be diagnosed if I saw a specialist. But this time I noticed that my employer's definition of "disabled" included not only neurodivergence but also depression, which I do have a diagnosis for. So... now I'm disabled.
I have no idea what use the label is when it's so broadly defined. It doesn't give my employer any information that would help them support me in any way. Fingers crossed there is some benefit to it.
It probably helps the employer demonstrate that they hire and retain disabled people, likely assisting with some government quotas, and defenses against lawsuits by aggrieved ex-employees.
It is interesting to consider that disability may enable much higher academic performance as long as people get the proper accommodations. After all, wouldn't it be interesting if people we think of as disabled can - under the correct conditions - be more productive than 'able' people. An individuals' capability is generally pretty circumstantial and I think we should be open to asking questions about how optimal our current social structure is for productivity and capacity going forward. We may need to imagine new ways of living and structuring work and society to reach even higher levels of productivity.
A third is about as common as astigmatism in >50 year olds (like me, for instance!) I wear glasses to accommodate this disability, and as a result have nearly no practical problems due to it.
I don't think a problem having a high frequency means that we should decide it doesn't matter or need rectification.
You misunderstand how neurodivergence is be handled in education. It isn't a single diagnosis, and does not have a single accommodation. We use a catch-all word because it makes it easier to talk about as a collection of issues, but that's not how it's diagnosed or treated.
If you would find wearing noise blocking ear muffs, or sitting on a bouncy chair, or using a typing instrument instead of writing, improves your performance on a test, then yes that should be permitted.
(I do also think it would be a good idea if people had longer for many tests or tests had less on them. That kind of speed is rarely an important part of real world workplaces so those tests are rewarding low-value skills.)
"If you would find wearing noise blocking ear muffs, or sitting on a bouncy chair, or using a typing instrument instead of writing, improves your performance on a test, then yes that should be permitted."
The thing these examples have in common is that they don't give you any inherent advantage that invalidates the purpose of the test. (Assuming it's not a handwriting test, or an 'ignoring distractions' test.)
I would group all of these along with the examples I gave: corrective glasses, and wheelchairs. They should be available to all students, without diagnosis or discrimination.
If you think limited time on tests doesn't serve a useful purpose, then why give 'extra' time to only some students, and not to all students?
Current estimates place it around 20% of the population. Wouldn't take a whole lot of sampling error in admissions to result in 40% of admitted students
Stanford doesn't try to admit a random sample of the population, and its quite posssible the things it does select on positively correlate with the conditions at issue; it's quite plausible nonsampling error (systemic bias) is a bigger issue than sampling error in explaining any prevalence difference from the general population here.
I think, broadly, this is what neurodivergent people want. Nobody considers having poor vision a disability despite it nominally being one since it's so well accommodated. And it's so well accommodated in part because it affects so many people that it's normal.
The world right now doesn't do a great job of "by default" accommodating people with the broad class of difficulties experienced by people that fall under the umbrella of neurodivergence and takes as given that everyone is in the 70-80% group. So now it's a disability with doctor's visits and paperwork and specific individual accommodations when it very well could not be.
It's a way to separate us so that we can fight about it and not focus on the important aspect which is to provide everyone the help they need and deserve to make a successful life for themselves. Some may need more help than others, and so the powers that be who want to keep all that profit for themselves target those who need more help with dumb articles like this one which spread FUD.
I should specify also that I am not saying a medical diagnosis is not important, or that there is no such thing as ADHD or Autism.
I believe as a society we need to be more flexible in every area for every human and also to give individual attention to everyone so they can excel. Some people will need more help than others, like those with ADHD, and some will need much, much more help than others, such as those with more extreme sensory issues with Autism who may not even be able to go out in public without accommodations.
Your point about Stanford having a larger-than-average proportion of 'extremely gifted' kids is reasonable. Perhaps the smartest 20% at Stanford are drawn from the smartest 0.1% nationally.
But I think you're too dismissive of this part:
The professors Horowitz interviewed largely back up this theory. "You hear 'students with disabilities' and it's not kids in wheelchairs," one professor told Horowitch. "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests."
You said "One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs" but this is a straw man. The professor did not say this.
If you read the statement charitably, the professor only pointed out two things that are probably true, which I paraphrase below:
- most people, when they hear about students with disabilities, imagine physical disabilities
- the professor has seen that a sizable proportion of students classified as disabled do not require accommodations
Now, we could argue about what are reasonable accommodations and which are not. This is where I'm interested to hear your perspective.
I assume you are in favor of these two:
- kid needs wheelchair and a ramp, so kid can attend class
- kid needs glasses, so kid can see the whiteboard
I assume you are not in favor of this one:
- kid cannot find the derivative of 2x^2, so kid is allowed to use a CAS calculator for Calculus 1 exams
What do you think about this one?
- kid can pass the English Composition 1 exam, but only if given twice as much time as other students
I am attempting to ascertain where you draw the line.
I offered examples that I presume we agree on, on both sides of the line.
Then I gave an example where we might disagree.
If you feel my questions are 'cartoonish straw man questions' then that of course is your right.
However, I want to make it clear that:
- you mischaracterized the quotation from the professor in the article
- I would honestly like to understand (i) whether you agree there is a line to be drawn between things that correct for impediments that are irrelevant to the competency being tested, and (ii) where you would draw that line.
If the manner in which I've written my questions makes it seem like I have any intention other than to understand your position more clearly, I apologize.
In some peculiar, perverted sense, given that evaluating claims of disability requires breaching students' medical privacy. You wouldn't normally expect libertarians to so overtly be okay with invasions of personal privacy.
That’s probably because Reason’s libertarian goal is not to get claims of disability evaluated. The goal is to get the government mandate for disability accommodations eliminated, which eliminates any benefit of making the claims and therefore any reason to evaluate the claims.
I know; I'm pointing out this is manifestly not a libertarian worldview. It's part and parcel with Reason being ideologically paleoconservative with a libertarian dressing.
If you have to grade essays and you give students more time you have to spend more time on grading - taking away time from preparing lessons and supporting students individually.
Best teacher I had in university offered "unlimited time on tests". Their tests were hard as hell but they were scheduled after the last class of the day and ran until like 10 at night. It worked out to like 5 hours of test time even if most people could complete the test in like ~1.5-2 hours.
The policy was essentially "you have until the teacher/TA needs to go home" and given everyone in university is always swamped with work they were generally willing to stick around and get their own work done until it got super late and even then, even if you were the last test taker they'd generally negotiate a final 10-20 minutes with heads up so you could do your best to wrap up even if you weren't done.
But generally the rule is ~2x test time. The extended test time accomodation is normally listed as "double time" in my experience even if profs were generally willing to give you more than 2x time if you were still making meaningful progress.
Yep. That's exactly what I did when I taught at the university level. Mind you, I was single then, and had no family responsibilities, and the school was small enough that I could ask for the last test slot of the day and always easily get it. But, it's excellent for everyone.
It's unfortunately not practical for every class to do when everyone's taking all of their finals in the same week. There will be inevitable scheduling collisions: hence the need for timed slots and individual exceptions at alternative times and locations. If you can think of a systemic solution to that, I'm all ears. (Yeah: get rid of final exams. In theory I like that idea, too. AI is kinda pushing educators in the opposite direction at the moment.)
As for a systemic solution, I imagine you could probably handle exam scheduling at the university level once enrollment is over and drop week has passed. Of course this only works if the entire university is on board. Otherwise the system breaks down at the edges super quickly.
Once enrollment is more or less fixed I imagine you could generate a fairly optimal arrangement of final exams with an SMT solver + linear programming. Give 5.5 hours per exam, 2x a day, with a 1 hour allocation for breakfast + travel and a 1 hour allocation for lunch + travel. That gives you 14 hours. Breakfast at 0700 if one is so inclined, exam 0800-1330, lunch 1330-1430, exam 1430-2000.
You could do 6 hour exams but you'd have to offer extended hours on dining halls in that case since students may not be eating until 9pm/2100 or later.
With 5 days, 2 exam slots a day, that's 10 exam slots per student. Most students are going to bunched into relatively similar courses per semester (with some degree of variation) and students essentially never take more than 8 classes in a semester (I did 7 one semester and 8 the next and they just about killed me and generally I didn't see undergrad students taking more than 5-6).
A solver should be generally able to find a solution to that optimizing for most even distribution of exams. Doubly so if the university starts finals a little early and does 6 or 7 days instead of 5 (i.e. starting on the friday or thursday before). And if a complete solution is not available, a solver could identify which particular courses are causing the optimization to fail and the admin could negotiate solutions from there.
And of course you can improve upon this if the university incentivizes/pressures X% of courses in a program to offer no-exam/project based finals instead. Personally I hated project based finals (too much to do already and you end up forced to choose where you allocate your time) but I understand they are preferable for some students and they'd reduce the load during finals week assuming they are required to be due before finals and not during.
Get rid of academic terms, so that the finals don't all fall in the same week. Probably a hard sell.
Be less obsessed with evaluation and grading. Which probably means people have to be less obsessed with having a credentialing and gatekeeping system while calling it an "education" system. Probably an even harder sell. Although since the next step is for the AI to eliminate the need for credentialed humans, maybe we get it throught the back door.
This is a fantastic idea, as the exam becomes part of the teaching - if you sit there for 5 hours wishing you prepared your study better, that's an invaluable lesson.
I suspect the reason why it does not occur more commonly is simply because of the costs of running such a long exam.
> The result is a deeply distorted view of "normal." If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD
> risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class
OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.
Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.
I got 1.5 extra test time. I would have never graduated otherwise. I didn't use it my senior year though. To this day, I read slower than most, I have to reread things when others don't need to. Intelligence and having learning disabilities are not corollated as this article suggests.
Reading the comments here people seem to care more about what is "good" for the individual than what is good for the institution.
If you have learning disability that requires "assistance" at an elite university, then why can't I play in the NBA with stilts while being allowed to double dribble and travel?
Sure would be awesome for me to play in the NBA! Probably wouldn't be good for the NBA though.
It's funny how upset most comments are with the realization that a lot more people are disabled while most of the users in HN are probably on the spectrum
I grew up in a Danish town of 20.000 people and two schools. In my school there were 3 dyslexic children. They went to the "special" class 4 hours a week. I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name. It's because this was the place they put all the children with what we'd call disabilities today. Some of the students in the class were only in that class, others like my dyslexic classmate only went to the class those 4 hours a week. It was also a full age range from 0-9th grades. As you might imagine it didn't exactly work.
Today we know that 10% of the population is dyslexic. So those 3 children should've actually been 80. Some of those 77 children could be in the group of adults who can't read.
What is interesting to me is that you rarely see people rant about the dyslexic the way you see people talking about something like ADHD.
> I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name.
It's the sort of thing that doesn't have a fixed name, because once it's had a name for ~10 years everyone decides the term is offensive and gives it a new name.
The whole thrust of the article is complaining about timed tests and some kids getting more time. That's doubtless unfair if some are overclaiming, but the real solution is to not do timed tests at all - they are only serving to produce an arbitrary bell curve so that some can have higher grades and get better career opportunities. Better to not have a timer at all, and let people's actual ability shine.
Sure. I doubt that if some test at the moment takes an hour then you're getting much extra benefit at the five hour mark. The whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out - along an axis different to "competence".
>whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out
I suspect that is true for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, or GRE.
I suspect in classroom environments that there isn't any intent at all on test timing other than most kids will be able to attempt most problems in the test time window. As far as I can tell, nobody cares much about spreading grades out at any level these days.
How strong is the argument that a student completing a test in 1 hour with the same score as a student who took 10 hours that the first student performed "better" or had a greater understanding of the material?
Sure, but that answer doesn't address the questions of the value of time limits on assessment.
What if instead we are talking about a paper or project? Why isn't time-to-complete part of the grading rubric?
Do we penalize a student who takes 10 hours on a project vs the student who took 1 hour if the rubric gives a better grade to the student who took 10 hours?
Or assume teacher time isn't a factor - put two kids in a room with no devices to take an SAT test on paper. Both kids make perfect scores. You have no information on which student took longer. How are the two test takers different?
I just had an edifying conversation with a recent Standford grad who was a TA, and she talked about how some huge percentage of the class has testing accommodations that allowed them to take all exams in a private room, with no supervision, and with access to their phones (and the internet).
And the professors and TAs were not even allowed to ask the students what they needed those accommodations for.
> when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013, it significantly lowered the bar for an ADHD diagnosis.
I've suspected for many years that ADHD is like Medical Marijuana. Some people really need it. For others, it's just a way to get legal access to stimulants.
The amount of pressure young kids are under... I am surprised the numbers aren't much higher. I grew up with debilitating OCD/Tourettes. I am glad kids growing up today have more resources than I did. Society itself is sick and broken. If that many kids are having issues.. Maybe the system is the problem here?
It’s also worth mentioning that causality may go in the opposite direction: for the marginal student, part of why they got into Stanford was due to having more time than their peers to complete a test.
20+% of adults have anxiety, which they include here. So 38% for any of the conditions they listed ("mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD" plus everything else) doesn't seem off base.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of Stanford students are anxious or depressed. Isn't everybody, especially young kids who have spent the last decade going through the meat grinder of prepping for elite college admissions?
Many emotional problems that are highly dysfunctional can be missed or masked by raw intelligence until a certain higher level of intellectual competition or pressure is present.
Having participated in frequent academic competitions in high school in a top-5-biggest metropolitan area in the US, there was one guy in my era who pretty much won city-wide awards in any subject he touched all the time. So bright. He got into an elite college and spiraled out and dropped out for what, in hindsight I'd armchair-diagnose, were a mix of ADHD/Autistic/anxiety-oriented tendencies that collided with online gaming that hadn't caused failures in earlier environments for him.
At the gym I go to, there are a lot of college-age kids. I overhear them talking about getting on Ritalin or Adderall to help them study. Not because they really need it, it's just seen as a "performance hack" to get an advantage. They talk about what doctor they went to and how easy it was to get a prescription.
Have you ever taken a decent dose of an amphetamine? It isn't going to make you smarter but it will almost certainly boost your energy and ability to get stuff done.
The same is true for every individual person who takes it. At some dose it helps and at other does it doesn't.
And in the gym, it raises your heart rate so that hurts exercise, but without it I can't do any cardio because I get so bored 5 minutes in I have to stop.
I was just researching exceptional people with trisomy 21 and was pleasantly surprised by this article. I think Stanford, Harvard, and other elite institutions with these rates of disabled students must accept all ranges of students with disabilities including those with Down syndrome. I was especially inspired by people like Pablo Pineda who articulated how it's society that keeps them from succeeding and I agree. There's no reason for these universities to only accept the type of disabilities that wealthy students can rig the system for.
We will end up with everyone identifying as disabled (or at least "neurodivergent"). Then we'll all be back on the same level and someone will have to invent a new category that will also grow until it too encompasses everyone. And so on.
The solution is learning to tell people "you do not meet our criteria for being disabled". Alternatively, Congress could amend the ADA or someone could sue and win a court decision changing how it is interpreted.
I was recently wondering that since in the US the race is declarative and such a big thing, why don't people self declare being <of the currently most interesting race>?
If this brings you points at entey exams or similar bonuses - why not (mis)using that mechanism?
Or maybe I have as a European the wrong impression about positive discrimination based on race in universities? (I do not nit jave recent data, just remember that people mentioned that they did not play the "race card" to be admitted)
My experience backs up that this is increasing even on the last decade. I worry that it’s yet another hack that the $8000 admissions consultants offer to their clients, potentially pointing (yet again) to a version of DEI that doesn’t mostly amplify privilege.
My general impression of kids from elite colleges are that they're very good at finding some sort of loophole in the system to exploit, and they get lauded for it. And if they balk, for whatever reason, they feel like they're falling behind those that do. So then there's a feedback loop for everyone to take advantage of some kind of exploit to stay competitive. "You'd be stupid not to do X also, if everyone else is." with no consider to morals or character--because they're not easy to measure.
Easy solution, if you take extra accommodations, its noted on your degree. If you are an employer, do you want someone who manipulates the system in these ways? Me neither. Maybe note exactly the accommodations on the degree so those with real disabilities aren't caught up in this.
FWIW a lot of the disability disclosure instructions for statistical purposes say stuff like "ever had cancer" and other qualifications that I find curious (because they don't really seems to be truly indicative of having a disability or not). (Not that it has anything to do with the main point of the article. Even in K12 a certain type of affluent family makes services into a game.)
When I went to the DMV and couldn't pass the vision test without my glasses, they put on my driver's license an indication that I only passed with the accommodation of corrective lenses.
The article frames being smart and promising (to a university) as at odds with having a learning disability, which is not necessarily true. It also frames depression and anxiety as learning disabilities, which they are not.
While I agree that smart people tend to play the system, I will offer another explanation.
I think university students are just weirder now. They just don't have the same social skills as before. Maybe Covid has erased social skills and behaviors, or maybe the internet is too prevalent.
I don't know what the social equivalent of the Overton Window would be, but I think that's shifted so hard that traditional autism tests would mark most modern students as autistic.
Not intending to offend, but aren't exceptionally gifted students (i.e. outliers) by definition neuro-divergent? Disclaimer: I am neuro-divergent, but not exceptionally gifted.
Lots to unpack in this so this following isn’t representative of my view on all of the article:
Cheating? Really? There’s a passing reference to getting an accommodation if partly through convenience as cheating. This throwaway line holds a lot of the problems of education in it. It denotes a view where education is less about learning than point scoring. Getting an accommodation for an extra day on a project is no more cheating than if a student asked for an extension.
Plenty of other accommodations, though maybe not all, are similarly not-cheating. It’s not cheating. It’s also not fair but so what? Put aside the system burdens doing this under the ADA may cause and your left with, what? Students being given more leeway and flexibility to 1) learn and 2) demonstrate that they have learned material.
This should be much less about “omg students taking advantage” and more about about “hmm, maybe this says a lot about how poorly things are currently done and better they could be with more thoughtful design”
Lol! I did that (sometimes) when I was in hospital in the UK. If you requested a halal meal they sourced it from a takeaway down the street, which was excellent, and a wonderful break from the usual dismal fare. I wasn't a dick about it, and would ask the meal order folks if it was OK to request one that day; sometimes they said 'yes', and sometimes not (based on what, I don't know), but they knew what was up, and didn't mind doing favors for those of us who'd been in a while. I'm still ridiculously grateful. The NHS (back then, a quarter century ago, now) was amazing.
it's not a trick on a flight. you just request the type of meal you want from the airline, usually 24 hours before the flight. they don't make you recite blessings or koran verses... you just ask and they accommodate you :)
most airlines that fly long routes offer a ton of different menus: kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, asian vegetarian (my favorite - usually indian food, which still tastes good when microwaved as opposed to a lot of non-first-class airline meals), lactose-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly... many options available that are usually a cut above the typical "chicken or beef".
beware - you have to do this for each leg of a flight with layovers! i've occasionally had luck requesting a vegetarian or vegan meal in-flight but most of the time they only pack as many as are requested ahead of time.
Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities? I think the article author, and many of the commenters here, are conflating "normalised behaviours" with "intelligence". As a society we have normalised pushing students into being able to complete assessments within an allotted time frame, even though the time it takes to finish an assessment isn't a perfect measure of one's intelligence (regardless of whether or not the answers were factually correct/incorrect). We have normalised allowing people who are "articulate" to take up space in society because we have collectively decided that articulate people are more intelligent, even though that isn't inherantly true.
I don't doubt that many of those students are faking having a disability to game the system in order to benefit themselves, but this article and the discussion around it are anything but intellectual.
>Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities?
?? many people would think there is something wrong with the definition of disabled if 38% of the population is disabled: more likely to be mislabeled. now, if 38% of the population is not disabled, but 38% of elite universities is, that is also something of note... is how the headline/article should be read.
then, if you live in a society with the ideological divides that many western societies show, where one side campaigns by advocating more social spending and the other advocates that it's being overdone, the suspicion is sure to emerge in some quarters that the metrics for disability might be manipulated in one political direction or the other. also makes a number like 38% interesting.
The CDC reports that 1 in 4 Americans are disabled. Sure 38% is higher than 25%, but the 38% number is the worst case scenario, two of the other universities cited only had 20% of students who were disabled, below the CDC number.
> one side campaigns by advocating more social spending
Ironically, having more social spending on 4-year universities would actually alleviate this problem if we are following the author's logic. If students weren't the ones footing the bill for their education, there would be less incentive for them to take measures to try and circumvent a system that penalizes low-performance (doubly-so because you both get a bad grade and you still have to pay back the money).
I read the headline/article exactly the way it was supposed to be interpreted. I'm also not reading that far into it, the byline literally states, "If you get into an elite college, you probably don't have a learning disability", which again, is simply not true and is ableist. Disabled people are not incapable of performing certain tasks, but they are hindered, which is why it's called a disability and not an inability.
> No one says disabled people cannot attend elite universities
The author spent the byline and first half of the article trying to explain that these universities wouldn't accept people with disabilities because they're just too elite and highly-selective. The recent surge of disabilities is actually perfectly explained, even in the article. The diagnostic criteria for disabilities has changed over time, becoming more "relaxed" as some would put it. If the diagnostic criteria expands to include more people, we are going to see higher rates of disability.
Whether I care depends on the accommodation they're seeking.
When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.
That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.
Having a mental disability is chic for kids right now. You won't find a discord or other online profile of a kid with less than three mental disabilities listed. For better or worse, they use them to connect with one another, have something in common. It doesn't help either that these disabilities are super easy to misdiagnose with dishonest patients which means lots of real drugs are flowing to children with fake problems.
This is all aside from the fact that these disabilities can be used as a way to get all sorts of special treatment. That's just icing on the cake. They see each other doing it and say why not me as well. It's a feign mental disorder chain reaction that's gone critical. Sexuality as well. They like to collect labels like Pokémon. Massive social benefit.
It doesn't annoy you that people are using your label for clout though? With all the adults focusing on LGBTQ+ trans, etc.. a label is a way to make yourself standout, and kids are desperate to do that. Especially with mental disorders and sexuality because takes zero effort to give yourself a label, and now you have something to talk about.
This is super common in affluent school districts. Bulldozer parents with lots of time and resources eventually get their kid some diagnosis that confers benefits in their schooling. Be it additional time on assignments, one on one tutoring, or whatever. They carry these diagnoses, habits, and expectations to college.
To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.
You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.
Ok, so we are raising a bunch of cheaters and liars. Great.
When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.
Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.
The same reason so many have a medical marijuana prescription, or a disabled license plate, or a 'service animal' that they bring into restaurants, grocery stores, and airplanes, or so many people take advantage of wheelchair service at airports then walk off the plane without help. If there is a system, people will find a way to abuse it and find shortcuts and loopholes to exploit.
Is that something a Stanford student would want on their permanent record? Employers or the government might be able to obtain that information. You could be flagged for life as a reject.
Under the Trump administration, accommodations for mentally disabled people are no longer enforced. Most of the enforcers were laid off. The new policy is “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” [1]
I hold a R&D Position at an MIT lab. I also hold gov clearances for DoD work. They are pretty accepting of the fact that a lot of folks in the field are neurodivergent. No one cares because if you deliver results you deliver results. No one cares about shit under the Trump administration because its an absolute joke that has thus far only stood to get in the way of the way we carry out research. The party of "minimal government" sure as hell loves to tell public established institutions how to carry out their own damn business.
Why put a time limit on exams? Why not put everyone on the same playing field by allowing unlimited time to take the exam? The majority of exams at my university have no time limit (within the operating hours of the testing center), and it works well. At the end of the day, if you don't know the material, having more time isn't going to help you.
because leadership needed a lot of irrrrational bullshit to justify their incompetence in the urgently imminent case that the biological and academic descendants of their "generation" outperformed them in a a ... waffle? whiff? ... I apologize, I don't know the term, and I only identified part of the heap of bullshit the old "guard" used to keep the kids "dumb enough" (136.9 - 144.3 IQ when they enter the horticultured league) but it's a great concern, nevertheless ... "housing"? ... in 2025? how retarded were you peeps 15 years ago? how the fuck did you survive? OH WAIT, YOU BOMBED IRAN? brrrrr, so evil of youuuuu
but it's wonderful we can debate this, really. I'm glad we get to exchange words, everybody, all of us!
Thank GOD, the OLD FATHERS of academia left some room ... to walk circles in ... and that they left so many of the questions they had and inspired to be left unanswered by the few/many who got in/didn't get in(to) the space that would give the incredible rarity of human brains with that specific kind of passionate curiosity in this (Tao universe measure something) vast galaxy of ours that bit they ... deserved? needed? wanted? desired? hundreds/thousands of generations worked incomparably hard for ... ???
so that we wouldn't be cursed with looking at the results of TWO COMPANIES IN 20-FUCKING-25 that are tapping that insanely sexy big ass of Space around this cutesy blue-and-green little planet of hours/ sorry, ... "ours", ... like, ... somewhat "ours" ... ... ...
Heyyyyy, are there any cool new toys on Alibaba or whatever the name is or something? There's some German genes in the neighborhood who can use a camera
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. ... Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.
