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The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors
"My argument is that they didn't plan accomodations adequately so now we should just get rid of accomodations."
The academic equivalent of "too many people are using the escalator so we will be getting rid of it"
With very few exceptions every school accommodation I’ve heard of is something that every student should have access to, diagnosis or not.
One of the most common accommodations is extra time on tests. Time limits on tests should not exist. Most tests are designed in a way that the average student will have plenty of time leftover, and anyone who needs more time should be allowed that time.
If disability accommodations help you, you should have them. Full stop. If you don’t need them, you won’t find them helpful in the first place. Extra time on tests isn’t helpful to someone who completes them on time.
I've been in so many places over my educational years where all they could bloody give me was extra time on tests and assessments, which never fucking helped, because I'm shit at a lot of things but I am a good test taker. What I found the most helpful was when I could have a quick test during standard school hours instead of a stupid take home project that ate through days worth of my limited decompression time, and cost me spoons I simply didn't have after spending every last one on getting through the school day and the bus ride! But if I said I didn't need extra time on tests, I also didn't get whatever pitiful other scraps of help they could offer.
Same. If anything, I hyperfocus like a machine and get my tests done in one third of the time. I thrive when there's pressure.
But I would have become a biologist had I been given accomodation on learning things by heart, like hundreds of species names. It's the sort of information that just runs through me as my brain won't hold on to it for more than an hour. I've deviced all sorts of coping mechanisms for this like rehearsing key points of a test just minutes before so I can enter some of these factoids into my answers that otherwise clearly show I've understood and can apply the information very well, I just struggle with the jargon, terms, dates etc.
Also I do need more time in preparing for tests, I need to fully understand a thing before I can give answers on it. I can't just read stuff and parrot it in a test, because it won't be there in my head without an understanding of the whole. This is why I get called a perfectionist, but getting there is actually pretty taxing every time. I can't just wing it.
"Wait, it's all eugenics?"
slaps hood of the Atlantic
"This neoliberal mouthpiece can fit soooo many 
in it!"
I remember finally deciding to ask for accommodations for my ADHD during my senior year of Engineering undergrad, in 1 course. Very first exam I was sat alone in a small room, with the professor waiting outside. I overheard a professor walk by and ask mine, ‘proctoring an exam?’.
My professor says, ‘yeah, it’s for reasonable accommodations. I just don’t get why we have these students, if they can’t do it in the normal amount allotted to them, they can’t do it.’
All I could do was smile. I’d made it through school without asking for accommodations and the one time I did it some guy wants to jump up and wax poetic about darwinism or some shit. These people are just losers, they always need something to corroborate their world view and they will always find something.
I hope that professor never stops hearing people working in the field he teaches speaking just within earshot about him, saying "those who can, do, those who can't, teach"
It's not true but it would make him feel bad and that's good enough
Liberals when Nazi eugenics: how could this horrible tragedy have happened? Why did normal people go along with this? We may never know...
Liberals when capitalist ~~eugenics~~ ahem sorry, meritocracy: so true!! 
After miserably “bootstrapping” my undiagnosed ass through engineering school, getting requisite experience and passing the 8 hr exam to become a licensed professional engineer, and about a decade of experience- all while heeding the advice of “JUST TRY HARDER TO FOCUS” - I finally got an adhd diagnosis.
I tried getting a reasonable accommodation for remote work (something I’d done for years prior - let alone during “lockdowns”) and was told (by hr) that not being in the office means I’m incapable of doing my job. So I settled for wfh two days a week, and as everyone else is in the office full time now, I now stick out like a sore thumb, and have been passed up for promotions despite glowing reviews because “there’s more to work than just completing projects.”
Not sure what it takes for people to feel a shred of empathy, but I hope it happens to them some day.
Remove time limits on tests entirely.
Never have I ever felt like if I had more time on a test I could have gotten a different result, because every test I've ever done in my life I completed the entire paper inside the time limit. The time limit never prevented me from answering anything, so it may as well not exist. I would have answered everything just the same, giving me more time wouldn't change any of my answers at all. At best it might make me correct a small error, oversight, or in the case of English tests a spelling/grammatical error, maybe. But if everyone gets time to make these corrections, nobody is advantaged or disadvantaged.
The time limits are arbitrary unnecessary nonsense and removing them would remove the ability to attack people over them.
I was never able to complete most exams at university in time because I was too elaborate with my answers. Time limits are obviously necessary because you need to collect it at some point and can't keep supervisors there forever, but I don't see the point in making them so restrictive that some people can't answer all questions in time.