"Obviously"? "is clearly bogus?"
Not to me. I see too much rhetoric and assumptions. In an article in Reason magazine, I expect more -- to demonstrate careful thinking that cuts through lazy common-sense thinking.
To make sense of a situation, one of my favorite tools is simple: a causal diagram(s). See [1]. This requires effort, and it should. Making a useful, communicable model that forms the foundation for your argument takes practice. Here's a disability-related example: [2]
I want to live in a world where causal models are demanded by readers.
My wife has a cousin who basically gamed the system for undergraduate and law school. She grew up white, middle class, but her dad, being of Mexican descent (US born) allowed her to play up the Hispanic angle on college applications, landing her scholarships and better admissions. Then, for law school, she claimed she had ADHD so that she could get extra time on tests. It was all a scam.
Dude lost me at the first sentence: "The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country."
Very clearly the author has never visited Stanford or UCB.
Which is to say, "elite" universities do not base admissions solely on what I assume they mean when they say "smartest."
Accommodating for disability is cheesing the test score. Cheesing a test score is cheesing the metric. Cheesing the metric is always some form of lying, usually to yourself.
- You're lying to yourself about how good of a fit your are for the program.
- The professor/administration is getting inaccurate data about the teaching efficacy.
If you want to know if you can be a civil engineer despite your disability, the last thing you should do is correct for the disability in your primary success metric.
You show a touching level of confidence in the idea that test scores are a useful metric of anything anybody cares about... especially after they're Goodharted into oblivion. Maybe the extreme ends of the ranges are, if you compensate for noise sources. And giving somebody more time on the test may indeed be compensating for a noise source.
Incentives. Did you know that mental health specialists like therapists as a field are entirely in lock-step in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything, because otherwise most insurance won't reimburse?
Any functioning individual can go to a therapist and get an immediate diagnosis of an affliction, simply because therapists won't get clients if they don't provide the avenue for being funded by health insurance.
I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that says "I'm depressed." Which I'm sure exists, but I don't conflate pill-mills with responsible MDs, either.
Regardless, depending on the state, licensed counselors are qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, so not sure what your comment is getting at.
One one hand you say sure, they have to provide a diagnosis like an adjustment disorder, and on the other you say walking into a therapist's office and getting that is like a rare pill-mill? Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
This article is talking about any sort of mental health "disability", and the way the mental health system financials work is that it's no wonder we have so many identifying as having a disability. The system isn't evaluating an individual and applying a disorder to people that are factually on the 5-10% of the population that would be a rare "disorder". The system is literally slapping a disorder label on everyone that walks in and these people are identifying with the label they're given.
> Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
Yes. You seem to be taking chagrin with the fact that therapists have to attach a diagnosis code in order to bill insurance, and then conflating that with inflated diagnoses of mental disorders that qualify as disabilities.
My issue with your comment is that I think you're taking a systemic issue (which I acknowledge, btw) and framing it as therapists' misconduct. If your claim that therapists are categorically diagnosing anyone who shows up for the purposes of billing were true, we'd expect to see very high diagnosis rates specifically among therapists who rely heavily on insurance, relative to those who are mostly private-pay. I don't have that data, but I'd be surprised if the difference were as extreme as your framing implies.
What did change in a clear, documented way was the DSM-5 criteria in 2013, which lowered thresholds for several conditions and broadened who qualifies for a diagnosis. That is diagnostic classification problem, not a "therapists are gaming the system for billing" problem.
It’s matter of incentives. Everyone knows the value of college is in the piece of paper they give you at the end, the things they teach you are not super helpful in real world. So people cheat so they don’t have to waste time learning useless knowledge and instead spend that time on something valuable, like working out or going to a party.
>the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
Stanford can make the student pay any costs of the accommodation if Stanford wants to push back on the student. E.g., if the student requests extra time on tests, Stanford can estimate the total cost of employing the proctor and bill that (amortized of course over the amount of extra time).
But yeah, it is kind of excessive how much special treatment a person can get in US society just by being rich enough to afford a doctor who will sign whatever letters the person needs (and being shameless enough to request the letters). Another example is apartment buildings with a strict policy of no dogs. With a doctor's letter, the pet dog becomes a medically-necessary emotional-support animal, which the landlord must allow per the same ADA discussed in the OP.
I don’t think the ADA allows charging people with disabilities extra. For example, if you claim you have a service dog, then you are legally not allowed to be charged pet fees.
it's destroying the integrity of the human genome with each subsequent generation worse and worse and will result in a culling of the species over time toward more stable subgroups likely in more remote regions not affected by these things as much
This is what trending towards zero sum looks like. The cracks in society are growing ever wider. Failure to get into the top schools and obtain top grades is perceived as potentially life ruining. Hence all this cheating, and, also, grade inflation.
I had a college roommate who got hit by a car and was in a coma with lasting mental deficits. He was a mechanical engineering major, and because of his "disability" he got 2x time allowed on exams. It did not seem right to me, but oh well.
Because it's bullshit? Kids today don't understand that they are not special, everyone's different and the diagnosis you get from a TikTok video is not real.
The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.
My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic
What a disgusting article. It's abliest to say that disabled students won't be able to make it Stanford. The only weird part is calling anxiety and depression a disability.
Saying that people who are using accommodations are cheating is morally repugnant.
Instead of saying that we need to clamp down on people claiming disabilities, we should open up the accommodations to everyone.
"Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD."
This is clickbait. There are diseases and disorders, and we have medicine to treat them so that people can be functional in society (particularly, work and school).
Is it really surprising that the top minds in STEM might not be neuro-typical?
You can't tell me you think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk (!), etc., have "normal" brains.
Whether that should count as a disability or a superpower is subjective. ADHD and Autism often present as strengths in one arena, and weaknesses in another. Speaking overly broadly: An aptitude for hard facts and logic, with a difficulty with emotions and social cues.
That's not to say that everyone who presents as such should be given the same accommodations. It's probably being abused. But that doesn't mean they're lying about their brains. It took a doctor to diagnose it. What more would you want to see beyond "a doctors note"?
I watch a lot of bodycam DUI arrests on Youtube (I'm not proud of it - it's a guilty pleasure) and something I have noticed is that close to 100% of young female suspects claim to have ADHD, anxiety, depression or all 3. This generation has been trained to use these three pathologies to excuse poor behaviours. So it wouldn't be a surprise to see them using it to excuse poor academics, even preemptively.
This is a really poor article that has no research behind it, and no attempt to investigate anything or talk to anyone with a different view. The only source is the terrible Atlantic article about the topic.
There’s plenty to discuss and disagree with these policies but the author’s willingness to make broad judgments about college students’ behaviors and internal states based on poor understanding of ADHD, the ADA, and what’s actually going on at these schools is incredibly poor journalism by this author and by Reason.
As a "real" disabled person with autism...whatever that means.... This entire thread is very saddening. And lacking the usual debate vibe and is just people dumping their hate and frustration with no real sources or data or understanding :(
I was literally reading the same stuff happening in Norway and two young women at the university spoke up about it. The main issue there was the abuse of doctors time lying about issues to get extra time on the exams as the extra time requires a doctor's note.
A lot of commenters have focused on the ADHD, but the 38% number is from anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
... and this generation of students has every reason to be anxious and depressed. I'm surprised the number isn't over 50%. They're watching the white-collar jobs (the kind of jobs that justify a Stanford degree price-tag) get hammered by AI with no plan to back-stop the unemployment resulting than the same answers from the past (i.e. mutterings of "bootstraps" and "saving" and "stop eating avocado toast"), they're watching fascism creep over the nations of the world again, they're watching the annual thermometer rise, the weather get worse, and the world pass tipping-point numbers that our best models suggest will lead to incredibly sweeping climate changes... And they're watching the current leadership of the planet do not enough to address any of this.
I have a teenage niece that is 100% convinced she'll never own a home. I don't have anything concrete to tell her to convince her otherwise.
So yeah... Maybe those double-digit percentage numbers are pretty justified by all of this.
Tldr: If you are actually smart, you leverage as much of the social system to your advantage that you can get away with. It's called being street smart. Don't blame the kids for being street smart.
Oh and the fact that in USofA, Big Pharma in cahoots with corrupt doctors and a broken police/judicial system let you legal amphetamines if you have adhd is, of course, nothing to do with this.
Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because
> Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.
buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.
I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).
edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.
The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...
Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.
Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.
If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.
The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating.
The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation request letters to anyone who makes an appointment and asks nicely.
There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.
Once it becomes widely known that getting a diagnosis is the meta-game to getting housing priority, nicer rooms, extra time on tests, and other benefits the numbers climb rapidly. When the number is approaching 38%, the system has become broken.
It's a real problem for the students who really need these accommodations. When 38% of the students qualify for "priority" housing, you're still in competition with 1/3 of the student body for those limited resources.
> There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.
This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).
The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these accommodations directly, or perhaps via some kind of auction. Acceptance to such a school will be the “basic economy” of attendance. If you want to pick your seat, you can pay to upgrade.
Or just operate so that everyone gets the academic benefits.
My roommate in the 90s was ahead of the curve, he memorized the Cosmo quiz “do you have ADD” went to the student center, got a script that he sold or snorted, and got to take his test in a comfortable room at a time scheduled centrally.
Just randomize assignments to rooms all over campus.
> This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).
Yup. A few years ago in California, go to a weed store in Napa. "Oh, you need a medical card" "Oh, sorry". I get handed a business card, no worries, just call this doctor here, it'll be $x (can't remember) and you can get a medical card and just come back in. I had my medical card within 5 minutes on the phone on the sidewalk outside the store.
Was having stress related ED issues a fews ago. Hit up Hims, fill out the questionnaire. Physician reviews it in our online chat. "If these are your answers, I would not be able to prescribe for you. If your answer to Q3 was x, Q5 was Y, then I would. Would you like to review your answers before re-submitting?"
Wow.
Great to know we're basically raising an entire generation without any integrity.
Can't wait to be in a nursing home where all the staff are trying to meta-game for lowest amount of responsibility rather than caring for the elderly.
And believe me, I'm the last person to disparage the truly disabled or those down on their luck. But 38% in a developed country is just straight up insane. Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?
I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?
There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
That's what you get in a world where damn near everything is measured against some objective criteria, analyzed by a 3rd party or tracked by the government or someone at the behest thereof
None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.
The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.
Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
It's not 38% of the entire population/generation, it's 38% of a tiny group who have gotten into an elite, highly selective school, and have the massive resources (not just education) to do so. But as someone else said, these are probably people who are much more likely to get placed into positions of power and authority.
I have bad news for you about existing nursing homes.
We’re a society of assholes. The comment above suggests selling accommodation requests.
Better yet, many of the graduates will become politicians, journalists, or prominent tech figures who will be pontificating about morality and regulating it for others.
Is it really gaming to get a doctors note to say a pet cat will make you happier?
My stepdaughter just started college. She told the tale of a boy and a girl who tried to claim that a cat was an ESA or service animal for both of them. The one cat. For both people. Just so happened that they were a couple in high school, and this was their effort to game the system to get assigned to a dorm together (the university generally wouldn't allow a co-ed dorm assignment like that, and had rules about relationship "overnights" in the dorm.
universities should have their own experts who give final diagnosis and are unapelable and thats it, all the psychopathic circus which is abusing real disabled people would be out
Why are frequent attendance exemptions granted? I'm totally blind and when I went to college my lack of attendance had nothing to do with the fact that I was blind and everything to do with the fact that I made poor choices like other college students. If I didn't have the mobility skills to get to class then I shouldn't have been granted an exception, I should have been told to get better mobility skills before going to college. I think the only time I asked for an attendance exemption was during finals week. There was a blizzard at the same time as one of my finals and the sidewalks and streets were not plowed. This made it incredibly dangerous for me to go to take the test. I just emailed explaining the situation and took the test the next day.
My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.
Water before toothpaste = adhd now?
Sort of like having any kind of strong interest in any kind of niche topic apparently now magically teleports you onto the autism spectrum. No, that's not how that works . . .
Don't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore.
I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
Autism spectrum highly favors jobs where it's basically person with data. I have seen estimates that a *majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum. I suspect I lie at the mild end of the spectrum--and I see programming as playing to my strengths and against my weaknesses.
Before software paid as well as it does now, the percent on the spectrum was definitely a high double digit %.
Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)
If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.
I always think of the SMBC "old physicist" comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
"High-functioning" is contextual for most autistic people. (The trick is to remain in those contexts, while developing skills to push the boundary a bit further out: get good enough at it, and even your closest friends will say "wow, that meltdown came out of nowhere!".)
Isn't this how you're supposed to be doing it anyway?
ADHD is when high school chemistry class covers emulsifiers and you remember it
But can’t remember if you ate today or not.
It's 5PM and I haven't eaten yet, good reminder. /joking-but-factually-true
I wash the brush before putting the paste on. I also doodle. I guess I have ADHD and everyone here should now accommodate my eccentricities.
> putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste
Wat? I had no idea I had a disability!
Same here. My logic is that my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria, which is kinda gross but also not that different from a lot of other surfaces and environments, and that it's going to collect some amount of stuff floating around. A quick rinse is going to dislodge a good fraction of what has accumulated over the course of a day.
I thought I was just being logical, but apparently I also have a deficit of attention. Okay, then. I guess I'd rather bear that burden than brush my teeth with shi... sorry, I probably should terminate that sentence before I get carried away.
> My logic is that
I just assumed a bit of water in advance would prevent toothpaste from directly/easily adhering to the bristles, keeping more of it "in useful circulation" as it were.
> kinda gross
A few months back I needed some hydrogen peroxide, but the available bottle was more than I was likely to use before it degraded into H20... So, naturally, I started messing around looking for other applications. (It worked great on certain oily gunks that resist isopropyl.)
One weird outcome from that is I've been putting a drop on the bristles of my toothbrush, although it's more of an idle experiment to see if the foaming action dislodges visible crud (i.e. toothpaste near the base) in-between uses, as opposed to a disinfection right before use.
Hey, interesting idea using it against the shower gunk. Definitely going to try it.
And, yes, definitely water first. It's sitting out there exposed, rinse it off!
Let us know if the peroxide gets rid of the shower gunk. I've tried all kinds of cleaners to no avail.
IIRC the regular hydrogen peroxide didn't do much against those discolorations.
One of the niche magic ingredients to look for is TSP. Alongside bleach (consult proper sources for actual ratios) the combination becomes more powerful against mildews.
I'm reluctant to mix anything with bleach(!)
look on the bright side. Fecal transplants are expensive but this way it's free. Sorry, that's not me talking, it's my ADHD ;-)
ADHD is nothing but an excuse for lack of discipline. I used to doodle during class, and I still do on interminable conference calls. We used to call it boredom. But there are no convenient meds for that, nor does anyone cut you any slack for being merely bored.
Ban pharma from advertising and watch mental health improve. Never going to happen, of course, corruption - sorry, "lobbying," have to use first world terms here - is rampant in the US.
>Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.
Yep. Speaking from experience, top colleges will give students with ADHD or similar conditions as much as double time or more on exams. One college I know of sends them to a disability services office to proctor it, in which they simply don't enforce time limits at all.
Coincidentally, there's an overwhelming number of students with ADHD compared to before these kinds of accommodations became standard.
having infinite time on exams is level of the the ADHD cheating iceberg
level 2 of the ADHD cheating iceberg is having medically approved methamphetamines to infinistudy before exams e.g. ritalin
> Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.
Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can do something.
In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. I suspect there is a correlation between people who think things through and people who do well in school.
> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly.
Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.
In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.
This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.
It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.
I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.
But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.
I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.
I remember a Linear II test where we had to do Gram-Schmidt on a few large matrices and the prof was a stickler for showing steps. I'm not sure if writing was the limiting factor but it was definitely a major factor. Quantum mechanics is also one of those where there can be a lot of intermediate steps if you don't have things like group theory under your belt (and you usually don't if you're in Griffiths).
I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.
When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays.
Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.
I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.
> the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint
Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.
I had an abstract algebra exam where for the last question, I couldn’t remember the theorem to do it in a sensible way, but could see that the brute force approach only needed ~40 modular multiplications. That came down to the wire!
Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.
I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper.
Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
> scrap pieces of paper
The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.
Caltech had timed exams (2-3 hours) and infinite time exams, at the discretion of the professor.
The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it.
Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.
In the upper division of my undergrad physics degree that was really common. Open book, open everything except peers. I personally loved those exams and my grades went way up. I could walk away for a few minutes if I was stuck, maybe grab a beer to relax, and get back and solve the problems. But I think this is much harder to do and getting even more difficult. I was at a small university and you really couldn't google the answers. It was really easy to write google proof questions. But a key part was that the classes were small, so it was pretty obvious if people were cheating.
I went to grad school in CS after a few years of work and when I taught I centered the classes around projects. This was more difficult in lower division classes but very effective in upper. But it is more work on the person running the class.
I don't think there's a clear solution that can be applied to all fields or all classes, but I do think it is important people rethink how to do things.
That's how my parents taught. Design questions to make the students apply their knowledge rather than regurgitate it. Forget a fact it's being applied to, look it up. Don't understand the concepts, you're stuck. Know the material, piece of cake. One time I was in my father's classroom because he was showing a film he wanted me to see. There was a quiz afterwards, he knew it wouldn't be alien to me and had me try it. 5 minutes later I turn it in, the class thinks I gave up. Then he says I aced it. But I graded an awful lot of his tests, I know that when I didn't know the material I wouldn't stand a chance. The day I found a question that I could guess was notable enough to me that I asked my mother about it. (A case of not knowing the fact. Her supplying the information that the tribe in question was a stone age culture in the New Guinea jungles made the why apparent.)
One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake.
A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. The trick there was to know how the Fourier transforms (based on sine/cosine) were derived, and just substitute in sinh/cosh.
If you were a formula plugger or just memorized facts, you'd be dead in the water.
I do think that's one of the reasons it's easier to do in physics. You're taught to see math as a language and therefore need to interpret it. With that in mind who cares if you memorize formulas and can churn out some algorithmic computation. You'll memorize formulas "accidentally" as you use them frequently. But if you don't know how to interpret the math you're completely fucked and frankly probably won't do well as a physicist. Much of the job is translating back and forth.
I actually loved my classical mechanics class. The professor was really good and in the homeworks he'd come up with creative problems. The hardest part was always starting. Once you could get the right setup then you could churn away like any other (maybe needing to know a few tricks here and there).
Coming over to CS I was a bit surprised how test based things were. I'm still surprised how everyone thinks you can test your program to prove its correctness. Or that people gravely misinterpret the previous sentence as "don't write tests" rather than "tests only say so much"
A couple of my upperclassmen professors used open-everything exams, notes, textbook, even the Internet was allowed. Although time was tight so if you felt like you had to Google something, you better not have to do it a second time.
My time was pre-intertoobs. My freshman year was the last year one saw slide rules and punch cards.
The ASR-33 teletype lasted another year.
I ceased knowing everything about my computer in the late 80s.
That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.
At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock.
Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.
Besides, I actually wanted to learn the stuff.
I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and their answers are still correct.
They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor.
If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.
But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.
In this context, time constraints are measured in hours and are very informative regarding the student’s capacity to prioritise, plan and carry out their work under pressure.
It is actually very informative when one person can
Agreed. Frankly test taking doesn't correlate to job performance well by any metric.
For example, get 90% on a test, that's applauded and earns a distinction. In a job context, 90% gets you fired. I don't want a worker who produces "90% well soldered boards". I don't want software that runs on "90% of our customers computers". Or a bug in every 10 lines of released code.
A test puts an arbitrary time limit on a task. In the real world time is seldom the goal. Correctness is more important. (Well, the mechanic was going to put all the wheel nuts on, but he ran out of time.)
College tests are largely a test of memory, not knowledge or understanding. "List the 7 layers of OSI in order." In the real world you can just Google it. Testing understanding is much harder to mark though, Testing memory is easy to set, easy to mark.
Some courses are moving away from timed tests, and more towards assignments through the year. That's a better measure (but alas also easier to cheat. )
I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant?
I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
"I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference?"
I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...
That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.
I'm always surprised by comments like the gp's. Even working on different types of programming jobs I would be surprised if the majority of time is spent on actually writing lines. The majority of my time is spent on understanding the codebase and how the new requirements best fit in there. I do see people jumping in straight to /a/ solution, but every time I've seen that happen it is hacky and ends up creating more problems than solutions.
I'm also surprised at how common it is for people to openly discuss how irrelevant leetcode is to the actual work on the job but how it is still the status quo. On one hand we like to claim that an academic education is not beneficial but in the other hand use it as the main testing method.
I think why I'm most surprised is we, more than most other jobs, have a publicly visible "proof of competence." Most of us have git repos that are publicly available! I can totally understand that this isn't universal, but in very few industries is there such a publicly visible record of work. Who else has that? Artists? I'm not sure why this isn't more heavily weighted than these weird code tests that we've developed a secondary market to help people optimize for. It feels like a huge waste of money and time.
I don't think test speed is correlated with that.
Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.
If I'm paying a professional by the hour, yes, it matters if he can do it in one hour rather than two.
I once hired a civil engineer to do a job for me, and he started billing me for time spent learning how to do it. I refused to pay him. (There was nothing unusual about the job, it was a simple repair task.)
That's a tricky one that I find myself pondering a lot as a contractor.
I've ultimately decided that if it's something I'm required to learn for this specific task then I'm billing for the time spent doing that. But if it's something that I figure I should know as a person being hired to do a task in this particular domain then I won't bill for it.
To me it's the difference between hiring a mechanic to 'rebuild an engine' and 'rebuild a rare X764-DB-23 model of an exotic engine.'
It's reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild an engine but it isn't necessarily reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild that particular engine and therefore it's reasonable for that mechanic to charge you for their time spent learning the nuances and details of that particular engine by reading the manual, watching youtube tear down videos, or searching /r/mechanic/ on Reddit for commentary about that specific video.
It's important to strike a balance between these kinds of things as a contractor. You don't want to undervalue your time and you don't want to charge unreasonable rates.
I agree with your assessment. In my case, I am a mechanical engineer and what he was billing me for smelled of being scammed - he thought I was ignorant. I confronted him on it and he backed down.
I've had similar experiences with auto repair shops. Recently I got a BS estimate for an alternator replacement, and a BS explanation. Fortunately, I had done my homework beforehand and knew everything about how to replace the alternator on my particular car, and the service rep knew he was outmaneuvered and gave me a fair price.
Women believe they are targeted by auto mechanics, but they target men as much as they can, too.
Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place?
Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good?
Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards?
I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.
Lots of people think a test should measure one thing (often under the slightly "main character" assumption that they'll be really good at the one truly important thing).
Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.
It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though.
Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
> Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.
Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.
And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.
There can be a genuine need to make it fair. Some students with anxiety can take 10 minutes to read the first question, then are fine. ASD could mean slower uptake as they figure out the exam format.
So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.
> So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.
We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.
If thinking speed is determined to be important and made one of the evaluation criteria, then it's important whether or not you have clinical anxiety.
If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?
> All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.
This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly.
Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text.
With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.
Those examples seem like reasonable, narrowly tailored accomodations to me. But the article linked in the parent comment says:
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.
The accommodation process shouldn't be easier. I had to provide documentation to an employer per ADA rules.
For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.
I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.
I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)
Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.
1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.
Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:
- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.
- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.
- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.
- Find out the position of the hour hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Tell myself the hour number.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Find out the position of the minute hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.
- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.
- Both remembered.
- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.
- Hour and start time need to be remembered.
- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.
- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.
- Remember everything
- Two math operations.
Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.
- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.
I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.
I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.
If your brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person, what's the argument for why grades shouldn't reflect that?
Put another way, if my brain works at a slower rate than the genius in my class, is it then unfair if my grades don't match theirs?
In general these seem like reasonable differences to consider when hiring someone for a job.
I am very sympathetic to your situation. It just seems that like either the time should matter or it shouldn't.
Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.
Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.
Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.
Now, I can imagine two situations.
1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?
2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.
just to go off of this, I'm not bipolar but I feel we need to also consider more severe mental disorders. For example I have multiple personality disorder
Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body
Hello I'm a tiny babby
> Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.
Why are you trying to measure speed though?
I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else.
Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.
Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok.
Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
> Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it
That seems like a big assumption that i don't believe is true in general.
I think its true at an individual level, as you learn more about a subject you will become faster at it. I don't think its true when comparing between different people. Especially if you throw learning disabilities into the mix which is often just code for strong in one area and weak in another, e.g. smart but slow.
Well that’s the core of the problem. Either you’re measuring speed on a test or you’re not. If you are, then people with disabilities unfortunately do not pass the test and that’s the way it is. If you are not, then testing some students but not others is unfair.
At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.
Eliminating time limits on standardized tests is infeasible; it would require changes to processes on a state or national levels, and mindsets in education as a whole. It's also a complex enough issue that you'd have factions arguing for and against it six ways to Sunday. It's not going to happen.
In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.
Eliminating time constraints is entirely reasonable. Leaving exams early is generally an option in most standardized testing systems - though usually with some minimum time you must remain present before leaving.
Taking what is currently scheduled as a three hour exam which many students already leave after 2, and for which some have accommodations allowing them 4 hours, and just setting aside up to five hours for it for everyone, likely makes the exam a fairer test of knowledge (as opposed to a test of exam skills and pressured time management) for everyone.
Once you’ve answered all the problems, or completed an essay, additional time isn’t going to make your answers any better. So you can just get up and leave when you’re done.
I think one challenge would be preventing professors from taking advantage of the time to extend the test. I suspect the professors would generally like to extend the test to be more comprehensive, and are limited by the time limits of the test, and tests will naturally extend to fill whatever default time is allotted.
> Leaving exams early is generally an option in most standardized testing systems
I didn't because I'd use the extra time to go over my answers again looking for errors.
You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time.
But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.
But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task?
In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?
I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone.
I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit.
I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.
Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair:
* You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription.
* You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits.
* You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.
I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.
The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.
Those are all great examples where I agree that an accommodation seems uncontroversial.
But to quote the article linked in the parent comment:
> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons.
One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis.
Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.
> An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths
If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles.
The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated.
The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.
The braille example you give makes absolutely perfect sense. The blind student is being evaluated same as the other students and the accommodation given to the blind student (a Braille version of the test) would be of no use to the other students.
But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.
If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?
> But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.
That depends on how the test is designed.
Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test.
However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.
Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns.
If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on.
So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone.
Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
> why don't we just give it to all students then?
I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.
> However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.
Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?
> Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.
I think almost all of my high school exams and at least half of my college finals had >90% of students remaining in the exam hall when the proctor called time.
> Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?
Perhaps this comes down to definitions, but i would say that in general, no, speed is not part of mastering material in intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes it might be correlated though. Other times it might be negatively correlated, e.g. someone who memorized everything but doesn't understand the principles will have high speed and low mastery.
If you saying a good test measures skill and not speed, what is the rationale for withholding the extra time from some students? I'm not saying you have to use all the time. I finished many a college exam early and left. No biggie.
I'm just saying if you are going to let some kids stay longer, let everyone stay longer. And you seem to agree on that point.
Either have a time limit for everyone or no one.
>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained?
A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.
That makes sense to me, but in that case I also just don't understand why one group gets more time than another group. If the test is meant to evaluate thinking speed, then you can't give some groups more time, because now it doesn't evaluate thinking speed anymore.
The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages.
It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs.
This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
> This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
Wouldn't say this is an accurate description of the US economy.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
That link supports the thesis if everything?
Top 0.01%, +9.1%
Top 0.1%, +13.9%
Top 1%, +15.2%
Top 10%, +6.1%
Middle 40%, -6%
Bottom 50%, -0.1%
This supports exactly GP's two statements:
> we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.
Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking
> This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
> > we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.
> Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking
Not sure about "power" there. In my experience you get power by having a lot of free time and dedication to something else other people don't care about… which yes includes billionaires obviously, but most of the people meeting that description are just middle class retirees, so they're outnumbered.
> > This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.
> Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
It does not show it "every year", there are long periods of stagnation and some reversals. I would say it shows that recessions are bad and we should avoid having them.
nb another more innocuous explanation is: there's no reason to have a lot of wealth. To win at this game you need to hoard wealth, but most people are intentionally not even trying that. For instance, you could have a high income but spend it all on experiences or donate it all to charity.
Who is in the white house regularly dictating policy? Is it old retirees with no money or connections?
Who's at your local city council meeting getting every single proposal to build an apartment cancelled? (It's the old people.)
When I graduated HS in 1982, the top 1% had 34.7% percent of the wealth. Today, the top 1% has 71.1%. So yeah, I'd say he's spot on. There have been a few dips and valleys, but the trend line is pretty strong.
That is not what that chart shows. It shows top 1% was 25% in 1982 and 35-37% now. Mostly related to the Great Recession.
Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial.
If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.
Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.
Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.
Probably started out as an exception for truly difficult situations but like everything else became routinely exploited once widely known about and eventually became a defacto norm and just part of the protocol.
A lot of things start like this. You need someone with an aggressive backbone to enforce things - which these institutions won't have.
> If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures
Why is that gated like that?
If your rant is about the USA: Are we really going to try to turn this into a war against the ADA?
I counter: If students are requesting specific accommodations en-mass, maybe schools should rethink overall decisions. Maybe housing shouldn't be shared. Maybe the workload should be relaxed.
Disabilities are far more commonplace than you might imagine. The number of disabled people per 1,000 likely hasn't changed, but our recognition of disabilities such as autism, anxiety disorders, etc. has gotten better.
I'm sure a very small amount of folks do abuse the system, but I'd bet money that most actually have disabilities.
If you still think otherwise, think again: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid 30s, and with autism in my mid 40s. This is through extended, multiple hour testing. Nobody told me I had these issues. I was simply told I was a terrible person that didn't do his school work and behaved poorly at school. Now, with an understanding of autism, ADHD, and the new anxiety disorder I have thanks to a recent brain injury, I'm able to finally address this stuff.
I also aced higher level, computer centric stuff, and set a record for one of the quickest to graduate in my state at a technical school (2 months instead of 2 years).
Bottom line is that you should not be making poor assumptions about people abusing the system without evidence to prove it.
On "parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability" -- for the purposes of standardized testing we've found it extremely difficult and feedback we've heard from others on message boards echoes our experience.
I do feel like a test that is so focused on speed rather than ability seems like it loses a lot of its utility. There's a bunch of math I can't do. It doesn't matter if you give me an hour or two -- I won't be able to do it. But distinguishing between the ability to solve a problem in 30s versus 40s seems to be missing the point.
the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation, not just time and half on tests. If you had carpet replaced in your dorm because it gave you an allergy, it would be included. So, this is just an article that is just flat out bullshit.
> the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation,
The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.
Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.
25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:
> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.
A public two-year college? So, a community college? That's a much more specific claim than that being the case for public universities overall.
yes, the original article is a flat out bullshit lie
https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae
it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?
this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.
the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case
Your link doesn't say "25%". It's also not an official, up-to-date statistics resource. It's website copy for the office of accessible education
The "1 in 4" number has been there as far back as Wayback Machine has that paged archived (2023): http://web.archive.org/web/20230628165315/https://oae.stanfo...
So it's definitely not a precise statistic, and it's likely out of date.
1 in 4 is 25%
it's on their website. Along with all the other details. where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.
And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.
The Atlantic journalist talked to Stanford Professor Paul Graham Fisher who was co-chair of the university’s disability task force, so I imagine they either got it from him or someone else at the school.
They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.
The number isn’t sourced. But the article does say 24% were receiving academic OR housing accommodation. So 38% registered disabled but only 24% receiving any type of accommodations sounds suspiciously like bullshit. It would require people registering and not using the thing they registered for.
But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here. Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd. The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.
There are any number of reasons for that to be the case.
1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.
> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.
you are talking complete nonsense, sorry. Nobody pays full tuition at Stanford unless you are rich, it's literally free for families making less than 150k a year.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.
> 1 in 4 is 25%
N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.
It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.
Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.
You are nitpicking. By that logic, since we can never know the precise number because that number is always moving, we simply don’t know what the number is and all this is moot.
> The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range.
The National Center for Education Statistics disagrees with 3-4%.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60That's a different statistic. Not all students who report having a disability on a survey will be registered with their school's disability office.
Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey.
https://disability.utexas.edu/statistics/
https://irp.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/01/20...
https://dsst.fsu.edu/oas
This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:
> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-profit institutions, 7% at for-profit institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.
https://pnpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/StudentswithDisa...
The bullshit nature of the article becomes clear as the author repeatedly begs the question as the sole means of making her actual argument.
Edit: To be clear there’s a lot of argument from incredulity or “obviously something is wrong,” without doing the work to establish that.
Meanwhile my uni required brain scans for adhd accommodations it was asinine
Imaging (brain scans) cannot be used for ADHD diagnosis. There is no standard for it. There were a couple quack doctors who pushed the idea (Dr. Amen is the famous one) but it's not an accepted medical practice.
I think someone misunderstood, or they were telling you a lie.
They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.
It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.
> Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.
My research was done a long time ago. I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless. Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?
Regardless, your overall point is interesting. Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm. If that ostensible harm isn't reflected in reality, and there is a net benefit in having a certain age group accelerate (and, presumably, deepen) their education, perhaps this type of overwhelming regulatory control is a mistake. In that sense, it's a shame that these policies are imposed federally, as comparative data would be helpful.
I went to university at a time that Adderall was commonplace, and am now old enough to see how it turned out for the individuals. At college, it was common for students to illicitly purchase Adderall to use as a stimulate to cram for a test/paper etc. It was likewise common for students to abuse these drugs by taking pills at a faster than prescribed pace to work for 48 hours straight amongst other habits.
In the workplace, I saw the same folks struggle to work consistently without abusive dosages of such drugs. A close friend eventually went into in-patient care for psychosis due to his interaction with Adderall.
Like any drug, the effect wears off - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years. As I recall, the standard dosages of Adderall cease to be effective after 7-10 years due to changes in tolerance. Individuals trying to maintain the same therapeutic effect will either escalate their usage beyond "safe" levels or revert to their unmedicated habits.
In my experience, Adderall does lose effectiveness but Vyvanse is much hardier. I’ve been receiving treatment for ADHD for about 4 years. My current Vyvanse dose is marginally higher than my original Adderall dose, but I’m considering reducing it down to below my original Adderall dose.
Cognitive behavioral therapy does excel at treating ADHD! But 5 years of therapy is what, 16 times more expensive than 5 years of medication? Maybe more? Not to mention the time commitment.
But adderall and vyvanse aren’t the same drug at all. You cannot directly compare dosages. 50mg of vyvanse is roughly equivalent to 20mg of adderall. As a prodrug, Vyvanse must be processed by the liver for it to function.
Indeed. That's why I'm underscoring that my Vyvanse dosage (20mg) is only midly higher than my Adderall dose was a few years ago (15mg).
The person you're replying to asked for a source, not an anecdote.
Adderall doesn't particularly have long-term tolerance. If you're developing tolerance to it, you have a magnesium deficiency and should take magnesium threonate supplements. (Not oxide, the cheap ones, that doesn't work.)
And then remember to drink water, exercise and get enough sleep.
I prefer to cycle between addictions of modafinil and caffeine, you shouldn't chronically use 1 drug forever
You get addicted to modafinil? I've tried it. It doesn't cure ADHD but it is remarkably like if those boomer newspaper comic jokes about coffee were actually real.
But… it's not addictive at all. Taking it made me not want to take it again. I was just like damn, I kind of smell like sulfur now.
> Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years.
Apropos of anything else, 5 years of weekly CBT to get to the same result is a _lot_. 260 hours of therapy that, on my current health insurance would cost nearly $12,000 in copays. And during that 5 years you're still dealing with your ADHD to some heavy extent.
Lmao, imagine saying this kind of slop to someone with diabetes.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy matches insulin after 5 years”
(because they die - so they’re no longer counted)
The results seem pretty clear that CBT can be quite effective in helping with ADHD.
Unlike insulin, which cannot be produced with any sort of therapy, it does seem that ADHD can be significantly improved.
I'm sorry though that the facts seem to bother you so much.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22480189/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28413900/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32036811/
Imagine posting “sorry that the facts bother you” and then linking to
- A study with a sample a size < 50
- A study that says that medication improves outcomes over CBT
- A study that says that evidence for CBT improving ADHD symptoms comes from studies with such small sample sizes that the conclusions could be the result of bias
The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them. The first two don’t really say that and the third one literally refutes that position.
>The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them.
Fortunately for them, that's often the case. I've seen at least a couple internet arguments with LLM-generated "sources" that didn't actually exist.
> Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.
> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?
Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:
> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.
https://archive.is/20250413091646/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
> I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless.
There is no conclusive research on humans, but you have these backwards. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is thought to have less risk for neurotoxicity than Adderall (amphetamine). Amphetamine enters the neuron and disrupts some internal functions as part of its mechanism of action, while Ritalin does not.
Both drugs will induce tolerance, though. The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.
There are also some entertaining studies where researchers give one group of students placebo and another group of students Adderall, then have them self-rate their performance. The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test. If you've ever seen the confidence boost that comes from people taking their first stimulant doses, this won't come as a big surprise. These early effects (euphoria, excess energy) dissipate with long-term treatment, but it fools a lot of early users and students who borrow a couple pills from a friend.
> The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.
They lasted me 12 years so far. Same dosage.
> The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test.
A feeling of euphoria means your dosage is too high, and people without ADHD probably shouldn’t take these drugs.
If the studies involved people that were on the drugs normally, it’s also not a particularly surprising result. The drugs induce a very real chemical dependency, and you will not feel like yourself or that you are performing when you are off of them.
That is honestly my only complaint. Without the drug, I am essentially a vegetable. If I go cold turkey, I can barely stay awake. However, it’s still a lot better than my life was before.
Wow that's interesting! Could you share your sources?
Source for amphetamines being a performance enhancing drug? Try some lol.
Really, they're habit forming and destructive so don't take them, but the reason they're so popular is they really do kick you up.
> Try some lol.
Trying amphetamines classically gives short-term euphoria and confidence boost.
There have been a few studies on this. If you give college students amphetamines they will report performing dramatically better, but their actual performance is maybe slightly improved at best and some measures are worsened: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/6/3/58
The notable thing is that they all report doing much better despite the actual results not matching their self-assessment.
So don't "try some" and then think you're going to be speeding around like a superhuman for the rest of your life if you get a prescription.
I’m not sure what you mean by “interesting”, can you please explain, ideally by citing a few reputable dictionaries?
I dont know why you're getting downvoted, I see this all the time and its infuriating. Its a deflection tactic to burn peoples time.
I think you answered your own question as to why this is getting downvoted lol
The person I replied to was clearly using sarcasm
It's much more likely that ADHD diagnosis is easier to get when trying to get disability benefits and has practically no downsides for the student.
It's much harder to fake deafness or blindness to get that extra housing and exam benefits.
there is so much wrong with the first few paragraphs of this article
1. some of the things they list as "disabilities" are sicknesses which _can_ be disabling but not per see disabilities
2. all of the things listed aren't one/off but have not just huge gradients, but huge variations. You might be afflicted in a way which "disables" you from living a normal live or job but still might be able to handle university due to how it differs.
3. non of the things list is per-see/directly reducing your ability to have deep understanding in a specialized field. ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university. It's also might make more "traditionally structured jobs" hardly possible for you and bad luck with how professors handle their courses is more likely to screw you over. Anxiety is often enough more topic specific, e.g. social anxiety. This means it can be disabling for many normal jobs but not affect you in universities which don't require you physical presence, but if they do you basically wait out the course and then learn after being back home. In rare cases it can also help with crunch learning before an exam. Etc. etc.
Actually if we go a step future all of the named health issues can make it more likely for you to end up in high standard universities. Hyper focus on specific topics from ADHD might have started your journey into science even as a child. Anxiety might have lead to you studying more. Since might have been an escape from a painful reality which later lead to you developing depression.
If we consider how high standard universities can cause a lot of stress which can cause an out brake of anxiety or depression in some people it just is another data point why we would expect higher number of health issues (if you lump a bunch of very different issues together like they do).
Later they then also throw in autism in the list of mental issues, even through autism always had been higher represented in academia due to how it sometimes comes with "special interests" and make socializing as a child harder, i.e. it can lead to a child very early and very long term focusing on scientific topics out of their fully own interest. (But it doesn't have to, it can also thoroughly destroy you live to a point "learning to cope with it" isn't possible anymore and you are basically crippled as long as you don't luck out massively with your job and environment.)
Honestly the whole article has a undertone of people with "autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression" shouldn't be "elite" university and any accommodations for them should be cut.
Now to be fair accommodations have to be reasonable and you have to learn to cope with your issues. Idk. how they are handled in the US, but from what I have seen in the EU that is normally the case. E.g. with dyslexia and subtle nerve damage making hand writing harder I could have gotten a slight time extensions for any non-multiple choice exams. I didn't bother because it didn't matter all (but one) exams where done in a way where if you know the topic well you can finish in 60-70% of the time and if you don't even 3x time would not help you much (and the extension was like flat 15min). That is except if my nerve damage or dyslexia where worse then I really would have needed the time, not for solving questions but for writing down answers. There was one exam which tested more if you had crammed in all knowledge then testing understanding, in that exam due to dyslexia and my hands not being able to write quite as fast as normal I actually last some points, not because I didn't know but because I wasn't able to write fast enough.
The point here is if done well people which don't need accommodations shouldn't have a huge benefits even if they get them, but people needing it not getting it can mean punishing them for thing unrelated to actual skills. Live will do so enough after university, no need to force it into universities which should focus on excellence of knowledge and understanding.
>ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university.
"Hyperfocus" is a clinical term for focus that is excessive enough to be an impairment. People often conflate it with the term "Special interest" used for Autism, but it's completely different, it refers to the inability to pull focus away from something despite wanting and needing to. It is, definitionally, without benefit. If there's a benefit, it's not hyperfocus.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. ADHD is characterized by poor ability to direct attention. People know about it causing a lack of attention to things that need attention, but it can also cause attention to things that don't need it.
yes I don't mean "special interest"
and I'm aware that people with ADHD don't really have any way to direct it
and that it can easily lead to them neglecting everything from them self, over work to social relationships
so it will help more then it hurts in university
but it still can matter before, even if it's just a parent mistaking a hyper focus on some science topic with a special interest in it and then exposing you to more science related stuff earlier one in life
Just training for working at McKinsey after graduation
Navigating Bureaucracy 101
Given the current pace of changes and levels of uncertainty about the labor market 5-10 years from now, this may actually be the most useful skill-set the university is teaching students today.
Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.
What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is:
- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)
- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.
through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
It really seems strange to me that single rooms haven't become the norm, especially in light of how many people clearly prefer them. It's one thing to share a kitchen or bathroom in an apartment, but after college, how many people ever share bedrooms with anyone except a partner?
I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.
Add it to their LinkedIn and final evaluation and the problem solves itself
It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.
This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.
Yes, but people who lie are also at fault
Hate the game (the system and the people who set it up and are maintaining it), not the player.
30% of passengers ask for wheelchairs on long distance flights from India. That's how the system gets abused for priority boarding.
Still shitty privileged behavior, and any doctor providing a diagnosis just to get a kid a better dorm room, should immediately have his or her license revoked.
I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
Seems like evidence of profound moral decline that students would do that.
not even moral decline! I’d personally feel like a fraud every day if I “made it“ by using 5 different _unnecessary_ accommodations. Where is the satisfaction in that?
I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters.
People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.
Did anyone else actually enjoy dorm life? I was a freshman some years ago, so maybe it’s generational, but it was a very fond time.
I guess it’s probably high variance. My roomate was a great dude. I can easily see how it could go the other way.
I had a bad roommate who when I asked the people in the house to turn the music down he would tell them to turn it up, and he constantly had annoying guests in our tiny room. Fuck Patrick you know who you are..
i remember being woken up at 3am by him vomiting in the middle of the room. In the morning he used my swiffer to clean up his vomit. I told him to keep the swiffer .
On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.
Yeah fair fair. It's high variance. My roommate once had a bunch of his highschool friends over for a weekend and one of them sleep-peed onto my roommate's stack of books.
It would be interesting to test that maybe by looking at the disability rate before and after the honor code was changed recently. If there was an increase in disabilities, it might be because other cheating options on exams were limited.
For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.
I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.
It means that the action we should take in response to this article is "building more dorms with singles" rather than "we need to rethink the way that we are making accommodations for disabilities in educational contexts".
That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
I worked in residential life while in college and can tell you that placing freshmen in singles is a horrible idea. It leads to isolation and lets mental health issues fester. Some need it but you do not want to place anyone who doesn’t into a room alone especially in their first year.
Before you went to college, did you have a bedroom to yourself in your parents' home?
Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.
I agree in that freshmen should get the "experience" at least once. However, the way Stanford has arranged housing has meant that a good number of students will not live in a single for any of their 4 years.
Yet here in the UK it's perfectly normal. When I went to uni in 2000 in our halls there were 15 rooms per floor ber block, 2 of which were twins and 13 were single.
The people in the twins were not happy - they hadn't asked for them.
I knew one person who dropped out in the first 3 months (for mental purposes), and that was someone who shared a room.
Meh. I think you're overstating it. To meet your anecdata, I had both the first college year, and single > double by a large margin.
I would not classify it as anecdata. This was research backed policy adopted by most US universities. Residential life and the Dean of Students office are usually doing a lot to cooperate with other universities. This part of US colleges is not competing with each other so they routinely share data, go to conferences together multiple times a year, and res. life directors move from college to college every few years so they all know each other incredibly well.
The point is that everyone who gets a single is super happy about it the same way that a drug addict is always happy when they get their drug of choice for free: of course it’s great. Of course it isn’t the best thing for you in the long run. I say this as someone who hated being in a double my first year and spent the next three in a single.
As far as I am concerned having apartments of 4-8 students where each has their own small room but shares a common space is ideal. But usually this is reserved for sophomore year and later.
It depends on the person. I lived alone in my last year of undergrad and it sent me into a deep depression. I figured out that living alone was too much isolation for me and moved back in with a roommate. That helped to pull me out of my depression and be able to finish my degree.
I don't think people advocating for more single rooms would say that no multi-occupancy rooms should exist for people who do want them.
True, but unfortunately the response from Stanford has been to introduce triple and quad rooms ;)
This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).
I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.
The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.
I suppose so, but nonetheless it still likely harms the rest of the students who are honest by raising the price of housing for all students.
The diploma or credentials should be marked with the conditions of admission. That would prevent abuse from those who don't or shouldn't qualify for special admission conditions.
...and punish those who genuinely develop or suffer from some new condition after admittal.
In the context of academics I’d call it manipulating, exploiting or scamming the housing system, rather than cheating. Just because academic cheating is the center-of-gravity for this type of conversation, and, IMO, a much much bigger deal.
If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
This whole comment thread has been a crazy way to find out the ways people justify immoral behavior to themselves.
This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.
So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.
That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
"It's always been this way" and "everyone does it" are what bad people say to justify themselves.
Donald Trump won twice. Republican party is mostly cheering everything he does. Ho won by lying a lot. Media mostly sanewashed it. Meanwhile, GOP complained they did not sanewashed it enough.
HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago.
The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.
This isn't about Trump, it's about a lack of morality among students at one of the (formerly) most prestigious universities in the US.
It’s all connected. We are in an era where cheating is applauded and shame is non existent. Trump is not the sole cause of it but he is a contributor.
Compared to what Trump does, what his voters cheers on, what the whole his party defends, those students are still basically saints. It is profoundly hypocritical to look at who gets to win and lead, to look at what does not bother his voters at all and then complain abet ... check notes ... someone getting single room on some exaggerated claim.
And frankly, with HN praising Uber, Tesla and the rest of SV constantly breaking laws and rules companies, again, those students are practically saints.
OP worried about this:
> Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.
Trump winning second time, the people who lead government and GOP, the critical mass thing already happened. There was no moral already among significant share of population. Trying to pearl clutch over students is almost funny in that context.
Do you think my comment is doing that? Or are you just commenting on the other comments.
FWIW, just to be clear, I don’t think “manipulating, exploiting or scamming” are good things to do!
> If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
It isn't, but if I'm on the hiring end and I know you play games like this, I'm not hiring you. I can work with less competent folks much better.
Cheating to get limited housing benefits starves those limited resources from truly disabled students who actually need them.
Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.
I mean, they watch our president, who got a JET for god knows what, and after seeing that, why shouldn't they grab for the bag?
I suppose stanford does optimize for cheating, but this still seems excessive
I reviewed incoming applications during one Oxbridge academic application cycle. I raised some serious concerns, nobody listened, and therefore I refuse to take part on that any longer. Basically, lots of students are pretending to be disabled to enhance their chances with applications that are not particularly outstanding, taking spots from truly disabled students.
All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system.
I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks.
Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
> The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud.
If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not:
1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations
2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties
3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
> Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability
It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact.
I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.
That was my point, it is not a disability from an education POV, or at least I would not consider it as such without an independent audit.
I use the word "cheating" like I use the word "hacking." The connotation can be either good or bad or contextually. You are defeating a system. The intent of the cheater/hacker is where we get into moral judgements. (This is a great sub-thread.)
Sadly, society also optimizes for cheating. Meritocracy is a myth.
In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.
Or Stanford is influential enough that it creates the future new world, which now will have far more cheating.
This is what it comes down to
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
The direct result of this thinking is that people who need the accommodation face difficulty in getting it.
You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.
But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)
Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.
You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.
I think you're reading more into what I said than what I intended.
I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.
There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.
The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.
Some levers are accessible to everyone, but the implied social contract is that you only pull it if you actually need it, because the system doesn't have enough resources for everyone to do it.
Yes, I agree.
Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.
If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.
The problem is that people simply have no investment in a community anymore. This is a direct consequence of globalization and capitalism. Travel to a foreign land, exploit the locals, and return home. Westerners are just now realizing that they're on the receiving end of it now.
> You don’t have to donate to the collection plate
Hey, if they stop using the money I donate to advertise that my neighbors are abominations in the eyes of God they can have my money again.
The "collection plate" could just as well mean a panhandler's hat. The point is charitable giving, not christian specifically.
> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
I live in liberal cities. Nearly every car drive and bicycle rider has the attitude "F everyone else, I'm going to break every law if I find it inconvenient to myself. Who cares if it affects others"
This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"
People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.
I worded it in a way flexible to meet everyone's morals. Absent someone trying to performatively live a truly philosophically deontological life every person has some line where they will avail themselves of some available lever to remove some awful situation even if someone else might call it "cheating".
Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.
Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.
What is the honorable value that leads to "I'll get mine screw everybody else"?
In the culture I grew up in, this was considered cheating.
A culture that honored truth telling and integrity. Was that long ago or far away?
No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
Sounds entirely consistent with the original story…everyone claims a mental health need because so many others are doing it.
Maybe the difference isn’t morality but accepted norms? Or maybe it’s that single room accommodation is possible now and it wasn’t then?
I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).
The problem is the promotion of values and behaviors that plague a low-trust society. I think making excuses for it is truly inappropriate and immoral.
This is tragedy of the commons exactly. Whether it's moral depends entirely on the ethical theory you subscribe to.
> a problem with Stanford's definitions
Only if students aren't lying on their application.
> a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation
That point is probably behind someone at Stanford.
I agree with you that cheating is a loaded word, but the question at the end here that the rules or standards enable users to work around it therefore it's not cheating is a bad semantic argument. We can use the exact same argument to excuse every kind of rule breaking that people do. If a hacker drains a billion dollars out of a smart contract, then they literally were only able to do so because the coded rules of the smart contract itself enabled it through whatever flaw the hacker identified. That doesn't make it less illegal or not cheating for the hacker. It feels like victim blaming to point the finger at the institution being exploited or people who get hacked and say its their problem not the individuals intentionally exploiting them.
This attitude was one of the things that collapsed the former Eastern Bloc. "He who does not steal is stealing from his own family."
Stealing from work was so normalized in the former USSR that it wasn't even considered stealing, just "carrying out". Jobs in meatpacking facilities were highly desired because even though nominal wages were low, workers could make so much more by selling on the black market. The entire system was rotten from top to bottom.
And when everybody else does it (and all assume that everybody does), it really ends up being true. That's why it's so hard to get out of this hole - telling people to "start with yourself" won't cut it, they need to see that others are doing the same as well rather than trying to benefit from the opportunity.
While on the one hand I get where you're coming from, on the other hand I simply say "One does not have to go to Stanford."
If you lie (or exaggerate) about a disability and claim a benefit, you could be denying somebody with more serious disabilities getting the help they need.
I agree. That's not what's happening here.
My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".
The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.
> The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
I'm glad you had no problem with "dumpster fuck".
Well, there's meaning and then there's personal style. I didn't want to cramp yours :-)
Is this better or worse than nepo babies, white privilege or other normal social status benefits for college?
Being born to rich white people doesn't provide positive reinforcement for sleazy behavior at an age where people are likely to take the lesson seriously.
So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;
"buries the lede"
oh how I hate this phrase
Follow the incentives
this is very educational, on how being a victim an a psychopath helps you in life:)
Uh it leaves out one of the more important things that you also get more time for exams
Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things.
The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias...
I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions.
[rant]
Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about.
[/rant]
So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you?
[0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis.
[1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased
[2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM)
[3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8
[4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say?
[5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.
>> I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet
Maybe, but my single data point: I'm on the board for a condo corporation and even though we spend a lot of time dealing with pet policies and the damage pets (read: dogs) cause, we have a total of ZERO pets registered (and paying the monthly fee), and these are overwhelmingly owners not renters who might be excluded from having pets to begin with.
I appreciate the insight, I'm definitely conjecturing there and I'm sure there's a lot of variables.
I'm curious, is this a few bad owners ruining it for everyone or commonplace. My suspicion is the former, as those things typically follow power distributions.
But I think the complete lack of options forces people's hands. If you're a pet owner, what do you do? The option of paying a pet deposit and monthly fee is either simply not available or extremely limited. So I think it is a bit natural that the abuse of the ESA system happened. My options are get rid of my cat or get an ESA. It's an obvious choice. And with the ESA you cannot deny me rent nor charge extra. That's why I call it the nuclear option. I've always offered to pay a deposit but when told there's a no pet policy it turns into "oh, sorry, I 'forgot' to mention she's an ESA". Most people I know with ESAs never make the first offer.
Truth is that there was an arms race and the pet owners won. The question now is if it is more profitable to charge for pets or get no extra money for ESAs. Either way people will not give up their pets. I have a legitimate rec but I know you can get them for pretty cheap. So whats the move from here? I suspect the best move is for landlords to at least try to get money for the pets that are there anyways.
Note: the ESA issue is only a minor part of my comment. I don't personally care about this issue beyond keeping my cat. But the other uses I'm much more concerned about
I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this.
As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.
That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.
Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.
Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
Well put.
> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture
Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.
Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.
For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
> maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that
You're really close to getting it.
Students in school do not have this flexibility. They are required to be there, an 8th grader has no control and little influence over how their time is spent, or whether their tasks are a good match for their abilities.
So the only option in school is accommodation. There are some who continue to expect that into adulthood, but the vast majority of kids diagnosed with ADHD do not seek accommodation in their professional life.
Why? Because they do exactly what you propose. They find careers that match their disposition.
This is an important distinction. Indeed, many behaviors (ie attachment issues) that are maladaptive for an adult can be adaptive to a child and it is important to not change those without taking into account the environment a child is in.
An 8th grader may not have control over how their time is spent, but an attuned response from the people around them will help the child adapt.
A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb'
vs
A child experiencing: 'everyone around me can take this test, but i cannot, I must be dumb' and a caring figure in their life explaining to them 'you show traits of ADHD, this commonly makes it harder for you to focus on things like a math test. it really hurts when you fail the test and you wanted to get an A. Why don't you try again at the same problem at home, I believe in you. And maybe I will talk to your teacher about some extra time for the next test. We can't always get this, and even if you don't pass the test it's ok.'
> It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
They're both two sides of the same coin though. You can get a neurodivergent person to a level that they're able to function in life, but they won't thrive or be happy.
Do we think it's enough for people do be a productive worker or do we actually want to give them the ability to live their life to its fullest?
I don't see how you spending time in ways that work well with your challenges is different from your job providing accomodations, except that if your employer is willing to work with you then you don't have to randomly roll the dice until you come up with an employer where things happen to work in whatever way you wanted.
It's not like one of the accomodations on the table is "not doing your job"
The difference reduces to:
1. The career I would like to have, and the life I desire to live, is my free choice. Once I've made that choice, the community's responsibility is to give me whatever I need so that I can apply myself to that career and live the life I imagine for myself.
vs
2. I have certain capabilities and limitations. The community has certain needs. If there's any way for me to do so, it's my responsibility to figure out how my capabilities can service the community's needs, respecting my limitations, and it's the community's reciprocal responsibility to make sure my contribution is fairly acknowledged so that I can live a secure and constructive life. I'll figure out the rest from there.
The difference is how you relate to the job providing accommodations. If you know certain employers are more willing and able to provide accommodations then you can consciously weigh that piece of information when considering a job/career field.
By consciously accepting who you are and how you work with the world, it lets you navigate better in it. For some people that is just feeling it out and ending up in a career that fits them. For some people, it might be getting a diagnosis. The end result might be the same.
What is your personal experience here?
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
Hmm ..the irony is that jobs that require the least amount of credentials have the least accommodations. White collar jobs, especially in tech, seem to have so many accommodations or delays and extra time. Think how often employees come in late or delay work. HR exists to accommodate these requests. College, and school in general, has far fewer accommodations and flexibility than seen in most work environments, save for low-skilled jobs where puantiality is necessary.
> Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
This stuck out to me, because even in tech, especially after being diagnosed with ADHD (out of desperately failing to adapt, despite technically being reasonably competent) my career and statistically that of many others is normally anything but stable. An overwhelming percentage of jobs and disciplines do not have any real affordances for just a little variation from the norm, and people broadly still do not believe the condition presents anything but hilarious superficial differences, but that otherwise if the person shares one skill with other employees they should be capable of being an arbitrary cog like any other.
"Other people are capable of showing up on time, why can't you!?"
"Well, I have ADHD, I have to take medication to regulate my dopamine levels and struggle with time blindless, it's a real problem that I wish I didn't have, but I do my best given regularly switching contexts and priorities"
"Ya, great, that's cute but show up on time, are we on the same page?"
"No, but I'll say yes because you can't understand, I have no choice, and I'll continue doing what I'm doing until you fire me for not meeting your expectations, even if they have nothing to do with the skill I do actually have and gravitate towards, and would like to continue applying in service of company growth or whatever"
"Great, then we're on the same page, and I'll just start checking in on you more frequently because clearly you're retarded, thanks"
----
The only people who do realistically get accomodations are either in super niche fields, are absolutely exceptional in their niche field, or are just on their own or in industries that require none of the normal things associated with their discipline.
> But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
... provided that that gauntlet hasn't stuck a label on you that makes everybody think you're unsuitable for any role, and provided that it's bothered to develop the abilities you do have, and provided that other people aren't being unnecessarily rigid about what roles they'll allow to exist.
Sure, maybe it's stupid to frame it as "THIS counts as being disabled and THAT doesn't"... but we have a world where many systems have decided to do that, and may act slightly less insanely inflexible if they've put you in the "disabled" bucket.
If everybody has some limitations, maybe everybody should get some accommodations. You know, so that they can actually contribute using their strengths. But I'm not holding my breath.
Some people have harder lifes than others.
Saying everybody has a few things that they struggle is kind of offensive.
I struggle because my parents were drug addicts and my father tried to kill us all when I was 5.
Somebody ALWAYS has a harder life than you.
> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
I agree with almost everything you say here. However, I wanted to point out that you make the same mistake the articles author does. "Disabled" and "Diagnosed" are not actually the same thing, even though we do describe ADHD and the like as "learning disabilities."
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
That doesn't fit the authors narrative, or trigger the human animals "unfairness" detector though so it makes a far less interesting article.
A majority of the 38% are receiving accommodations:
> This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.
Mind, the disability rate for 18-34 year olds is 8.3% in the US, so even 24% is shockingly high. That's the same disability rate as 65-74 year olds.
You are actually landed on the difference between “impairment” and “disability”! They’re often used interchangeably (along with “handicapped”), but they have specific meanings.
https://med.emory.edu/departments/pediatrics/divisions/neona...
The article is pretty clearly someone trying to drag disability on to the stage of the culture war because it's another group that's easy to other, imo.
This is the common gag reflex, but multiple things can be true at the same time; there can be a greater need for support of disabled persons AND a shocking abuse of the systems by priviledged students. Ditto for the need to support women & minorities at the same time as white males are doing poorly and need help.
I don't think I disagree, and I don't think I suggested that couldn't be the case.
Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
On pretty much every "culture war" issue the "left" fails to adequately grapple with bad actors and those that abuse empathetic policies to harm others or unfairly advance themselves. Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.
> Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
Of course it's terrible for the genuinley disabled. That said, I would rather accidently assist an able person than accidently fail to provide the required accommodations for a genuinely disabled person. The default should be acceptance.
Those who abuse these systems should be given an all expense paid trip to the surface of the sun. Ripping off the disabled is about as low as a person can get, and that is what they are doing.
The original article is more enlightening: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... (Gift link taken from the linked article, not my own)
The stats are thin because not everything from private universities (where the disability numbers are highest) is reported. However they did get this:
> L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator at Ohio State University, told me that 36 percent of the students registered with OSU’s disability office have accommodations for mental-health issues
Note that's only accommodations for mental health issues, so exclusive of the numerous other disability types.
This Is detail often left out of this debate . A diagnosis does not imply accommodations.
I nearly failed high school and I flunked or dropped out of college four times. I just absolutely cannot work within the framework of modern schooling.
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.
The way my brain works is just fundamentally incompatible with school. Starting from fundamentals and building up just doesn't work for me. Especially when we spend six months on fundamentals that I grokked in the first three weeks. The way I learn is totally backwards. I start from the top, high-level concepts and dig down into the fundamentals when I hit something I don't understand. The tradeoff is that the way I think is so radically different from my colleagues that I can come up with novel solutions to any problem posed to me. On the other hand, solving problems is almost a compulsion.
That said, if I had the option I'd choose a normal childhood over being a smart engineer. Life has been extremely unkind to me.
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.
lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.
I have a friend like this he is absolutely the smartest I know, maybe not the most effective. My point is that most people have drawbacks. I much rather work with an autistic myself you learn to handle the quirks.
And pointing this out adds to the discourse here how?
> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
There's a term for exactly this: "twice exceptional"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional
Not only is this such a cringe term (we may describe poor aptitude in an area as an exception but exceptional?) it's also not accurate. If you want a milquetoast label call them "spikey" to denote the array of dimensions and the variance, or multimodal or similar.
I mean, I didn't invent the term--but the literal definition of "exceptional" doesn't necessarily mean that something is positive, only that it's outside the norm.
Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.
> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge.
Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their career.
A new patient who tries Adderall will feel a sense of euphoria, energy, and motivation that is temporary. This effect does not last. This is why the Reddit ADHD forums are full of people posting "I just took my first dose and I'm so happy I could cry" followed a few weeks later by "Why did my Adderall stop working?". The focus part is still mostly working, but no drug is going to make you feel happy, energized, and euphoric for very long.
> Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
You're confusing two different things. Registering with the school's disability office is orthogonal to getting a prescription for anything.
Everything can be abused or used incorrectly. If you drink too much water you remove salts from your body and get sick.
With Adderall (or Vyvanse) good protocol is to get small dose, like 5-10mg early morning once every one or two weeks. Then you’ll get boost when really needed and feel uplifting for few more days.
Taking it every day is insane, ADHD or not.
Abusing adderall can obviously go wrong, but if you do it right you take it once every month or so and have minimal long term effects. Stanford students arent using it for the euphoria, theyre using it so they can study all night without getting distracted. Its also not a miracle drug, you have to be in the right mindset for it to work and a lot of the people who use it dont understand that.
If you have ADHD, for neurotypical people it might feel that you are performing better but results will not improve https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/smart-drugs-can-decrease...
It's a small study and the "knapsack task" probably does not generalize to writing a paper or coding or something. Far from dispositive.
Utter bullshit engineered to convince students not to do drugs. Adderall doesn't make you magically better at solving the knapsack problem, it's not NZT-48 from Limitless. That's not why anyone takes it.
> it's not NZT-48 from Limitless
Yeah, that's modafinil.
(Or for social situations, bromantane.)
They really don't, and if they did then would it be so bad if people who didn't "need" them took them?
Obviously if there's safety issues but for stimulants unsafe doses will 100% always decrease performance, because they'll affect sleep.
Steriods will give you a massive physical advantage too. If you're not doing something with a governing body and get them prescribed you're golden.
This is actually another growing problem: TRT clinics will prescribe testosterone to virtually anyone who requests it. Among new TRT patients, a large number of them didn't even have bloodwork drawn before receiving their first prescription.
Many of the TRT clinics also hide the fact that going on TRT results in testicular atrophy and lifelong dependence. The forums and Reddits are full of people who decided that injecting testosterone every couple days for the rest of their life isn't all it's cracked up to be are realizing that it's not so simple for everyone to get off of it, even with all the HCG, SERMs, and PCT in the world.
TRT is one of those things which requires precise and active management. But it also increases quality of life and well-being so much for 45yo and beyond that it’s insane not to use it. (And same thing with HRT for women).
Your choice is to die chronically ill, weak and depressed for decades, or feeling great and enjoying your later years.
If you have enough your own testosterone then doing TRT is more harm than good. But once you get older and don’t anymore - TRT is golden.
The issue of course is "medical science" has continually lowered what is normal. Men 50 years ago had significantly higher testosterone than today. The blood work normal CI reflects this decrease. In reality, any man lower than 600 should probably be supplementing TRT. However, you're not likely to get it prescribed before you are below 300, and even then, it'll be just enough to get you back over the curve. There's basically no risk to it as long as you keep your total test <= 1000 ng/dL (and probably <= 800 ng/dL tbh).
The median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL. 20 years before it was ~550 ng/dL. 20 years before that we were above 600 ng/dL. Men are falling ill with more chronic illness, having more sexual dysfunction, and have more feminized features. We should probably be asking ourselves why this is happening rather than adjusting blood work CI's down.
> median total testosterone for the cohort born after 2000 is 391 ng/dL.
Really interesting. I wonder what is age range. This is beyond low. At this level you naturally feel tired all the time.
My third time sharing this link in this post because it's just so relevant. A Slate Star Codex classic:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
Then accommodations should not be needed if they are so easy, unless I am missing something?
Accommodations don't have to be used in all classes. They might need accommodations in an English class and no accommodations in the scientific or math classes. Usually this isn't evaluated per class, it's evaluated per student and then it's up to the student to use or not use the accommodations for the various classes they take.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway.
There are certainly way more neurodivergent people in tech. But 38%?? I don't think so. And I think you're conflating HN nerdery with actual medical issues that mean you need extra time on tests. I'd believe that e.g. 30% of HN are pretty weird nerds, but there's absolutely no way that means they all need extra time on tests.
> As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
Somehow it is impossible for people to blame the system, but instead they diagnose physical deficits in children based on their inability to adjust to the system.
Maybe the random way we chose to mass educate children a couple hundred years ago isn't perfect, and children are not broken?
Blame the system is only useful if there is a different/changed system that would be better. The current system isn't perfect, but if you can't handle it I'm not aware of any change that would be worth it - there are a lot of changes that would get worse results (sometimes for everyone, sometimes for a different subgroup of people). Remember results is not how well you do in school, it is how well you do in life after school that counts. (economics is only one measure of this, it is important because wealth is a good proxy for a lot of useful things like enough food)
If you're not familiar, you might like reading about the social model of disability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability
TL;DR: Disability is not inherent in difference, but rather a combination of the difference and an environment in which that difference is not well-supported. For an analogy - a deep-sea fish is blind, but not disabled by their blindness. Similarly, a kid who "can't sit still" isn't disabled unless we put them in an environment where they have to.
> I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this.
What on earth is a "malicious" explanation of this?
That people know they do not actually need/qualify for accommodations, but misrepresent themselves in order to get them?
Ok but such a person who thinks this way is definitionally in need of help; who would waste any brain wattage caring about this? Do they also need government subsidies to pay attention to their own lives?
Getting a diagnosis to get more time to complete tests. https://accommodations.collegeboard.org/how-accommodations-w...
Ok, but who cares? If you don't need accommodations, the extra time won't help you.
For instance: i qualify for such accommodations, but the extra time would not grant me a better score. Who cares?!
Cheating is the malicious interpretation, same way steroids are considered cheating in other competitions. (college admission is a competition, there are fixed number of seats and you cheating to get a seat hurts someone else.)
Right, but life is not a competition. Who cares who gets a prescription for ritalin?
I don't understand how yous can be ignorant of this. In the USofA you get advertised at continuously by drug companies.
Do you really think they spend that money advertising, and that you can then not buy the products?!?
Sure, you need a corrupt doctor. But the amount of advertising tells you exactly the amount of corrupt doctors that can act as drug dealers for you.
If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.
Not rocket science.
Somehow the whole country has collective blindness to this fact that is scarily obvious to anyone from outside the USofA that drops by.
Drugs adverts for prescription drugs should be illegal: because there is no legal justification for them.
>If someone is advertising something at you, it's because you can get it and you are potential market.
>Not rocket science.
Yep. I see adverts for Psoriasis and so, of course, I developed Psoriasis although I never had it before I saw the adverts. I see adverts for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and, of course, then developed it because I am a "potential market."
Even better, I see adverts for tampons, sanitary pads and "feminine' deodorants. As such, I underwent gender reassignment surgery so I could then purchase said products because I'm a "potential market."
Yes, the above is satirical. And no, I don't purchase products because " they spend that money advertising"
If I show you an advert for brassieres, are you then forced to purchase them because of all the money spent on such adverts? Are you even slightly tempted to do so?
If I show you an advert for literal snake oil as a cure-all, are you then powerless to stop yourself from purchasing it?
I hate to break it to you, but we Americans aren't slaves to, or required to spend money based on, consumer advertising.
Heck, I don't drink Coca-Cola or Budweiser. If what you say were true, I'd literally be drowning in that garbage.
Please take your ridiculous stereotypes elsewhere.
Edit: Fixed typos.
I just don't see any harm from taking these drugs. It hurts nobody, hence my skepticism of the "malicious" characterization.
One example of a malicious explanation would be: people are lying about having a disability to get some sort of benefits they don’t need, likely at the expense of someone who does need those benefits.
What they get is amphetamines, legally.
38% of stanford kids taking or selling drugs, legally, because they are rich kids: and the poor kids get jail time for buying it off them.
Go USA.
Wierd that no-one on this thread seems aware of it.
There are two standard treatments for adhd: met & dexies midnight runners.
There are non-stimulant ADHD medications. Maybe they should try going on Intuniv instead.
(That one reduces anxiety a lot, which would be good for students, but it also kinda kills your sex drive.)
Taking the drugs legally, maybe; it is very much illegal to sell the kind of amphetamines used to treat ADHD. Ritalin, for instance, is a schedule II drug, and it is a felony to sell without a prescription.
I mean who cares? This hurts nobody.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
> there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
How do you know this?
Do you have access to their medical records?
Are you in HR and have access to any accomodations they may have filed?
Do they even have accommodations filed at work? Neither I nor many of the people I knew in university who had accommodations needed them in the workplace because the structure of an undergrad course setting is wildly different from that of an actual workplace.
I have told HR at basically every place I've worked that I had filed for accommodations during university and that I generally manage my disability well but that I may need to file for formal accommodations at some point in the future. This isn't something that I've necessarily told people I work with and it's not visible or obvious. Most disabilities aren't.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Were you a solo founder of 5 companies? I literally cannot fathom that you worked at 5 even very modest-sized tech companies and never experienced a colleague with some level of what we’d call neurodivergent.
I can’t validate that the rate is 38%, but I find it hard to believe it’s under 5% and if it’s 5%, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid crossing paths across 5 companies and 15 years.
That's unfair. Even a founder of a company wouldn't have any legal means of knowing for certain the disabled status of their employees.
Federal contractors are required to track the percentage of self-identified disabled employees for reporting to the government.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/section-60-741.42
>I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
How does one even know this? Do you ask everyone you meet if they are neuro-divergent? That’s awkward as hell.
> Is it much though? 38%?
I'd say 30-40% is definitely in line with what I saw at various FAANG employers. Though it may be that other types of employer optimise less for those attributes.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
Have you considered that you yourself may be neurodivergent?
> Also DEI benefits!
Ah, you accidentally showed your hand there. DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes. Whether or not that is appropriate, or if the system was unfair, is arguable; fictitious "benefits" are not.
No one gets a DEI check from the government. But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities, we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.
> DEI does not provide benefits; it seeks to prevent continued, assumedly unfair, selection processes.
So it is not a benefit to be hired for a role over your peers because you satisfy an ethnic requirement needed for an arbitrary quota? I dont know about you, I'd sure love to have that on my side.
> DEI does not provide benefits
I don't know how you can define DEI without enumerating benefits these policies provide to certain groups of people, some of which, like the ones being discussed, have very flexible boundaries.
> No one gets a DEI check from the government.
We are discussing private institution(s). But if left unchecked that could expand to local governments.
> But since you don't even see that others around you have disabilities
Oh, I've seen plenty of people who had disabilities for the purposes of draft/mandatory military service.
> we can't really expect you to know much more than Fox tells you.
Your ability to figure out other people's information sources is most certainly no better than my ability to figure out if people have mental disabilities.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Hmm, have you looked in the mirror perhaps?
> And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time
This is it exactly. Programmers believe that we are God's special autists. 'Neurodivergent' is a nonfalsifiable label just like 'queer'
Have you considered the fact that you may be neurodivergent? Your assumption that you’ve never met a neurodivergent co-worker is surprising.
From what I understand, some autistic people assume everyone has the same worldview and agenda as they do, they lack a theory of mind. I’m not making this accusation about you, I’m bringing it up because I find it surprising that everyone you’ve worked with is neurotypical.
I can usually tell if someone is neurodivergent or not within the first minute of meeting them, usually just from eye contact and body language.
> I’m bringing it up because I find it surprising that everyone you’ve worked with is neurotypical.
So there are two potential explanations there. The one where I don't see neurodivergence where it does exist and the other one where you do see it where it does not. Would you be OK with 50/50 probability each of these options being right as the baseline assumption?
> Have you considered the fact that you may be neurodivergent?
I scrolled through some of their Reddit comment history (it's linked on their profile) and I think I would peg them as probably autistic. Their patterns of emphasis, placements of sentence breaks, certain turns of phrases and pattern of emotional expression seem to closely match a few autistic friends I have & a few autistic coworkers. Research on this hasn't fully developed though so I can't really offer references (other than the preprint that inspired me, https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...)... I still don't really have a non-ambiguous way to call the different types.
> it just became popular to label others
Feel like my theory of mind is just fine given its predictive power.
> > The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Just another anecdote, but where I work (tech startup) there are at least 7 other employees (that I know of) and I can identify every single one as autistic. Three are one type, another three are another type, and I think the one other as well as myself are the same type.
Research in the space hasn't advanced enough yet for this to be consensus, but in my opinion this preprint is exactly correct, and is what taught me that there are even subtypes to recognize at all: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...
There are, of course, plenty of non-neurodivergent tech companies. These are typically boring corporate ones, though I think there are some non-flashy ones that are perfectly respectable. I don't think Microsoft would count, though; Asperger's can look a lot like a lack of neurodivergence if you don't pay close enough attention.
My company is about 100 people. I regularly interact with maybe 12. I'm AuDHD and so are at least 5 others---4 that I have regular interaction with and have told me, and one who I do not have regular interaction with but told me anyway. There are also at least 3 pure ADHD people.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
I'm guessing you are blind, yea? Otherwise how could you otherwise justify such a statement?
> Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
The person is clearly retarded themselves. Let's not judge too harshly
“Smart kid” who did “poorly at school” is a fascinating doublespeak. School is where you demonstrate you are smart. Skilled is different from smart btw. Not being able to do an integral but being able to tune a holly four barrel carb are not the same thing. It’s just baffling that you would make this claim.
I don't know about Stanford students' actual disability, so I can't say much to that. I went to shitty high school and decent middle school in relatively poor middle class neighborhood. Now, I live in a wealthy school district. The way parents in the two different neighborhood treat "learning disability" is mind blowing.
In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.
In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.
>Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids
Sure it does, those extra teachers don't work for free. I think kids should get the help they need, but it's silly to pretend that it doesn't cost money that could be going towards other things.
I'm in a upper-middle neighbourhood and my kids go to public school. Not having a individual learning plan is the exception (I think that makes me double-exceptional). Classrooms DO NOT get more education assistant resources and combine this will the move to integrate kids who ehsitorically wouldn't consider attending regular school means teachers spend all their time managing the classroom and the parents.
>> the older one doesn't talk in school, period.
If the kid is completely non-verbal there's no way they should be in a class with regular kids. This is extremely unfair to the class.
My kid hated school in kindergarten as well. As did I. I didn't get any kind of intervention, and I feel like that set me on a terrible course.
My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.
I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.
> Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits.
There is a limited amount of money in the school system. When resources are assigned to one place they are taken away from somewhere else. The kids in the class without IEP students are getting boned by this policy.
That’s just a callous myth.
You think schools have unlimited money?
American society is at the point where if you don't play these sort of games/tricks, you'll get out-competed by those who do. Bleak.
I've made it a principle to live my life according to certain ideals - one of which is not to play these games/tricks.
I'm doing better than fine.
Have others who cheated done better than me? Sure - some have. Why should I care? I'm a high income earner and I don't need an even wealthier life.
I am not at all an outlier. If you're amongst a crowd that won't value you for not cheating, it's on you to change the crowd you hang out with.
Do you have children?
I do. I still subscribe to your ideals or at least mostly follow them. But for lack of playing such games, I saw my children’s opportunities slip away.
My kids are not that old, so it hasn't come to a head yet. I presume you're talking about school performance - particularly closer to high school?
At the same time, we may need to adjust our baseline on what we call "opportunities".
I've lived in other countries, and one of the nice things about the US is how uncompetitive school is. One could (and likely still can) get into a decent "average" university without much difficulty. In other countries, not so. You could be in the top 10% academically and end up in a really low quality university. I would understand playing such games there.
>I've lived in other countries, and one of the nice things about the US is how uncompetitive school is. One could (and likely still can) get into a decent "average" university without much difficulty. In other countries, not so. You could be in the top 10% academically and end up in a really low quality university. I would understand playing such games there.
The difference is you're going to pay nosebleed prices or take out extortionate student loans in the US.
Yes, but you get to go. In plenty of other countries, there are far fewer seats than students graduating from high school. Being merely above average means no college degree.
(Well, except they also have private schools, but the cost to income ratio is much higher there than here).
>> But for lack of playing such games, I saw my children’s opportunities slip away.
Examples? I most certainly don't play these games and believe my kids are further along in developing the most valuable, lasting characteristic: grit. So many things in life require you to grind, and the only way to gain this is to practice.
>So many things in life require you to grind, and the only way to gain this is to practice.
getting a kid who doesn't deserve entry to pass a prestige university with as little effort as possible is an effort to short-circuit that concept.
many games to play in this world.
Children were passed up for elementary school admissions. Whereas the schmoozers and their kids got in.
I can’t provide proper education and practice. There is no grit or grind. They’re just falling further and further behind the ones who actually got access to good schools and teachers.
One who tested highly gifted (145 IQ) after years of educational neglect now tests at 120. It’s pathetic. And even if I spend all my time and money I cannot reverse the decline.
Schmoozers learned grit and grind? That's opposite of my experience and observations.
What role do you play in the educational neglect? I am not sure I understand the decline here.
145 -> 120 IQ decline
Because I can’t access good schools and teachers. Because I didn’t schmooze to the admissions directors and other gate keepers.
I should’ve worn better clothes, driven a Porsche, and displayed the right shibboleths. Except that even now I’m too immature and stupid to know what they are.
>Except that even now I’m too immature and stupid to know what they are.
This is the bigger problem, not the type of car or clothes you drive. I dress like a schlub and drive a Toyota and don't feel any of the social pressures you're talking about. I think it's in your head.
>145 -> 120 IQ decline
You're also putting way way too much emphasis on this test. The methodology of IQ tests is also entirely questionable. I'd hardly be judging myself as a parent based on this.
> I think it's in your head.
It may be, but it also could be the community/town he lives in. I certainly do know schools where you need to play games to get admission, and dressing like a schlub would exclude you (which is fine, given I have alternatives - he perhaps doesn't).
> The methodology of IQ tests is also entirely questionable. I'd hardly be judging myself as a parent based on this.
Fully agree on ignoring the IQ (why would one even get it tested?)
However, I suspect he does see other signals of decline, and sees those who went to the school achieve more.
> What role do you play in the educational neglect?
Not the person you're responding to, but that's uncalled for.
There are many variables that go into a child's development. The parents are merely one of them. They can do their best and things can still go south.
from my understanding of educational outcomes, the BIGGEST factor in a child’s success in school is their home life. At least for K-12. Multiple studies come to this conclusion.
Obviously “home life” encompasses many things like parental involvement, stability of family relationships, socioeconomic status, etc. And it’s not the only factor of course.
So the question is hardly uncalled for IMO. Could have been worded in a less accusatory tone though! The person was pretty rude.
"A married man with a family will do anything for money." - Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
Opportunities to be among the insufferable nepo baby cohort?
The most revealing example of this was when I found out how many of UK's 'elite' school children were molested, grew up and proceeded to do everything they can to make sure their children attend these very same 'elite' schools.
Western culture is beyond repair.
If you don't mind sharing, which country do you live in? I'd imagine the ability to play fairly and still get ahead varies a lot based on local cultures/norms.
The US.
Interesting. I'm glad it worked it for you, but unfortunately that's very different from what my personal/anecdotal experience with America has taught me.
I think one has to be a bit careful in picking one's goals and priorities. I'm not saying "going the straight path" will lead to success in all endeavors (likely not at Wall Street, for example).
In my case, it so happened that the goals I was pursuing (e.g. job in tech industry) had lots of opportunities that didn't involve playing many games. I think it's still the case today.
But if your goal is "I have to go to an elite university, and become a senior exec at a FAANG", then my way may not work out.
The one variable that's hard to control, though, is how things are growing up (childhood/teen years). You can't control these - your parents/school do. If you grew up in an unfair environment and had poor parents, you may have to play those games. My point is that once you get past those stages, you don't have to convince yourself that you need to continue playing those games.
Basic game theory at work right there. You only need a few bad apples to cause the entire system to devolve.
Yup, a few bad apples start things off, and then after that many others who would have never been the first to do this decide to jump on the bandwagon (lest they be left behind). If it weren't for the shameless folks at the beginning, it wouldn't happen. But once they kick things off, it's a domino effect from there.
Perhaps the fundamental issue isn't the apples; it's the barrel.
If everything is a competition, then of course people will leverage personal advantage for personal gain. But why is everything a competition?
> But why is everything a competition?
For all of human existence there has been competition for limited resources. Until all resource scarcity is eliminated competition will remain in the natural world.
That's one theory.
Counter theory: for all of human existence people have shared resources and traded among each other. Yes, for truly scarce resources trade breaks down.
So is "good housing" a scarce resource on Stanford's campus? Or is their default resource allocation schema too anti-human so it's turning something that should be a simple trade and negotiation problem into a knife-fight?
America is rooted in capitalism, so the resource allocation schema of scarce goods (e.g. nice homes to raise families in) is indeed a knife-fight.
This mentality is defeatist. I rather lose fairly than cheat to win.
Thats true, but I think the blame is more on "American society" and not the kids working through the system.
50 years ago, college was cheaper. From what I understand getting jobs if you had a college degree was much easier. Social media didn't exist and people weren't connected to a universe of commentary 24/7. Kids are dealing with all this stuff, and if requesting a "disability accommodation" is helping them through it, that seems fine?
That seems naive, it would be like if we started dumping tons of deer food into the woods and the next year when deer are grossly overpopulated we thought "why are there so many deer now?".
Humans are as a mass dumb animals, if we give them the opportunity for individual gratification at long-term cost for the group they are going to take it immediately.
Indeed, it's much more reflective of American society in 2025 than it is of the individual students (or even Stanford in general).
Failing out of college can be life-ruining. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-interest non-dischargeable debt and employment opportunities completely nuked.
Come on, let's be serious. Most Stanford undergraduate courses aren't that tough, grade inflation is rampant, and almost anyone who gets admitted can probably graduate regardless of accommodations or lack thereof. We're talking about the difference between getting an A or A- here. And Stanford has such generous financial aid that students from families earning less than $150K get free tuition so no one should be leaving with huge student debts.
> no one should be leaving with huge student debts.
"In the 2023-24 academic year, 88% of undergraduates graduated without debt, and those who borrowed graduated with a median debt of $13,723." Source: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/stanford-sets-2025...
So strictly speaking, not "no one". (But certainly smaller than the national averages.)
sorry, I often forget that I went to a university that's actually challenging, and that's not the typical case.
Reason.com is operated by the kind of people who start the game with generational wealth in their back pocket.
It's true, if you don't go to the eye doctor, you'll be outcompeted by someone wearing glasses.
Depends highly on your field. There are plenty of military personnel and commercial pilots hiding things or avoiding being seen for any kind of treatment, because a diagnosis could lose them their jobs.
Rolling out electronic health records has been a disaster for military recruiting, because such a large portion of kids flat-out lied on the medical screening, and 60+ percent of the population is already disqualified.
Yea I was depressed and it turned into a whole thing. Military especially hide mental issues due to the stigma and chance to lose your livelihood.
that's interesting, in that it would be very interesting if it motivates better fitness program funding federally
Long ago I remember reading society in China was like this. There's SO MANY people that you HAVE TO cheat the system to even maintain pace with your peers, much less get ahead. And cheating is so rampant that it's expected you will do it.
Really sad that mentality seems to be normalizing world-wide.
But, like—isn’t the bleaker thing that that seems so existential of an outcome? The vast majority don’t go to Stanford. The vast majority of those aren’t valedictorian.
And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war…
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories,
I’ll buy this
>professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system,
I doubt this. Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
That is not to say things are worse than before. But humans view the world in relative terms, and they seem to expect more than reality can offer. And whereas before there was ignorance, today, there is widespread knowledge and visibility into the gulf between the have nots, the haves, and the have even mores.
> Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
Healthcare sure, but for Americans, it is culturally and institutionally seen as a core part of justice that the guilty have their future destroyed. That it affects those dependent on the guilty is a part of that destruction, it's trying to isolate them from others. If you still have your family around, has your life truly been destroyed? Among American people it might not be universal, and may seem absolutely barbaric, but the extreme malignance of American justice is more or less consistent with a wide swath of attitudes Americans have, especially when they're the ones who have been severely harmed.
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war
By those metrics yes, but not by the more important metrics IMO of: buying a house, having a stable job, starting a family, etc.
Can we stop designing society like people won't game the system? I swear every social program or benefit or corporate relief program we roll out is designed to be exploited. In fact they use specific requirements (a doctors note, a set income level, etc.) and not direct oversight/discretion so it is even easier to game because you just need to tick the right box.
I was happy enough getting into the second best uni in my country on my own merit- I know that I could have gotten into the best if I talked about family members and pets passing and personal challenges like all my friends but that doesn't benefit anyone.
True but I don't think that's out of the norm. The upper echelons of American society always consisted of a bunch of fake status games and abuses, a legacy admission is basically a socially accepted form of disability. Or non-ability, I guess.
America never had a rigorous meritocratic national system of education, it's a kind of half developed country in that sense that became democratic before it modernized (that is to say patronage survived) so you have this weird combination of family clans, nepo babies and networks competing with people who are where they are based on their performance.
Pretty sure it was always like this
No, "disability" used to be something of a stigma. Now it's celebrated, and people proudly identify with it.
If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
>If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
This isn't even true either. In the past there was a huge emphasis and effort made toward character. Going out of your way to do the right thing and be helpful and NOT getting special treatment but choosing the difficult path.
Now everything is the opposite it's about getting as much special treatment as possible and shirking as much responsibility and this isn't just people it's throughout the corporate and political system as well.
Yeah, good times create weak men, and all that. I agree.
some disabilities have mostly lost their stigma, sure, in some places.
Many have not. Most have not, if you consider the whole world and not just California and Washington or whatever.
I can tell you from personal experience as a person with a physical disability that it's still very much a stigma.
It's also very much possible for something to be both a stigma and an identity. In fact, the stigmatization can make the identity stronger.
Well, some kinds of disability still are a stigma, but here on HN neurodiversity/autism is celebrated as some kind of superpower, basically.
I'm aware. See for instance, VC Arielle Zuckerberg's comment that when deciding which founders to fund she looks for "a little of the rizz and a little of the tis" with "rizz" referring to charisma and "tis" to autism.
One could argue that mythologizing a particular characteristic is itself a form of stigma.
I'm all tis and no rizz
Performing well academically is not at all mutually exclusive with ADHD or Autism. In fact, it is possible for those to manifest in ways that benefit academic performance. It also isn't really surprising that students in a highly competitive environment would suffer from anxiety and depression.
I suspect that many of these people would be able to make it through college with good grades regardless of accomodations, but at the cost of reduced emotional and mental health.
And there are also probably others who legitimately have ADHD or Autism, but don't really need any special accommodation to do well academically.
I go to one of those elite universities now, and I get academic accommodations. I think some of the increase is truly from greater awareness about disabilities among teachers and parents. My mom was a teacher, and she was the one who first suspected that I had dyslexia. I repeated kindergarten, and I was privileged that my parents were able to afford external educational psychology testing. Socioeconomic status is a large part of my success. Even seemingly small things like the fact that my parents could pick me up after school so that I could go to tutoring was something that other kids didn’t have, because their parents were working or didn’t have a car.
So you are a long way from Kindergarten to an elite university. I mention this because it is odd to me that you picked your 4 to 5 year old self to validate why you are getting accommodations in your teens/twenties at a self-described elite university.
My own kids have some issues and varying levels of accommodations, but those have evolved and lessened over time. As you would hope they would! You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations now as you did 15 years ago?
Sorry, I am trying not to be offensive here but I am genuinely confused.
Dyslexia isn’t curable. It doesn’t magically go away with help, techniques, or accommodations —- it just becomes more manageable.
He/she probably wouldn’t have gotten into an elite university without that help through childhood.
I am aware, my daughter has Dyslexia.
But this is not a thread about elementary school accommodations, it is about university level accommodations.
The question is why the author implies he needs the same or similar accommodations at 20ish that he did at 5ish.
Or does he?
The point they made about grade school, to me, points more towards early recognition now leads to more kids having a shot at top schools.
Not because they have a 'disability' or a particular type of accommodation, but because it was caught early enough and worked with by people that cared, that now they have a model for learning that better suits them. It was never an issue with intelligence, only that some of us* run into walls because the standard learning lane is pretty narrow. Crashing into those walls in grade school is likely what kept many people* from going to top colleges (or any college) -- but now that it's better understood and worked with at an early age we are seeing people show up who can do the same correct work, but do it in a way that's different.
* Im also dyslexic, but from the days that wasn't a thing in my mediocre public school. I was simply a slow reader that couldn't spell (or pronounce or "sound out" words) or read out loud, but somehow had high scores in other language/comprehension test.
You incorrectly drew an implication. The authors words only actually imply that some accommodations are still needed, not that they are the same accommodations.
This conclusion is obvious given that the underlying condition is not curable.
> needs the same or similar accommodations
You inferred or assumed that...OP didn't say it. It's common sense that accommodations would be different for children just learning to read vs. university students.
I think they mean to refute the article's suggestion that tiktok and misinformation are the cause by highlighting that they received accommodations at a young age.
>You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations
They didn't share the nature of their current accommodations.
What does receiving accommodations at a young age have to do with this
No offense taken. My first point was that some of these students were legitimately diagnosed with learning disabilities long before grades, the SAT, or college admissions were even a thought. I also should have been more clear that I wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD until I was around 9, so I went from needing to repeat grades to being more successful in school as a result of getting the support I needed.
My overall point is that learning disabilities like dyslexia have no impact on intelligence, and accommodations just level the playing field. I imagine that if I hadn't been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, I wouldn't have made it to the same school.
But for people who truly need academic accommodations, the playing field will never be level, because every aspect of school takes them longer. I don't get more time to study for exams, and if it takes me twice as long to read and comprehend the same chapter of a textbook as someone without dyslexia, I have to study twice as long just to get through the same content. I think it's fair that I get to take notes using "prohibited technology" during lecture when it is impossible for me to decode what the lecturer is saying fast enough to turn it into handwritten notes.
However, I agree with the article that the percentage of students who claim to have disabilities has gotten out of control. Almost 60% of the students in the extended exam room finish the exam in the standard time anyway. It does make it appear as though everyone with accommodations is gaming the system.
Having ADHD and dyslexia is not "quirky" or fun. It consistently ruins my life. It is not something I make part of my identity.
I would do anything to not need accommodations.
This will probably get me voted into oblivion, but reading your posts here, I wonder how you would do if accommodations were taken away from you entirely in your elite university.
Maybe I am completely wrong, but I suspect rather strongly you would do just fine based on what I am reading here.
And before people flame me into oblivion, in addition to my own kids I know lots of others with significant learning disabilities. They have one thing in common: they don't write like this.
Yeah I suspect that people are being over-diagnosed, but I also suspect we're catching dramatically more cases than we were previously. An overcorrection if you will.
The "left handedness" graph change that occurred once we stopped punishing people for being left handed. Same sort of thing here. We'll stabilize once we get good at diagnosing it and stop stigmatizing it. We're in a period where the graph is changing, and that change is disruptive, but it'll level out.
Sure. We're also changing rubrics and even inventing new conditions, and we don't really try to graduate them. On top of that, there are perverse incentives. Amphetamine is an amazing drug, and since some people get it, those who don't find it hard to compete. So, we have to give them a way to get it, because the side effect of not doing that is popping them with felony drug trafficking charges at the airport. I don't blame anyone for playing the game.
Suspecting is reasonable. So is suspecting it is under-diagnosed.
Ranting about how all these diagnoses are fake is not.
Time may revise our opinions of the current state, but with the exception of malpracticing professionals, the diagnoses are valid for given state of medical health knowledge.
I don't believe the diagnoses are fake. I didn't rant. I said I suspect. In fact I am diagnosed myself and have benefited from the diagnosis.
> and I get academic accommodations
What does this mean, exactly?
Typically: Take tests with no time restrictions. Retake tests. Use assistive technologies (e.g., calculators) that are usually disallowed.
Typically means more time to take tests than the standard allotment, but could mean other things- a digital version with a screen reader that speaks the questions to you, or something else specific to your disability.
This sort of scamming has been going on for a long time, by rich kids particularly. I remember 20 years ago I was surprised to learn that one of my friends, a very clever guy from a very well off family, was supposedly so profoundly disabled that he could do all of his tests overnight and at home. When I asked him how he got such a sweet deal, the answer was "My dad's a doctor."
I'm mostly a law professor these days. When final-exam time rolls around (as in, this week), I raise my eyebrows when I'm sent the list of students who get 50% extra time. I wouldn't presume to judge the propriety of any given student's accommodation. But many of the accommodated students seem to have done just fine in class discussions during the semester.
FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth."
FWIW, consider that some of these students may need the accommodation specifically because of the pressure of the final exam. Many mental health disabilities will become worse with stress. A low stress environment and a high stress final exam could trigger entirely different symptoms.
For example, I have OCD (real, diagnosed, not the bs "omg im so ocddddd"). I have extra time accommodations because I have to spend time dealing with my OCD symptoms. With treatment, they tend to fade into the background. They re-emerge only in high stress situations. I would seem like a perfectly normal student in class, but then clearly start struggling with these symptoms if you watched me take an exam. Consider, many other students you teach may have these same experiences.
> some of these students may need the accommodation specifically because of the pressure of the final exam.
Success as a lawyer often requires the ability to handle a certain amount of pressure. Timed exams are one way of screening for that ability. But it's by no means a sure-fire predictor of success: Legendary trial lawyer Joe Jamail [0] flunked his first-year Torts class at UT Austin [1], yet went on to become a billionnaire.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Jamail
[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2015/12/r-i-p-to-a-billionaire-lawye...
One can only hope these accommodations are not being granted to medical students.
You are praising billionaires while complaining about people gaming the system?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It wasn't praise — just an observation about how grades and class standing aren't always a good predictor of success.
(I never met Joe Jamail, but by reputation there was a lot about him that I didn't especially admire.)
The problem is your identifying success with becoming a billionaire. To me, in the contrary, it's the telltale of a profoundly broken society.
I don't disagree that the existence of billionnaires is problematic (especially given the Supreme Court's abominable decision in Citizens United).
But it's beyond rational dispute that Joe Jamail was one of the most successful trial lawyers of our era.
Then they don't belong in the law field or wherever, simple as that. My son has OCD pretty bad, and I know there are roles he is unsuitable for. One of the things he does is confesses about every little thing that happens--he can't keep a secret or tell a lie. It's socially debilitating.
I don't see how getting 50% extra time on exams is anything remotely close to cheating. Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.
> Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.
An unpleasant fact of law-school faculty life is that, at least at my school, I'm required to grade students so that the average is between 3.2 (a high B) and 3.4 (a low B-plus). Because of the nature of my course [0], a timed final exam is about the only realistic way to spread out The Curve.
[0] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Syllabus.html
Why don't all students get the extra time, then?
If everybody gets extension, say a 2 hr test becomes 3 hrs, then eventually there will be someone who claims 3 hrs is the new normal time and still demand an extension over that.
It really depends on the perception of whether the goal of the extension is to give disabled students an edge over "normal" students or to give everyone a fair(not necessarily equal) opportunity to complete the test.
That's a great question, actually. Timing tests appears to arbitrarily punish students.
What do you do for work?
I'm not aware of many jobs where employers don't care how fast the work gets done.
Class rank is a primary factor for top law jobs open to new law school graduates. MCAT scores play a huge role in med school admissions. Etc.
Like it or not, there are life changing impacts to others by cheating at this stuff. This is unambiguously cheating.
New York Times had an interesting podcast recently where they talked about how so many children are being diagnosed with autism to the point where it's hurting the severely autistic student population (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/podcasts/the-daily/autism...). There's a finite set of resources pooled for special needs students, and now most of these students have relatively minor symptoms compared to those with "profound autism" (which is a severe disability associated with the inability to speak or live independently).
I suspect this is similar - rich parents are doing anything for an edge in their child's education and can get any diagnosis they desire. It's an unfair system.
For those with more mild issues, they should really be realistic about what the needs are.
I was diagnosed in my 40s with ASD and ADHD. It may have been helpful to know earlier (though I could debate both sides of that), but I didn’t need any special classes or helpers that would take resources from others. I’m wondering if some kids are saying they need this stuff to justify the condition or to play up the sympathy, to make the condition their personality.
The rate of autism diagnosis is really off the charts in MN these days...
Okay, RFK Jr.
GP is referencing a billion dollar national news Medicaid fraud, not vaccines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089856
A swing and a miss. Note the geographic specificity and give it another go?
Sorry, if you meant an MN that isn't part of the United States, I totally missed that.
I was referring to the social services scandal that is rocking the state of Minnesota, and which involved fake autism diagnoses. [1]
1: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/09/24/feeding-our-future-...
Wow, they got caught and prosecuted and everything! What a scary epidemic of fake diagnoses.
Who said it was scary? I just said there's been a spike in diagnoses.
It did cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and I assume that only a fraction of that will ever be repaid by the perpetrators.
It is interesting how accommodations can reveal dysfunctions in educational practice. In my courses, requests for accommodations generally change the course design for all students. This is because the accommodation does not alter expected learning outcomes, but it is clearly something that aids students with difficulty learning the material succeed. My goal is that all students succeed in the expected learning outcomes. I don't want the course to be challenging for the wrong reasons. So often the request reveals something I was doing that is unnecessary and makes the class more difficult for little reason. That isn't to say that there are not learning environment that should add additional stress. Sometimes such conditioning is needed so that one can succeed in the challenges they are being trained for. That isn't the case for my students.
> the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
Isn't that... good? What else would be expected if you have a disability, and need accomodations?
The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article:
> In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.
So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
Being diagnosed with the disorder does not automatically qualify as a disability. This article, and many people in this thread seem not to be able to distinguish between the rising rate of diagnoses, and being disabled or needing accommodation.
I have been diagnosed as being several different types of neuro-divergent, but I am also not qualified as disabled and do not need or want any special dispensation. I would say that I have been relatively successful in life by almost anyone's metrics without it.
There is still an enormous advantage in understanding yourself, even without the expectation of accommodation or medication. I was also, sadly, not diagnosed until my mid-40's.
I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
>I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
When I have thoughts like this, I like to theorize about causality. If I had had an easier time when I was young, would I still have developed the qualities that helped me get to where I am now in the first place?
Have you gotten one of these notes yourself? It's not trivial. It's a huge pain in the ass, and everyone along the path is saying, "I don't believe you".
I have, and my experience does not match yours. It was extremely trivial and was little more than (1) booking a psych appointment, (2) filling out an intake ADHD questionnaire at home (which can easily be filled out to give whatever diagnosis you'd desire), (3) meeting the psych & getting a formal diagnosis, and (4) picking up my Rx from the pharmacy.
This is not what they're describing. Have you ever gone through the process of receiving an accommodation at a university? It is significantly more challenging than just having a diagnosis. They will look for every single possible excuse to refuse you access. They will require you to repeatedly book new doctor's appointments to get extremely specific wording for any accommodation you may need. Your doctor will have to fill out multiple forms for the university. Then, for each class, you will have to meet with every professor you have to request your accommodations. Many of these professors will try to talk you out of using them, or find ways to get around them.
Dx out here required all those steps plus attestations from family and teachers, historical accounts, written narratives, a check in with the GP, bloodwork and blood pressure, and ongoing follow ups at least quarterly.
Plus all that happens before you get an accommodation, which is a wholly separate process.
If it turns out half of all people have something, it's just normal human stuff. Today's ADHD is likely a symptom of tiktoking your brain's serotonin out or some other chemical
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
You've missed the point. How does Stanford end up with 38% of their students claiming to have a disability while other schools only have 3%? Are the other schools illegally discrimating against these students, so that their only alternative is Stanford? Or is it possible that something anomalous is happening at Stanford?
While it doesn't explain the whole difference, it's not surprising that Stanford has a higher rate. First: the more demanding the environment the more likely you are to find (got example) milder ADHD to impact your life. Second: the more well off you are or more access to resources you have, the more likely you are to actually care to get diagnosed. Third: stressful environment can actually cause serious issues, suddenly. For non-education reasons I suddenly gained panic attacks while I was at uni and they took years to go away.
I'm sure there are more things like that.
On the contrary, it’s very surprising. There’s no way that 38% of people are disabled by any definition of the word. 10× differences between the disability rate between schools simply should not exist.
What percentage of Stanford students are in a wheelchair? Are the actual stats publicly available somewhere?
Yes 38% of students at stanford are either blind or in a wheelchair
Touche, I'm just going to go ahead and upvote you.
Where does the idea/reasoning that highly academically successful students cannot have a disability come from?
I would go a step further and say there is probably a high chance that neurodivergent students are more academically successful, iff they did get to that level of education. And it's not impossible that they are overrepresented in that group of people.
And people may be intellectually gifted, and yet experience strong behavioral and social difficulties. Not that my own observation counts but I've met multiple people on the spectrum who were highly intelligent and "gifted" yet faced more adversity in life, i.e. for social reasons. It's controversial because it directly goes against the idea that we exist in a meritocracy.
People are going to cheat no matter what. To me, it's more important that the people who do need and deserve accomodations are able to get them though!
Nobody said that. They are saying or insinuating that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled. That certainly was not the case as recently as a decade or two ago. People have not changed drastically, so what gives?
Change in diagnosis criteria, that doesn't mean people before weren't disabled. You need to understand people with ADHD usually overcompensate to meet the academic performance needed and it is not sustainable in the long run. It also doesn't mean they need accommodations, just that they are categorized as disabled in some way or form.
> They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled.
Which is an unreasonable claim.
I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.
The necessary doctor's note can be trivially purchased without any meaningful evidence of disability. I know a number of children of wealthy families with these notes. They don't even pretend to be disabled, possession of the note makes it beyond question.
Buying an advantage for your children in this way is widespread. This article suggests that it is even more widespread than I imagined.
So, let's say we make it more difficult to get "proof" of disability, something that requires more than just a doctor's note.
Won't these rich people also be able to trivially acquire these, while people who actually need accomodations will continue to struggle because it's difficult to prove they need something?
Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it.
Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.
And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.
The problem is that it is also applied to disabilities that are not objectively measurable and therefor extremely prone to abuse.
That's exactly the dilemma.
Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that.
Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to.
But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict.
Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious.
Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing.
And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints.
So, what do you do then?
> then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled
Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action.
Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
Article about this by Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
once expertise can drive benefits, expertise becomes a target for corruption
weirdly: if you want good scientists, don't listen to them!
It is probably not good if nearly half (38% qualifies as nearly half, right?) of students are considered disabled and needing accommodations, right?
Surely nearly half of any given public population can't be disabled?
25% of Americans have a disability, https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/media/pdfs/disabil...
We don't know what's the percentage broken down by age.
If 38% is almost 50%, 25% is almost 38%.
My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
I wouldn't hold that against him that much--the overabundance of handicapped parking spots is reason enough to game that one. It's ridiculous. My wife could have qualified for a placard because of her cancer and she was in a wheelchair for awhile, but we didn't bother getting one.
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa...
Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.
---
To the edit, I can agree.
We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).
ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.
If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
They're quite obviously not.
They're lying so they can get unlimited time on the test and/or look at their phone.
They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!
> They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!
This is just not an acceptable cultural viewpoint. Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.
> Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.
Fine. Where are the doctors? Why is the debate on the students?
Both are culpable.
Should we not bring up to doctors our issues or worries?
This question lacks nuance. Where do you draw the line? I'd draw one at suicide thoughts that you can't stop on your own and before seriously considering using any kind of psychoactive drugs for self-medication. Anything else IMO needs about as much medical intervention as a low fever case of common cold.
Oh, and once these two lines are back at comfortable distance you stop.
Agreed. You have to really narrow the definition of "disabled"
Of course, anyone who fears falling outside the definition would fight that vehemently
That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it.
God have mercy on us.
Right. What I'm saying is that we've probably screwed up by creating a system that incentivizes people to "be disabled" even if they really are stretching the definition of disabled
I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
I don't think you understand my position and you're certainly reading tone I didn't intend into my words
I am nearsighted, I am ADHD, I am hearing impaired in one ear, I am celiac. All of these are lifetime conditions that are not going anywhere
If glasses didn't exist, I would certainly be disabled. But let's be real, no one considers glasses a disability, even though glasses are just as important to a vision impaired person as a wheelchair is to a walking impaired person
You clearly know nothing about how these accommodations are handled.
Can you clarify? I heard about the test time thing from students. That corroborates the parent comment.
Most everyone has some disability or other. Just because you may work around it or not think of it that way, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
Who are you to say what should be included or not, that something can be gauged as mild or not, and that there should be a treshold?
I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely, for one, so perhaps I'm more of an authority on this subject than most commenters here. I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I had a rather difficult time despite obviously having it (ie was late to the intake appointment). In particular it involved a questionnaire about current and childhood symptoms, and both myself and my parents had to answer it.
> I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I'm not sure about this one, but there is no treatment for ASD and so no particular reason to have a diagnosis, so there is probably less interest in giving you one.
> have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely,
And that makes you competent to determine the value of the disability claims of others and the appropriate accommodations such folks should receive?
Really?
Then again, you are the eminent galaxy-wide expert on such things, aren't you bananalychee.
Will you honor my request to impregnate my wife and daughters so they can carry offspring that's so much more valuable than anyone else on the planet? Pretty please!
> I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely
Can confirm; I was your physician.
(Anyone can say anything online!)
That's awfully convenient isn't it. The 38% of Stanford students claiming to be disabled must have a good reason for it while those of us who understand how easy it is to be diagnosed with a so-called "disability" must be lying. Do you honestly believe that roughly half of the people you meet need special accommodations to study and work?
Yes, because half the people I know do need special accommodations. Maybe if you didn't go out of your way to avoid disabled people you'd notice us when we exist.
Are we overlooking the possibility that ADHD is skyrocketing in generations which are now entering colleges (due to cell phone use and software designed to hijack their attention, the tiktok-ification of the internet, and so on) and students at demanding colleges are more likely to seek diagnosis?
That doesn't seem outrageously high for a high cap school?
15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.
Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.
Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.
We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.
Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?
> 15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.
Stanford is not a random sample of the global population. Most notably, Stanford undergraduates are young, primarily between 18-24[1]. 8.7% of people in the US from ages 18-29 have a disability [2].
[1] https://www.meetyourclass.com/stanford/student-population
[2] https://askearn.org/page/statistics-on-disability#:~:text=8....
8.3% of Americans 18-34yo have a disability according to the Census department.
Stanford's rate is 4.3x higher than that.
Add in that half of all students who claim a disability have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college, all the reports of rampant cheating in school, the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal where some parents helped their kid fake disabilities to get ahead, and even people here who seem to think it's ok to defraud the system to get ahead?
I think perhaps elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics to deny them entry since the last thing the world needs is more unethical people in positions of power.
> elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics
You are perhaps mistaking which side of the line Stanford would select for. It is a school that produces and prefers sociopaths. Its engineering curriculum, almost uniquely among universities, has no requirement for an ethics course. You can fulfill Stanford's "Technology in Society" requirement by taking a course where you network with VCs for a semester. It is a factory for making jerks.
Let's look at the probability another way:
If 1 in 5 are obese, would it be fair to assume that 1 in 5 Olympic runners are also obese?
The Stanford admission process could lead to a higher percentage of people with conditions that are classified as disabilities, but give them an edge.
Albert Einstein was a smart guy and very accomplished… yet his wife had to paint is house door red so he knew where he lived. He very likely had what we would now call ASD. While he was brilliant and a top university would love people like that, he needed some accommodations, such as a red front door.
> 15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability.
Not a chance in hell.
If you have better data, I'm sure the world would love to have it. The world, however, seems to agree the number is somewhere around 15-20%.
World Health Organization: 16%
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-...
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: 15%
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/f...
CDC: 25% of Americans
https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...
ROD Group: 22%
https://www.rod-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Glo...
US Census Department: 8.3% of 18-34 year olds
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa...
Easily wayyy more than that given both the loosening standards of what a disability is combined with over-diagnosis. But I get your sentiment. When I was a kid, disabled meant you were in a wheelchair or needed someone to physically feed you, and now it means you have an Adderall prescription.
Sounds like the old definition was missing a lot of people with disabilities.
People have different ideas of what "disabled" means.
Broadening the definition makes it less useful in many ways. I would consider "disabled" to mean one of: - Unable to ambulate effectively (requires crutches or worse) - Unable to look after oneself as an adult (for any combination of reasons) - Unable to use tools and items most people would consider standard - eg. can't hold a pencil, write, type, whatever.
That's a fairly harsh definition of disabled, but all of these people unambiguously require accommodation because of their incapacity. It's also off the top of my head, so I'd happily broaden it if you want to argue the point.
If I can talk to someone for an entire day and not realise or notice they are disabled in some way, I question the definition being used - how helpful is it in deciding how we should allocate additional resources and help in that case?
Well... in the UK it's now around 25%:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
However, big caveat - it's self-reported. If you look at how many people get disability benefit it's around 10%.
So whether or not that is true depends entirely on what you mean by "disability" which is obviously not a well defined term.
> However, big caveat - it's self-reported. If you look at how many people get disability benefit it's around 10%.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US, in order to get social security disability, you need to have a documented disability and there's also income limits. If you have a disability, but you manage to find a career despite the disability, you'll lose eligibility for social security disability or at least you'll lose the social security payments. Depending on the disabilities in question, I think it's reasonable that 60% of people with a disability can find work that pays enough that they are no longer eligible for a disability payment and/or they've reached the age where they get a retirement/old age insurance benefit rather than disability.
The system rewards people who can exploit it.
> "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Talented students get to college, start struggling, and run for a diagnosis to avoid bad grades.
Okay, I was an undergrad at Stanford a decade ago, I graduated with two majors (math, physics) and almost another minor (CS) so I took more credits than most and sat in more tests than most, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single person given extra time on tests; and some of the courses had more than a hundred people in them, with test takers almost filling the auditorium in Hewlett Teaching Center if memory serves. Article says the stat “has grown at a breathtaking pace” “over the past decade and half” and uses “at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” as a shocking example, so I would assume the stat was at least ~10% at Stanford a decade ago. So where were these people during my time? Only in humanities? Anyone got first hand experience?
They go to other rooms. I had several friends who would not be around during the exam days. On a high stress day like final exam day it's hard to notice but they were definitely gone (so like 1-2 people in a 20ish person class). UC system, mid 2010s.
> So where were these people during my time?
Testing accomodations are generally done at a separate time. So students with an accomodation requiring a low distraction environment or extra test time would all take their test after the main test takers.
This came with the dual advantage of providing an alternate time for students who had excused absences to take the test as well.
TLDR: You don't normally see the students with accomodations during tests unless you also have an accomodation or you had a conflict with the test time/date.
Most of my courses beyond freshman year were 10-20 people where I basically know everyone (unless they never come to class), so I would know if they weren’t showing up at exams. I’m pretty sure if these people were evenly distributed I would notice every exam for every class missing 1-2 people. So this is not it.
It really depends on the environment tbh. I know just for the "low distraction environment" accomodations, those normally aren't used for small classes but they are used for the big exams where they stuff the entire freshman class in the program into a series of auditoriums.
And of course some professors do double time accommodations by having the students take the test with everyone else and then follow the teacher to their office to finish the exam afterwards but tbh I didn't see that very often.
At another university I once had extenuating circumstances preventing me from taking an exam in one of the main exam halls. I was invited to take it in a normal classroom, where a session was being held at the same time for people who get additional time. I was able to start later and still finish with the normal allowance but without having a chance to collude with other students.
Or it wasn't diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn't good. Doesn't mean that they weren't there.
TFA is specifically about students claiming disabilities to get extra time on tests. I’m saying from first hand experience that I didn’t know a single instance of anyone getting extra time on tests, and wondering where those alleged instances were occurring. Anything that “wasn’t diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn’t good” (huh?) has nothing to do with the 38% stat, or anything else in the article, really.
The fact that this shows higher numbers than the community college kids ("...have far lower rates of disabled students...") is interesting too. Yeah, one can argue that Stanford maybe is just so accommodating that it just serves as a great attractor for people with disability. I somehow doubt that.
I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of some coaching program too. It seems too random for folks to just "stumble" on a hack. There are few of these outfits which advertise that they can "get your kid accepted into colleges" if you buy their services.
> But the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
If we take honesty out of the equation, what's the downside for not declaring a disability, if it's not that hard to get a note from a doctor? You get better housing, and more time on tests. I am surprised the number is not higher, actually like 75% or something.
Or that community college largely serves a different class of students who have worse access to mental health resources than students who attend Stanford do. The articles quoting of flippant professors and inability to see such potential obvious issues really shines a negative light on its publication.
I had neither healthcare coverage in high school nor expensive college consultants. When I got to college (Cornell) all my friends told me they had plenty of extra time on the standardized exam (the SAT) by virtue of doctors letters declaring conditions requiring accommodations. I'm sure some of these were legitimate. But practically everyone I spoke to supposedly had ADHD and resulting accommodations on the SAT. I'm not a MPH or Epidemiologist, but does 80% or 90% of the student population truly have a condition requiring accommodations?
Once 10 or 20% of students are doing this, it isnt unexpected for everyone to start doing it just to get on an even playing field. As usual, the poor students lose out because they cannot afford the doctors or expediters who can facilitate all these things.
It seems a bit ridiculous. How long before people claim "low IQ" or "bad memory" as a condition?
You've made a much larger claim (80-90%) than the article. That is interesting. And anedata, unless you have solid evidence of your opinion.
>> You've made a much larger claim (80-90%) than the article. That is interesting. And anedata, unless you have solid evidence of your opinion.
Firstly No evidence provided and none needed as an unscientific anecdata supporting my personal shock.
- Many of these accomodations for SATs are done in high school and then it isnt required anymore, so naturally people dont ask once they have already gotten into college. The SAT used to be a singular choke point for top schools, and becomes irrelevant immediately after.
- I was speaking about SAT and the article was talking about accomodations needed for college housing and other things
1. I provided an anecdote based on friends' personal statements, not statistics based on school, you should trust the school's stats, but i'd really like to see the stats from The College Board on SAT scores, with a WHERE clause on only scores/accomodations for students going to top schools
2. I provided an anecdote that may well be wildly inaccurate being n=1
3. I entered to college in 1996, we're 29yrs off from my experience and the article
4. As I said above, accomodations in college != accomodations for SAT
Wait until you find out how many students are using performance enhancing drugs to help them study!
If 38% of the top 1% of students have learning disabilities then I'd expect students near the mean to be 100% learning disabled, if those words have any meaning left.
It should be mention the learning disability also include dysgraphia, which include handwriting. If the motor skills is impaired, then that get classified as a learning disability regardless of how easy the person can learn a complex subject in higher education.
I view it similar to the ability to throw, kick and catch balls. Today it doesn't say much about a person ability to learn, but in the old times I can see the argument that it would be a hindrance in going through the education system. Not a learning disability per say, but a schooling disability.
I was sure you were going to say "then it follows that the top 0.1% must be 100% learning disabled."
You are implicitly hard-coupling work ethic and ease of learning. Especially in the U.S., it is within the realm of possibility that the students near the mean possess a comparative ease of learning but value that advantage at roughly 0%.
Aren’t some of these “accommodations” for “disabilities” things as simple as, like, asking their professors not to put them on the spot in class if they have crippling social anxiety? Because while that might “toughen up” some people, with this person, that technique amounts to just punching them in the face for no constructive purpose?
How much of this is a terminology problem—that the word “disability” serves this blanket purpose for statutory reasons rather than to signal the type or severity of impairment?
Like, at the end of the day, these students still have to perform or not. I get the impression that a lot of these accommodations are kind of just a formal way of not being a dick about obstacles tangential to the actual learning.
I went to the university half way through my undergrad to file for a disability because I have ADHD and I go through short periods where my medication just stops being effective for whatever reason.
It's not a major disability but it was a barrier to me performing at my best so I filed the paperwork and got some minor accommodations. It was basic stuff like letting teachers know during periods when I was struggling and they would allow me to take tests in a separate room (same time limit, just by my self in a quiet room) or allow me an extra 24 hours on certain assignments provided I requested it X amount of days ahead of time.
Certainly they provided a minor "advantage" but not substantially. And these were things that most teachers are already generally willing to accommodate regardless of disability but the disability system provides a formal framework for doing so and avoiding the justifying yourself over and over again (vs just getting it cleared up at the start of the semester).
Disabilities come in many shapes and sizes. Most of them are small and it's way easier to deal with an office that deals specially with disabilities to come up with accommodations that make sense for you and keep them consistent across your entire time at university than it does to try and negotiate terms with every single professor or TA.
You know that “learning disability” isn’t a synonym for “stupid”, right? We neither call people who are less academically able “disabled”, nor are disabled people necessarily less able to work academically (apart from some more debilitating mental disorders, which would be a disability). In fact, it’s quite the opposite: the word “disability” exists _precisely_ to distinguish “intelligence” – which is what the university is selecting for – and other characteristics, so in theory intelligence and disability are entirely orthogonal (apart from the exception I mentioned).
Of course, understanding what disability actually is requires considering each learning disability separately, which is something this article unfortunately fails to do. We can do this though:
- Anxiety and depression: I see no reason why this should decrease somebody’s intelligence, so the fact that there are elevated rates of such people at top universities does not seem odd. Since these are treatable conditions, they won’t necessarily affect the ability for a student to become an effective researcher.
- ADHD: This condition is marked by a lack of ability to focus, which is a property unrelated to intelligence. Some very famous mathematicians like Paul Erdős likely had ADHD, demonstrating that it’s not necessarily true this condition makes one a worse researcher.
- Autism: Does not necessarily reduce intelligence. We can look at professional mathematicians and see that a lot of them are autistic.
- Chronic pain, migraines, etc: Unrelated to intelligence. It’s possible this will decrease one’s ability to be a researcher, but if one is able to complete University at all, it’s likely not that severe.
I mean, I could go on, and of course there will be a couple of counterexample. However, it is still the case that generally speaking, “learning disability” and “stupid” are different things, and therefore there is no reason to expect that there would be lower rates of learning disabilities among those who are highly academically skilled.
I have been under the impression that "learning disability" means that you are less able to learn than your peers. Whether that deficit is on account of intelligence, health, etc., is a different subject.
According to your definition, you can be far superior to your peers at learning and still be learning disabled. If you are looking for stupid people, you have found one, because I don't understand that.
Because of all of the ways that students can be disadvantaged at learning, every student needs accommodations. There are no students who can't benefit from a highly responsive learning environment. Being able to benefit from that does not make any student learning disabled, just different, and they are all different.
But if you're just different, and not disabled, you lose victim cred, preferences and funding.
You can claim that “learning disability” should mean whatever, but this does not change the fact that medical experts define “learning disability” such that they do not inherently impede intelligence: https://ehvi.org/learning-vs-intellectual-disabilities/. This isn’t my definition, it’s the definition used by medical experts. A quote from that article:
> Learning disabilities don’t affect intelligence and are different from intellectual disabilities. People with LDs have specific issues with learning but have an average or above-average IQ (intelligence quotient).
I acknowledge that I was including autism as a learning disability, but I see this isn’t the case. Still, however, I hope you would acknowledge that autistic people are not inherently less intelligent than others, and neither are people with depression nor anxiety.
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.
As Scott Alexander opens his essay:
>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
Maybe they're all that academically gifted kinda autism and students near the mean are less likely to be disabled? /s
I can't talk about Stanford, but STEM-related jobs (including software engineering) certainly seem to be full of people with ADHD, autism and related "neurodivergances"
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these Stanford cases are people gaming the system. But I would be equally unsurprised if screening all students of elite universities revealed that over 50% of them had some condition listed in the DSM-5, with clear correlations between condition and field of study
I know you did /s but in public school gifted programs here the gifted kids have IEPs (a document defining their Individualized Education Program) similar to what is required for special education kids with disabilities.
I have a teenager who is at an academically rigorous college prep school. He is incredibly bright and one of the best students in the school. But he has an accommodation in math for extra time because he has a form of dyscalculia which makes him very prone to misreading and mixing up in working memory the numbers, symbols and other formulas. He understands all the concepts well, but his disability results in calculation/mechanical errors unless he has the extra time to check his work multiple times for these errors. I believe this kind of disability and accommodation is legitimate, but I understand why others may disagree. He even says he often feels guilty for getting extra time when others don't. I am sure there are also people who abuse the system and get accommodations when then don't actually need them.
Why can't everyone get extra time?
That's a much bigger meta question, like what's even the point of putting timing constraints on any test?
Logistically, my kid has to go a testing center at the school during his free period and/or lunch periods for his extra time. I can imagine that if everyone got extra time, it would be a logistical nightmare.
But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.
> But I think the reality is that our educational system had just decided that faster is better and that speed is a legitimate way to grade and rank students. Which is stupid.
That's not stupid. Speed does in fact matter in the real world. To illustrate the point, let's consider an extreme example: what if it took me an entire year to do something that someone else could do in an hour? My results would be so slow that nobody would tolerate me as an employee or partner. On the other extreme, if someone takes 1h1s instead of 1h it's not really a big deal.
I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a line somewhere and say "if you can't do it this fast, you haven't learned the material adequately". The tricky thing is where to draw that line, not whether such a line is ok at all.
Ok, in the extreme case, that's a fair point. Tests can't be unlimited in length. But I don't think it's actually that tricky to draw the line. If a typical school test is 1 hour during class, just give students the option to come in at lunch or a free period for an extra period for extra time if needed. That seems easy and reasonable enough to me.
Because there must be some time limit, particularly for an in-person exam which win probably become even more common thanks to LLMs and such.
Yes. It depends on whether the time pressure is an integral part of the test. If it isn't then people should get as much time as they need. If it is, it's not clear why people should get different amounts of time.
Everyone who runs out of time does actually need extra time!
Agree!
Does this number include housing accommodations? They are provided through the same disability office. I have dry eye disease, and when the relative humidity was 19% in my dorm room I requested an accommodation to have a humidifier. I’m sure that type of accommodation wouldn’t have been approved in the past.
I went to an elite school. I had undiagnosed depression and ADHD and I almost failed out.
I don't think I needed more time on tests but I definitely needed medication and counseling. The counseling resources available at the time were not adequate and medication was difficult to get.
Same. I was on academic probation freshman year. Managed to recover and graduate. But I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD/ASD until I was 38.
An "elite school" is not for everyone because everyone is different.
You did not need medication and counseling. What you needed was a regular public college.
Perhaps you should stick to galactic history, Janov.
Psychology doesn't seem your strong suit (unsurprising, given your origins and background).
oh dang you're right. I am throwing away my degree and my meds and canceling my therapy appointments right now and applying for regular public college.
> The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities.
What the actual... Lack of journalistic integrity rears its head once again. Executive function and social challenges do not make a person "not smart."
Going back to the core of the problem, I feel that this does need to be controlled. It's one thing to disability signal online to gain clout, it's a completely different thing to drain resources from genuinely disabled folks. Disabilities need to come with diagnoses.
Maybe the smartest, most promising young people in the country realize it is smart to claim a disability.
I am not saying they don't have one. I am saying some people have realized ways it helps to point it out and maybe not everyone is clued into that.
Fundamentally I would be fine with this, the system exploits us so it's only fair to exploit it in return. Practically, however, my concern remains for people who need resources to support them.
> one professor told Horowitch. "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests."
This is a blunt quote, but it gets at a key part of the problem: Qualifying as having a disability can come with some material benefits in many schools.
The intentions are good: Schools are doing what they think is best to accommodate and help students with disabilities. It has been a high priority for decades. However, some of these accommodations come with academic advantages. Extra time on tests is the most common one I've seen.
Combine this with the ease of qualifying for a disability (look up the right doctor online, schedule an appointment, pay insurance copay, walk out with a note) and it became an easy, cheap, and tangible academic advantage.
One of the schools I'm familiar with switched to giving everyone the same, longer time period for taking test because it was becoming obvious that the system was being abused.
> The intentions are good: Schools are doing what they think is best to accommodate and help students with disabilities
Considering it's the US, schools are just avoiding to get sued.
This focuses on students seeking diagnoses. But I would expect most of them have already been diagnosed long before college. Parents with high expectations of their children are more likely to seek diagnoses. If you've spent your childhood being told you are ADHD and on Ritalin, then it is natural you would self-identify as such in college.
You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.
If we don't care about time and only care about eventual recitation of the subject matter, why don't we give all of the students more time instead of only some of them?
The whole conceit of only giving some students more time suggests that timed performance is supposed to matter.
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
Well, considering * gestures broadly at everything *, I'm sure more than 38% of students are struggling with near-debilitating anxiety and depression. The future doesn't look very bright right now. I can't imagine what being in college must feel like. I've been doing this job for like 20 years and I feel incredibly uncertain about my future most days.
There was a kid in my high school physics class who went to Stanford. One time, someone broke the curve on the midterm test, making it hard for most students to get an A. The future Stanford student’s mom visited the teacher to beg for extra credit assignments. He got his A.
I suspect Stanford selects for students who are smart, yes, but most exceptional at gaming the system. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of watering down the difficulty of classes and standardized tests.
I think this kid's mom was mentioned in the Atlantic article [1] the link in the post is based on.
> Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
Woof.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...
This is definition of “hacking” the system: YC included question on its application that asked founders to describe a time they most successfully "hacked" a non-computer system to their advantage.
Sure it is not nice or moral but that is the life now.
My father is a super stubborn Dutch guy. Needs to see proof of something 10 times before he changes a long held believe.
Long time ago something came up like this in the Netherlands. Some massive, unexplained increase in disability.
I asked how could this ever be possible?
He asked: "Are any of the disabilities that show a massive increase not objectively measurable but still eligible for subsidies?
At the time I thought it was such a backwards way of thinking but over the years I can't shake this sentence.
Not exactly the right question, because you probably can't explain a change over time with a factor that hasn't changed in that time.
A few scattered comments, no single argument...
Performance-doping by a large percentage of students at prestigious schools has been going on for decades. Separate from the people who are wired differently and really need the chemical tuning.
Also, it seems a lot of students are on anti-depressants. (You might be, too, if you had pushy overachiever helicopter parents always pushing you. Or if the same career that paid for your affluent upbringing, including college admission advantages, came because a parent operated very selfishly in general.)
Meds seem to be a go-to solution for many affluent families.
Adderall doesn't let someone be the brightest student, but it helps them keep up with courseload, of study-heavy or lab-heavy classes -- to compete with the students who have better/more prior education/experience, better work practices, who prioritize studies over partying, or who are otherwise brighter as a student in some regard.
Of the students who didn't actually have an ADHD disability, but ended up relying on the meds anyway, they aren't bad people. They're actually generally nice and smart, like everyone else. I hope it keeps working for them, or they are able to wean off without ill effects.
One thing I really worry about is a different but related problem: a culture of cheating, most recently accelated by ChatGPT and the like. That seems to be having really bad societal effects already.
One thing I wonder about is whether some of the students on other meds, like for depression, are having too much edge of passion and creativity taken off. Although the college admissions and career prep books and coaches tell students how to give the corporate-standard performative indicators of "passion", that comes out as a very different thing, and maybe all the meds has something to do with that. (I suppose a professor who's been engaged for a few decades would have a good perspective on this.)
People respond to incentives. Give disabled people advantages and you get more disabled people.
Reminds me of "Miracle Flights", in which dozens of people require wheelchairs to board but only a few require them to deboard. Of course, if you are in a wheelchair, you get to board first.
https://www.explore.com/1804742/not-divine-story-miracle-fli...
I got ok grades in high school with 0 effort. When I got to college, that changed drastically, as I never learned how to actually study or learn on my own. I was on academic probation after my first year and had to figure out how to study, since I never had to do it before. I never could figure out how some of my roommates could study for hours at a time each week, I didn’t really know what they were doing. One class let us make a 1 page cheat sheet for the exam, that was pretty effective for me; once I made it, I didn’t need it. So the night before an exam I would do that, even if I couldn’t use it. That seemed to be enough to get me off of academic probation and graduate in 4 years with a semi decent GPA… but that was also after switching to the business college, which was much less effort than engineering. The worst were 2 self-instructional classes I had. I forgot about them both completely. I did one of them in the last 48 hours of the semester and took 6 exams in one day.
Fast-forward 20+ years and I find out I have ASD and ADHD. Knowing may have helped give me some better ideas for strategies, but part of me is glad I didn’t know, because I didn’t have an excuse and found a way through. Though I’m not sure any of the accommodations I hear about would have been helpful. I never needed more time during tests and having to take care of an animal just sounds like more on my plate. Had I actually spent time with tutors to study, I likely would have burned out. I needed a lot of downtime away from people.
I can totally believe that some kids who excelled in high school, enough to get into Stanford, would fall apart in college without the same structure and would need some assistance. But I do question what that will do for them when they need to go out and get a job. I know companies are supposed to provide accommodations if needed, but I have to believe that will impact their career. I haven’t told my manager or anyone since I found out about my own issues. It used to not be a problem at all, as my old manager let me work my way and he may have even known before I did, he was good at picking all kinds of things out like that. Currently I’m struggling for the past 4 years or so, but I’m not sure what to do about it.
I had a friend in high school who was able to take untimed tests. I later heard a teacher griping, because they didn't think my friend needed them. (I agree.)
My friend had a very good life, until he took a job that really clashed with his, uhm, tendency to be a perfectionist. When we caught up (because we hadn't spoken in a few years,) it was clear he didn't have much insight into how his perfectionism worked against him in the job. (It was a job where quantity was more important than perfection.)
What would have helped my friend more? Not the diagnosis that he needed untimed tests. Instead, counseling where he understood his difference, how to make best use of it, and when he needed to let go and not be a perfectionist.
There's a GAO report from last year about the dramatic increase of students with disabilities in college.
In 2004/2008/2012, 11% of college students had disabilities. It was 21% in 2020.
In 2020, 69% of students with disabilities had behavioral or emotional conditions - up from 33% in 2004.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-105614.pdf
For hiring managers, does this devalue elite schools?
I’ve had good luck with places like Notre Dame and Cal Poly where the kids are smart, and willing to work very hard. From the Ivy League I’ve had more luck with Cornell hires than the others.
It’s a small sample size so I’m curious what others see.
Timed tests encourage wrote memorization and reflexive knowledge. They don't encourage what is reflective of the modern real world knowledge recollection. In almost all scenarios, you have a book to reference for knowledge, much less search engines (and now LLMs). Almost nothing is memorized today, in the work world. What you know, in my experience, comes from frequent usage. Your timespan to work on most things is on the order of days, not minutes or an hour.
Tests should be open book, open notes, and an extensive amount of time to do the test. The questions should be such that they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not just how well you can parrot back information.
Whilst I would love tests to be open internet, this lends itself to very easy cheating. The material being taught and what notes you take about it should be enough to answer any questions posed to you about the material. Especially those that demonstrate an understanding of the material.
Sort of. There are some things that a person entering a field is expected to know without needing to look them up, because if you don't know it you won't develop good intuition or be able to execute your work in a timely manner. Most of the stuff you learn in your freshman year is this type of thing, while the later years tend to have more open-book tests.
This is also the kind of thing that you check for in an interview - somebody who needs to look up how to write a for loop isn't going to get hired as a C programmer, and somebody who isn't familiar with Ohm's law will flunk their electronics interview. So there's a very pragmatic reason to make sure that students have the basics memorized.
With rates that high, it's a disadvantage if you don't have specialists assess your kid for all the things that could qualify them for extra testing time if you have the money to do it.
Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education.
So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highly selective school that’s by definition going to be picking gifted kids over less gifted ones, and from that group will pick those that were accommodated appropriately.
(There could also be cheating - I don’t know either way. I’m just commenting on the premise of the article. One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious that this claim is totally illogical. Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.)
Just curious: If non-neurodivergent children are given the same accomodations (which are?) do they significantly outperform their peers too? For example: it's well known that 1-on-1 instruction time correlates to better academic outcomes.
(I'm not an educator; I have no idea.)
Similarly getting extra time on a test sure as heck would have improved my scores in many cases.
And ADHD meds seem like they would be helpful for studying.. How and where do we draw the line who gets and needs additional support?
I don't know about Stanford, but in earlier schooling accomodations can include things like being allowed to sit on a bouncy chair, or use a fidget toy, or type instead of hand-write (physical asynchronous development is a common issue), or wear headphones, or take more frequent breaks.
I do think that more flexibility in educational environments might be good for most people, yes.
100%, it's one of the irksome things about the education system in general - resources are limited. It's a hard problem to solve.
My current employer had me answer the question of whether I'm "disabled." I've never answered "yes" to this question since I've never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergence, though therapists have suggested that there's a good chance I'd be diagnosed if I saw a specialist. But this time I noticed that my employer's definition of "disabled" included not only neurodivergence but also depression, which I do have a diagnosis for. So... now I'm disabled.
I have no idea what use the label is when it's so broadly defined. It doesn't give my employer any information that would help them support me in any way. Fingers crossed there is some benefit to it.
It probably helps the employer demonstrate that they hire and retain disabled people, likely assisting with some government quotas, and defenses against lawsuits by aggrieved ex-employees.
It is interesting to consider that disability may enable much higher academic performance as long as people get the proper accommodations. After all, wouldn't it be interesting if people we think of as disabled can - under the correct conditions - be more productive than 'able' people. An individuals' capability is generally pretty circumstantial and I think we should be open to asking questions about how optimal our current social structure is for productivity and capacity going forward. We may need to imagine new ways of living and structuring work and society to reach even higher levels of productivity.
>It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology
if it's a well-understood issue in a scientific field, it's basically well-understood through the work of neurodivergent scientists.
What is neurodivergent though? If it’s a third of people, you can probably deem that normal.
A third is about as common as astigmatism in >50 year olds (like me, for instance!) I wear glasses to accommodate this disability, and as a result have nearly no practical problems due to it.
I don't think a problem having a high frequency means that we should decide it doesn't matter or need rectification.
That's true, but astigmatism:
- is clearly defined
- can be measured objectively (with autorefractors, keratometers, corneal topographers)
- can be corrected cheaply ($20 glasses) to eliminate any disadvantage in performance or efficiency
Neurodivergence:
- is not clearly defined
- cannot be measured objectively, and is diagnosed using behavioral observations and cognitive tests
- may rely on 'accommodations' that, in the hands of someone without a diagnosis, would be considered cheating
Imagine I don't have astigmatism. If I were to take your glasses, would they improve my performance in college?
Imagine my legs are fine. If I were to take someone's wheelchair and start using it daily, would that improve my performance in college?
Imagine I am neurotypical. If I were to take 2x the time on a test, would my performance improve?
You misunderstand how neurodivergence is be handled in education. It isn't a single diagnosis, and does not have a single accommodation. We use a catch-all word because it makes it easier to talk about as a collection of issues, but that's not how it's diagnosed or treated.
If you would find wearing noise blocking ear muffs, or sitting on a bouncy chair, or using a typing instrument instead of writing, improves your performance on a test, then yes that should be permitted.
(I do also think it would be a good idea if people had longer for many tests or tests had less on them. That kind of speed is rarely an important part of real world workplaces so those tests are rewarding low-value skills.)
"If you would find wearing noise blocking ear muffs, or sitting on a bouncy chair, or using a typing instrument instead of writing, improves your performance on a test, then yes that should be permitted."
The thing these examples have in common is that they don't give you any inherent advantage that invalidates the purpose of the test. (Assuming it's not a handwriting test, or an 'ignoring distractions' test.)
I would group all of these along with the examples I gave: corrective glasses, and wheelchairs. They should be available to all students, without diagnosis or discrimination.
If you think limited time on tests doesn't serve a useful purpose, then why give 'extra' time to only some students, and not to all students?
Current estimates place it around 20% of the population. Wouldn't take a whole lot of sampling error in admissions to result in 40% of admitted students
Stanford doesn't try to admit a random sample of the population, and its quite posssible the things it does select on positively correlate with the conditions at issue; it's quite plausible nonsampling error (systemic bias) is a bigger issue than sampling error in explaining any prevalence difference from the general population here.
I think, broadly, this is what neurodivergent people want. Nobody considers having poor vision a disability despite it nominally being one since it's so well accommodated. And it's so well accommodated in part because it affects so many people that it's normal.
The world right now doesn't do a great job of "by default" accommodating people with the broad class of difficulties experienced by people that fall under the umbrella of neurodivergence and takes as given that everyone is in the 70-80% group. So now it's a disability with doctor's visits and paperwork and specific individual accommodations when it very well could not be.
It's a way to separate us so that we can fight about it and not focus on the important aspect which is to provide everyone the help they need and deserve to make a successful life for themselves. Some may need more help than others, and so the powers that be who want to keep all that profit for themselves target those who need more help with dumb articles like this one which spread FUD.
You almost lost me in the first half but yeah, that title alone shows the intentions of the editorial
I should specify also that I am not saying a medical diagnosis is not important, or that there is no such thing as ADHD or Autism.
I believe as a society we need to be more flexible in every area for every human and also to give individual attention to everyone so they can excel. Some people will need more help than others, like those with ADHD, and some will need much, much more help than others, such as those with more extreme sensory issues with Autism who may not even be able to go out in public without accommodations.
Your point about Stanford having a larger-than-average proportion of 'extremely gifted' kids is reasonable. Perhaps the smartest 20% at Stanford are drawn from the smartest 0.1% nationally.
But I think you're too dismissive of this part:
You said "One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs" but this is a straw man. The professor did not say this.If you read the statement charitably, the professor only pointed out two things that are probably true, which I paraphrase below:
- most people, when they hear about students with disabilities, imagine physical disabilities
- the professor has seen that a sizable proportion of students classified as disabled do not require accommodations
Now, we could argue about what are reasonable accommodations and which are not. This is where I'm interested to hear your perspective.
I assume you are in favor of these two:
- kid needs wheelchair and a ramp, so kid can attend class
- kid needs glasses, so kid can see the whiteboard
I assume you are not in favor of this one:
- kid cannot find the derivative of 2x^2, so kid is allowed to use a CAS calculator for Calculus 1 exams
What do you think about this one?
- kid can pass the English Composition 1 exam, but only if given twice as much time as other students
Your request to read charitably is not supported by your followup of cartoonish straw man questions.
You are using rhetorical trickery to make a point rather than engaging in honest dialog.
I used no trickery.
I am attempting to ascertain where you draw the line.
I offered examples that I presume we agree on, on both sides of the line.
Then I gave an example where we might disagree.
If you feel my questions are 'cartoonish straw man questions' then that of course is your right.
However, I want to make it clear that:
- you mischaracterized the quotation from the professor in the article
- I would honestly like to understand (i) whether you agree there is a line to be drawn between things that correct for impediments that are irrelevant to the competency being tested, and (ii) where you would draw that line.
If the manner in which I've written my questions makes it seem like I have any intention other than to understand your position more clearly, I apologize.
> Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.
Libertarianism, it would seem
> Libertarianism, it would seem
In some peculiar, perverted sense, given that evaluating claims of disability requires breaching students' medical privacy. You wouldn't normally expect libertarians to so overtly be okay with invasions of personal privacy.
That’s probably because Reason’s libertarian goal is not to get claims of disability evaluated. The goal is to get the government mandate for disability accommodations eliminated, which eliminates any benefit of making the claims and therefore any reason to evaluate the claims.
I think they are just commenting on the bias of Reason magazine (it is a well known libertarian magazine).
I know; I'm pointing out this is manifestly not a libertarian worldview. It's part and parcel with Reason being ideologically paleoconservative with a libertarian dressing.
For pete's sake just give everyone extra time on tests; what's the big deal?
If you know the stuff, regurgitating it faster is a trivial optimization.
If you have to grade essays and you give students more time you have to spend more time on grading - taking away time from preparing lessons and supporting students individually.
How much time is enough, then? Do they get all day? A week? As long as it takes?
Best teacher I had in university offered "unlimited time on tests". Their tests were hard as hell but they were scheduled after the last class of the day and ran until like 10 at night. It worked out to like 5 hours of test time even if most people could complete the test in like ~1.5-2 hours.
The policy was essentially "you have until the teacher/TA needs to go home" and given everyone in university is always swamped with work they were generally willing to stick around and get their own work done until it got super late and even then, even if you were the last test taker they'd generally negotiate a final 10-20 minutes with heads up so you could do your best to wrap up even if you weren't done.
But generally the rule is ~2x test time. The extended test time accomodation is normally listed as "double time" in my experience even if profs were generally willing to give you more than 2x time if you were still making meaningful progress.
Yep. That's exactly what I did when I taught at the university level. Mind you, I was single then, and had no family responsibilities, and the school was small enough that I could ask for the last test slot of the day and always easily get it. But, it's excellent for everyone.
It's unfortunately not practical for every class to do when everyone's taking all of their finals in the same week. There will be inevitable scheduling collisions: hence the need for timed slots and individual exceptions at alternative times and locations. If you can think of a systemic solution to that, I'm all ears. (Yeah: get rid of final exams. In theory I like that idea, too. AI is kinda pushing educators in the opposite direction at the moment.)
Oh certainly.
As for a systemic solution, I imagine you could probably handle exam scheduling at the university level once enrollment is over and drop week has passed. Of course this only works if the entire university is on board. Otherwise the system breaks down at the edges super quickly.
Once enrollment is more or less fixed I imagine you could generate a fairly optimal arrangement of final exams with an SMT solver + linear programming. Give 5.5 hours per exam, 2x a day, with a 1 hour allocation for breakfast + travel and a 1 hour allocation for lunch + travel. That gives you 14 hours. Breakfast at 0700 if one is so inclined, exam 0800-1330, lunch 1330-1430, exam 1430-2000.
You could do 6 hour exams but you'd have to offer extended hours on dining halls in that case since students may not be eating until 9pm/2100 or later.
With 5 days, 2 exam slots a day, that's 10 exam slots per student. Most students are going to bunched into relatively similar courses per semester (with some degree of variation) and students essentially never take more than 8 classes in a semester (I did 7 one semester and 8 the next and they just about killed me and generally I didn't see undergrad students taking more than 5-6).
A solver should be generally able to find a solution to that optimizing for most even distribution of exams. Doubly so if the university starts finals a little early and does 6 or 7 days instead of 5 (i.e. starting on the friday or thursday before). And if a complete solution is not available, a solver could identify which particular courses are causing the optimization to fail and the admin could negotiate solutions from there.
And of course you can improve upon this if the university incentivizes/pressures X% of courses in a program to offer no-exam/project based finals instead. Personally I hated project based finals (too much to do already and you end up forced to choose where you allocate your time) but I understand they are preferable for some students and they'd reduce the load during finals week assuming they are required to be due before finals and not during.
Get rid of academic terms, so that the finals don't all fall in the same week. Probably a hard sell.
Be less obsessed with evaluation and grading. Which probably means people have to be less obsessed with having a credentialing and gatekeeping system while calling it an "education" system. Probably an even harder sell. Although since the next step is for the AI to eliminate the need for credentialed humans, maybe we get it throught the back door.
This is a fantastic idea, as the exam becomes part of the teaching - if you sit there for 5 hours wishing you prepared your study better, that's an invaluable lesson.
I suspect the reason why it does not occur more commonly is simply because of the costs of running such a long exam.
A better lesson than if you sat there for 2 hours wishing you had studied?
Given the context of this discussion, the answer would be "whatever extra time they're giving to the disabled folks".
> The result is a deeply distorted view of "normal." If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD > risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class
OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.
Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.
I got 1.5 extra test time. I would have never graduated otherwise. I didn't use it my senior year though. To this day, I read slower than most, I have to reread things when others don't need to. Intelligence and having learning disabilities are not corollated as this article suggests.
Reading the comments here people seem to care more about what is "good" for the individual than what is good for the institution.
If you have learning disability that requires "assistance" at an elite university, then why can't I play in the NBA with stilts while being allowed to double dribble and travel?
Sure would be awesome for me to play in the NBA! Probably wouldn't be good for the NBA though.
It's funny how upset most comments are with the realization that a lot more people are disabled while most of the users in HN are probably on the spectrum
I grew up in a Danish town of 20.000 people and two schools. In my school there were 3 dyslexic children. They went to the "special" class 4 hours a week. I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name. It's because this was the place they put all the children with what we'd call disabilities today. Some of the students in the class were only in that class, others like my dyslexic classmate only went to the class those 4 hours a week. It was also a full age range from 0-9th grades. As you might imagine it didn't exactly work.
Today we know that 10% of the population is dyslexic. So those 3 children should've actually been 80. Some of those 77 children could be in the group of adults who can't read.
What is interesting to me is that you rarely see people rant about the dyslexic the way you see people talking about something like ADHD.
> I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name.
It's the sort of thing that doesn't have a fixed name, because once it's had a name for ~10 years everyone decides the term is offensive and gives it a new name.
There's something a little ironic about calling every user on a website disabled on an article about overdiagnosing disability
I'm not ironic, you're ironic.
The whole thrust of the article is complaining about timed tests and some kids getting more time. That's doubtless unfair if some are overclaiming, but the real solution is to not do timed tests at all - they are only serving to produce an arbitrary bell curve so that some can have higher grades and get better career opportunities. Better to not have a timer at all, and let people's actual ability shine.
Realistically there has to be _some_ time limit. No one is going to sit in a room for 10 hours while you finish your test.
Sure. I doubt that if some test at the moment takes an hour then you're getting much extra benefit at the five hour mark. The whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out - along an axis different to "competence".
>whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out
I suspect that is true for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, or GRE.
I suspect in classroom environments that there isn't any intent at all on test timing other than most kids will be able to attempt most problems in the test time window. As far as I can tell, nobody cares much about spreading grades out at any level these days.
Why?
How strong is the argument that a student completing a test in 1 hour with the same score as a student who took 10 hours that the first student performed "better" or had a greater understanding of the material?
> Why?
Teachers have lives, including needing to eat and sleep.
Sure, but that answer doesn't address the questions of the value of time limits on assessment.
What if instead we are talking about a paper or project? Why isn't time-to-complete part of the grading rubric?
Do we penalize a student who takes 10 hours on a project vs the student who took 1 hour if the rubric gives a better grade to the student who took 10 hours?
Or assume teacher time isn't a factor - put two kids in a room with no devices to take an SAT test on paper. Both kids make perfect scores. You have no information on which student took longer. How are the two test takers different?
I just had an edifying conversation with a recent Standford grad who was a TA, and she talked about how some huge percentage of the class has testing accommodations that allowed them to take all exams in a private room, with no supervision, and with access to their phones (and the internet).
And the professors and TAs were not even allowed to ask the students what they needed those accommodations for.
> when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013, it significantly lowered the bar for an ADHD diagnosis.
I've suspected for many years that ADHD is like Medical Marijuana. Some people really need it. For others, it's just a way to get legal access to stimulants.
The amount of pressure young kids are under... I am surprised the numbers aren't much higher. I grew up with debilitating OCD/Tourettes. I am glad kids growing up today have more resources than I did. Society itself is sick and broken. If that many kids are having issues.. Maybe the system is the problem here?
It’s also worth mentioning that causality may go in the opposite direction: for the marginal student, part of why they got into Stanford was due to having more time than their peers to complete a test.
20+% of adults have anxiety, which they include here. So 38% for any of the conditions they listed ("mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD" plus everything else) doesn't seem off base.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of Stanford students are anxious or depressed. Isn't everybody, especially young kids who have spent the last decade going through the meat grinder of prepping for elite college admissions?
This.
Many emotional problems that are highly dysfunctional can be missed or masked by raw intelligence until a certain higher level of intellectual competition or pressure is present.
Having participated in frequent academic competitions in high school in a top-5-biggest metropolitan area in the US, there was one guy in my era who pretty much won city-wide awards in any subject he touched all the time. So bright. He got into an elite college and spiraled out and dropped out for what, in hindsight I'd armchair-diagnose, were a mix of ADHD/Autistic/anxiety-oriented tendencies that collided with online gaming that hadn't caused failures in earlier environments for him.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a surprising number of these disabilities require treatment with performance-enhancing drugs.
At the gym I go to, there are a lot of college-age kids. I overhear them talking about getting on Ritalin or Adderall to help them study. Not because they really need it, it's just seen as a "performance hack" to get an advantage. They talk about what doctor they went to and how easy it was to get a prescription.
I read somewhere that Adderall does not improve cognitive function in people without ADHD and in some cases can even decrease it.
Have you ever taken a decent dose of an amphetamine? It isn't going to make you smarter but it will almost certainly boost your energy and ability to get stuff done.
The same is true for every individual person who takes it. At some dose it helps and at other does it doesn't.
And in the gym, it raises your heart rate so that hurts exercise, but without it I can't do any cardio because I get so bored 5 minutes in I have to stop.
>takes amphetamine
>performance enhanced
>welp, guess I have ADHD!
By this metric everyone has ADHD.
That has been a thing since I went to college 20 years ago.
I was just researching exceptional people with trisomy 21 and was pleasantly surprised by this article. I think Stanford, Harvard, and other elite institutions with these rates of disabled students must accept all ranges of students with disabilities including those with Down syndrome. I was especially inspired by people like Pablo Pineda who articulated how it's society that keeps them from succeeding and I agree. There's no reason for these universities to only accept the type of disabilities that wealthy students can rig the system for.
We will end up with everyone identifying as disabled (or at least "neurodivergent"). Then we'll all be back on the same level and someone will have to invent a new category that will also grow until it too encompasses everyone. And so on.
Nihilistic guesses are fun. They make you look smart, without any of the difficulty of understanding or thinking of solutions.
The solution is learning to tell people "you do not meet our criteria for being disabled". Alternatively, Congress could amend the ADA or someone could sue and win a court decision changing how it is interpreted.
you just reminded me of the Rush song The Trees, though not quite the same meaning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trees_(Rush_song)
I was recently wondering that since in the US the race is declarative and such a big thing, why don't people self declare being <of the currently most interesting race>?
If this brings you points at entey exams or similar bonuses - why not (mis)using that mechanism?
Or maybe I have as a European the wrong impression about positive discrimination based on race in universities? (I do not nit jave recent data, just remember that people mentioned that they did not play the "race card" to be admitted)
My experience backs up that this is increasing even on the last decade. I worry that it’s yet another hack that the $8000 admissions consultants offer to their clients, potentially pointing (yet again) to a version of DEI that doesn’t mostly amplify privilege.
My general impression of kids from elite colleges are that they're very good at finding some sort of loophole in the system to exploit, and they get lauded for it. And if they balk, for whatever reason, they feel like they're falling behind those that do. So then there's a feedback loop for everyone to take advantage of some kind of exploit to stay competitive. "You'd be stupid not to do X also, if everyone else is." with no consider to morals or character--because they're not easy to measure.
Easy solution, if you take extra accommodations, its noted on your degree. If you are an employer, do you want someone who manipulates the system in these ways? Me neither. Maybe note exactly the accommodations on the degree so those with real disabilities aren't caught up in this.
Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.
The most illuminating line:
> here's been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker
FWIW a lot of the disability disclosure instructions for statistical purposes say stuff like "ever had cancer" and other qualifications that I find curious (because they don't really seems to be truly indicative of having a disability or not). (Not that it has anything to do with the main point of the article. Even in K12 a certain type of affluent family makes services into a game.)
Reminds me of the Asymptomatic Tourette's video https://youtu.be/H9X3GkacXG8
Wifey works at uni. From all her stories, sounds like a strategy I'd adopt to boost my GPA, if it existed back then.
Of course, there are also true cases where it takes 4 hours to complete a 30-minute test.
All it does is kill the GPA signal completely. One amongst many before, pure noise now.
[edit: not denying people need it. but it appears like folks that don't also use it]
Tell me about it. My best hire had a horrible GPA.
But I get it. If the job doesn't demand creativity but just following orders, GPA was a signal for it.
If someone needs 4 hours to complete a 30-minute test they should be in a school for the disabled.
There seems to be an obvious solution.
When I went to the DMV and couldn't pass the vision test without my glasses, they put on my driver's license an indication that I only passed with the accommodation of corrective lenses.
> when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013
Does Reason do even the most basic fact checking? The most recent “issue” of the DSM (DSM-V-TR) was released in 2022.
The article frames being smart and promising (to a university) as at odds with having a learning disability, which is not necessarily true. It also frames depression and anxiety as learning disabilities, which they are not.
While I agree that smart people tend to play the system, I will offer another explanation.
I think university students are just weirder now. They just don't have the same social skills as before. Maybe Covid has erased social skills and behaviors, or maybe the internet is too prevalent.
I don't know what the social equivalent of the Overton Window would be, but I think that's shifted so hard that traditional autism tests would mark most modern students as autistic.
Not intending to offend, but aren't exceptionally gifted students (i.e. outliers) by definition neuro-divergent? Disclaimer: I am neuro-divergent, but not exceptionally gifted.
Lots to unpack in this so this following isn’t representative of my view on all of the article:
Cheating? Really? There’s a passing reference to getting an accommodation if partly through convenience as cheating. This throwaway line holds a lot of the problems of education in it. It denotes a view where education is less about learning than point scoring. Getting an accommodation for an extra day on a project is no more cheating than if a student asked for an extension.
Plenty of other accommodations, though maybe not all, are similarly not-cheating. It’s not cheating. It’s also not fair but so what? Put aside the system burdens doing this under the ADA may cause and your left with, what? Students being given more leeway and flexibility to 1) learn and 2) demonstrate that they have learned material.
This should be much less about “omg students taking advantage” and more about about “hmm, maybe this says a lot about how poorly things are currently done and better they could be with more thoughtful design”
It's like when all the prisoners in Orange is the new Black start to claim they are Jewish in order to get the nicer Kosher meals from the cafeteria.
Lol! I did that (sometimes) when I was in hospital in the UK. If you requested a halal meal they sourced it from a takeaway down the street, which was excellent, and a wonderful break from the usual dismal fare. I wasn't a dick about it, and would ask the meal order folks if it was OK to request one that day; sometimes they said 'yes', and sometimes not (based on what, I don't know), but they knew what was up, and didn't mind doing favors for those of us who'd been in a while. I'm still ridiculously grateful. The NHS (back then, a quarter century ago, now) was amazing.
Supposedly this "trick" works on airline flights, too.
You don't have to claim to be Jewish. You can simply request the Kosher meal and if they have enough supply, you get it.
it's not a trick on a flight. you just request the type of meal you want from the airline, usually 24 hours before the flight. they don't make you recite blessings or koran verses... you just ask and they accommodate you :)
most airlines that fly long routes offer a ton of different menus: kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, asian vegetarian (my favorite - usually indian food, which still tastes good when microwaved as opposed to a lot of non-first-class airline meals), lactose-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly... many options available that are usually a cut above the typical "chicken or beef".
beware - you have to do this for each leg of a flight with layovers! i've occasionally had luck requesting a vegetarian or vegan meal in-flight but most of the time they only pack as many as are requested ahead of time.
Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities? I think the article author, and many of the commenters here, are conflating "normalised behaviours" with "intelligence". As a society we have normalised pushing students into being able to complete assessments within an allotted time frame, even though the time it takes to finish an assessment isn't a perfect measure of one's intelligence (regardless of whether or not the answers were factually correct/incorrect). We have normalised allowing people who are "articulate" to take up space in society because we have collectively decided that articulate people are more intelligent, even though that isn't inherantly true.
I don't doubt that many of those students are faking having a disability to game the system in order to benefit themselves, but this article and the discussion around it are anything but intellectual.
>Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities?
?? many people would think there is something wrong with the definition of disabled if 38% of the population is disabled: more likely to be mislabeled. now, if 38% of the population is not disabled, but 38% of elite universities is, that is also something of note... is how the headline/article should be read.
then, if you live in a society with the ideological divides that many western societies show, where one side campaigns by advocating more social spending and the other advocates that it's being overdone, the suspicion is sure to emerge in some quarters that the metrics for disability might be manipulated in one political direction or the other. also makes a number like 38% interesting.
The CDC reports that 1 in 4 Americans are disabled. Sure 38% is higher than 25%, but the 38% number is the worst case scenario, two of the other universities cited only had 20% of students who were disabled, below the CDC number.
> one side campaigns by advocating more social spending
Ironically, having more social spending on 4-year universities would actually alleviate this problem if we are following the author's logic. If students weren't the ones footing the bill for their education, there would be less incentive for them to take measures to try and circumvent a system that penalizes low-performance (doubly-so because you both get a bad grade and you still have to pay back the money).
I read the headline/article exactly the way it was supposed to be interpreted. I'm also not reading that far into it, the byline literally states, "If you get into an elite college, you probably don't have a learning disability", which again, is simply not true and is ableist. Disabled people are not incapable of performing certain tasks, but they are hindered, which is why it's called a disability and not an inability.
But this does not explain the recent surge of disabilities. No one says disabled people cannot attend elite universities.
> No one says disabled people cannot attend elite universities
The author spent the byline and first half of the article trying to explain that these universities wouldn't accept people with disabilities because they're just too elite and highly-selective. The recent surge of disabilities is actually perfectly explained, even in the article. The diagnostic criteria for disabilities has changed over time, becoming more "relaxed" as some would put it. If the diagnostic criteria expands to include more people, we are going to see higher rates of disability.
Whether I care depends on the accommodation they're seeking.
When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.
That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.
Having a mental disability is chic for kids right now. You won't find a discord or other online profile of a kid with less than three mental disabilities listed. For better or worse, they use them to connect with one another, have something in common. It doesn't help either that these disabilities are super easy to misdiagnose with dishonest patients which means lots of real drugs are flowing to children with fake problems.
This is all aside from the fact that these disabilities can be used as a way to get all sorts of special treatment. That's just icing on the cake. They see each other doing it and say why not me as well. It's a feign mental disorder chain reaction that's gone critical. Sexuality as well. They like to collect labels like Pokémon. Massive social benefit.
haha yeah im just queer for clout I love being popular
It doesn't annoy you that people are using your label for clout though? With all the adults focusing on LGBTQ+ trans, etc.. a label is a way to make yourself standout, and kids are desperate to do that. Especially with mental disorders and sexuality because takes zero effort to give yourself a label, and now you have something to talk about.
yeah there's totally a huge social benefit to being queer right now. definitely.
Are you being sarcastic because in kid social circles there 100% is. Play any games on Steam and/or Quest and it's very apparent.
Isn't it strategic at this point? Why not use the "disabled" card if it'll get you better results for similar cost?
Maybe I'm too cold or cynical here, but I would make it compulsory to indicate the disability in the diploma with an annotation or comment.
Or possibly the other way around: "Completed degree on standardized terms "
This is super common in affluent school districts. Bulldozer parents with lots of time and resources eventually get their kid some diagnosis that confers benefits in their schooling. Be it additional time on assignments, one on one tutoring, or whatever. They carry these diagnoses, habits, and expectations to college.
To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.
You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.
Ok, so we are raising a bunch of cheaters and liars. Great.
When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.
Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior"
Better rooms, more time on tests, sympathy, and more....The same reason so many have a medical marijuana prescription, or a disabled license plate, or a 'service animal' that they bring into restaurants, grocery stores, and airplanes, or so many people take advantage of wheelchair service at airports then walk off the plane without help. If there is a system, people will find a way to abuse it and find shortcuts and loopholes to exploit.
Is that something a Stanford student would want on their permanent record? Employers or the government might be able to obtain that information. You could be flagged for life as a reject.
Under the Trump administration, accommodations for mentally disabled people are no longer enforced. Most of the enforcers were laid off. The new policy is “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” [1]
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...
Disclosing an individual student's information to third parties without express consent is a violation of FERPA laws.
I hold a R&D Position at an MIT lab. I also hold gov clearances for DoD work. They are pretty accepting of the fact that a lot of folks in the field are neurodivergent. No one cares because if you deliver results you deliver results. No one cares about shit under the Trump administration because its an absolute joke that has thus far only stood to get in the way of the way we carry out research. The party of "minimal government" sure as hell loves to tell public established institutions how to carry out their own damn business.
The entire system from early education to corporate is setup to reward dishonesty, and then we are curious why we are lead by the dishonest.
Related:
Accommodation Nation: America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121559
Why put a time limit on exams? Why not put everyone on the same playing field by allowing unlimited time to take the exam? The majority of exams at my university have no time limit (within the operating hours of the testing center), and it works well. At the end of the day, if you don't know the material, having more time isn't going to help you.
Yeah that is a good point. Either you know it or you do not.
because leadership needed a lot of irrrrational bullshit to justify their incompetence in the urgently imminent case that the biological and academic descendants of their "generation" outperformed them in a a ... waffle? whiff? ... I apologize, I don't know the term, and I only identified part of the heap of bullshit the old "guard" used to keep the kids "dumb enough" (136.9 - 144.3 IQ when they enter the horticultured league) but it's a great concern, nevertheless ... "housing"? ... in 2025? how retarded were you peeps 15 years ago? how the fuck did you survive? OH WAIT, YOU BOMBED IRAN? brrrrr, so evil of youuuuu
but it's wonderful we can debate this, really. I'm glad we get to exchange words, everybody, all of us!
Thank GOD, the OLD FATHERS of academia left some room ... to walk circles in ... and that they left so many of the questions they had and inspired to be left unanswered by the few/many who got in/didn't get in(to) the space that would give the incredible rarity of human brains with that specific kind of passionate curiosity in this (Tao universe measure something) vast galaxy of ours that bit they ... deserved? needed? wanted? desired? hundreds/thousands of generations worked incomparably hard for ... ???
so that we wouldn't be cursed with looking at the results of TWO COMPANIES IN 20-FUCKING-25 that are tapping that insanely sexy big ass of Space around this cutesy blue-and-green little planet of hours/ sorry, ... "ours", ... like, ... somewhat "ours" ... ... ...
Heyyyyy, are there any cool new toys on Alibaba or whatever the name is or something? There's some German genes in the neighborhood who can use a camera
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. ... Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.
"Obviously"? "is clearly bogus?"
Not to me. I see too much rhetoric and assumptions. In an article in Reason magazine, I expect more -- to demonstrate careful thinking that cuts through lazy common-sense thinking.
To make sense of a situation, one of my favorite tools is simple: a causal diagram(s). See [1]. This requires effort, and it should. Making a useful, communicable model that forms the foundation for your argument takes practice. Here's a disability-related example: [2]
I want to live in a world where causal models are demanded by readers.
[1]: https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/images/volu...
[2]: https://ibb.co/5XcGyLK0
Agreed. I don't find the 38 percent figure to be surprising. I have no basis on which to find it surprising so the author's incredulity is baffling.
My wife has a cousin who basically gamed the system for undergraduate and law school. She grew up white, middle class, but her dad, being of Mexican descent (US born) allowed her to play up the Hispanic angle on college applications, landing her scholarships and better admissions. Then, for law school, she claimed she had ADHD so that she could get extra time on tests. It was all a scam.
Does she not have ADHD?
why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're left-handed?
this is a flat out lie and a case of bad journalism
it's not 38% - it's 1 in 4 or 25%, according to Stanford's own website https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae
and that number includes students getting literally any kind of accommodation whatsoever. Allergies, food allergies, carpet replacement, etc, etc
Dude lost me at the first sentence: "The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country."
Very clearly the author has never visited Stanford or UCB.
Which is to say, "elite" universities do not base admissions solely on what I assume they mean when they say "smartest."
Accommodating for disability is cheesing the test score. Cheesing a test score is cheesing the metric. Cheesing the metric is always some form of lying, usually to yourself.
- You're lying to yourself about how good of a fit your are for the program.
- The professor/administration is getting inaccurate data about the teaching efficacy.
If you want to know if you can be a civil engineer despite your disability, the last thing you should do is correct for the disability in your primary success metric.
You show a touching level of confidence in the idea that test scores are a useful metric of anything anybody cares about... especially after they're Goodharted into oblivion. Maybe the extreme ends of the ranges are, if you compensate for noise sources. And giving somebody more time on the test may indeed be compensating for a noise source.
Probably the same reason why half of HackerNews think they have ADHD.
Incentives. Did you know that mental health specialists like therapists as a field are entirely in lock-step in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything, because otherwise most insurance won't reimburse?
Any functioning individual can go to a therapist and get an immediate diagnosis of an affliction, simply because therapists won't get clients if they don't provide the avenue for being funded by health insurance.
> in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything
I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that says "I'm depressed." Which I'm sure exists, but I don't conflate pill-mills with responsible MDs, either.
Regardless, depending on the state, licensed counselors are qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, so not sure what your comment is getting at.
One one hand you say sure, they have to provide a diagnosis like an adjustment disorder, and on the other you say walking into a therapist's office and getting that is like a rare pill-mill? Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
This article is talking about any sort of mental health "disability", and the way the mental health system financials work is that it's no wonder we have so many identifying as having a disability. The system isn't evaluating an individual and applying a disorder to people that are factually on the 5-10% of the population that would be a rare "disorder". The system is literally slapping a disorder label on everyone that walks in and these people are identifying with the label they're given.
> Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
Yes. You seem to be taking chagrin with the fact that therapists have to attach a diagnosis code in order to bill insurance, and then conflating that with inflated diagnoses of mental disorders that qualify as disabilities.
My issue with your comment is that I think you're taking a systemic issue (which I acknowledge, btw) and framing it as therapists' misconduct. If your claim that therapists are categorically diagnosing anyone who shows up for the purposes of billing were true, we'd expect to see very high diagnosis rates specifically among therapists who rely heavily on insurance, relative to those who are mostly private-pay. I don't have that data, but I'd be surprised if the difference were as extreme as your framing implies.
What did change in a clear, documented way was the DSM-5 criteria in 2013, which lowered thresholds for several conditions and broadened who qualifies for a diagnosis. That is diagnostic classification problem, not a "therapists are gaming the system for billing" problem.
It’s matter of incentives. Everyone knows the value of college is in the piece of paper they give you at the end, the things they teach you are not super helpful in real world. So people cheat so they don’t have to waste time learning useless knowledge and instead spend that time on something valuable, like working out or going to a party.
>the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
Stanford can make the student pay any costs of the accommodation if Stanford wants to push back on the student. E.g., if the student requests extra time on tests, Stanford can estimate the total cost of employing the proctor and bill that (amortized of course over the amount of extra time).
But yeah, it is kind of excessive how much special treatment a person can get in US society just by being rich enough to afford a doctor who will sign whatever letters the person needs (and being shameless enough to request the letters). Another example is apartment buildings with a strict policy of no dogs. With a doctor's letter, the pet dog becomes a medically-necessary emotional-support animal, which the landlord must allow per the same ADA discussed in the OP.
So rich people should be able to pay for extra time on tests?
I don’t see how that is pushing back or solving any of the problems the article talks about.
I don’t think the ADA allows charging people with disabilities extra. For example, if you claim you have a service dog, then you are legally not allowed to be charged pet fees.
Gee idk could be toxic environment
medical industrial complex
toxic food
air pollution
enshittification happening in all industries
it's destroying the integrity of the human genome with each subsequent generation worse and worse and will result in a culling of the species over time toward more stable subgroups likely in more remote regions not affected by these things as much
Would love to see the percentage of Forbes 30u30 who also had (sorry, claimed) a disability in college.
>Would love to see the percentage of Forbes 30u30 who also had (sorry, claimed) a disability in college.
Once they get out of prison, we should ask them.[0]
[0] I'll be here all week. Try the prime rib!
This is what trending towards zero sum looks like. The cracks in society are growing ever wider. Failure to get into the top schools and obtain top grades is perceived as potentially life ruining. Hence all this cheating, and, also, grade inflation.
I had a college roommate who got hit by a car and was in a coma with lasting mental deficits. He was a mechanical engineering major, and because of his "disability" he got 2x time allowed on exams. It did not seem right to me, but oh well.
Because it's bullshit? Kids today don't understand that they are not special, everyone's different and the diagnosis you get from a TikTok video is not real.
Step 1. Go to harvard.
Step 2. Make daddy pay.
Step 3. Get a retard diploma.
Step 4. Graduate by literally cheating.
Step 5. Prey a company will hire you after they find you are a retard from harvard.
Why wouldn’t they, if it gives them some advantage?
It actually makes sense that the smartest people in our society would be disabled, right?
The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.
My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic
What a disgusting article. It's abliest to say that disabled students won't be able to make it Stanford. The only weird part is calling anxiety and depression a disability.
Saying that people who are using accommodations are cheating is morally repugnant.
Instead of saying that we need to clamp down on people claiming disabilities, we should open up the accommodations to everyone.
"Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD."
This is clickbait. There are diseases and disorders, and we have medicine to treat them so that people can be functional in society (particularly, work and school).
Nothingburger.
Is it really surprising that the top minds in STEM might not be neuro-typical?
You can't tell me you think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk (!), etc., have "normal" brains.
Whether that should count as a disability or a superpower is subjective. ADHD and Autism often present as strengths in one arena, and weaknesses in another. Speaking overly broadly: An aptitude for hard facts and logic, with a difficulty with emotions and social cues.
That's not to say that everyone who presents as such should be given the same accommodations. It's probably being abused. But that doesn't mean they're lying about their brains. It took a doctor to diagnose it. What more would you want to see beyond "a doctors note"?
I watch a lot of bodycam DUI arrests on Youtube (I'm not proud of it - it's a guilty pleasure) and something I have noticed is that close to 100% of young female suspects claim to have ADHD, anxiety, depression or all 3. This generation has been trained to use these three pathologies to excuse poor behaviours. So it wouldn't be a surprise to see them using it to excuse poor academics, even preemptively.
Consider that popular videos are those that play into preconceived stereotypes. I doubt your videos are represent of all DUI arrests.
This is a really poor article that has no research behind it, and no attempt to investigate anything or talk to anyone with a different view. The only source is the terrible Atlantic article about the topic.
There’s plenty to discuss and disagree with these policies but the author’s willingness to make broad judgments about college students’ behaviors and internal states based on poor understanding of ADHD, the ADA, and what’s actually going on at these schools is incredibly poor journalism by this author and by Reason.
As a "real" disabled person with autism...whatever that means.... This entire thread is very saddening. And lacking the usual debate vibe and is just people dumping their hate and frustration with no real sources or data or understanding :(
I was literally reading the same stuff happening in Norway and two young women at the university spoke up about it. The main issue there was the abuse of doctors time lying about issues to get extra time on the exams as the extra time requires a doctor's note.
just LOL
A lot of commenters have focused on the ADHD, but the 38% number is from anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
... and this generation of students has every reason to be anxious and depressed. I'm surprised the number isn't over 50%. They're watching the white-collar jobs (the kind of jobs that justify a Stanford degree price-tag) get hammered by AI with no plan to back-stop the unemployment resulting than the same answers from the past (i.e. mutterings of "bootstraps" and "saving" and "stop eating avocado toast"), they're watching fascism creep over the nations of the world again, they're watching the annual thermometer rise, the weather get worse, and the world pass tipping-point numbers that our best models suggest will lead to incredibly sweeping climate changes... And they're watching the current leadership of the planet do not enough to address any of this.
I have a teenage niece that is 100% convinced she'll never own a home. I don't have anything concrete to tell her to convince her otherwise.
So yeah... Maybe those double-digit percentage numbers are pretty justified by all of this.
Tldr: If you are actually smart, you leverage as much of the social system to your advantage that you can get away with. It's called being street smart. Don't blame the kids for being street smart.
Oh and the fact that in USofA, Big Pharma in cahoots with corrupt doctors and a broken police/judicial system let you legal amphetamines if you have adhd is, of course, nothing to do with this.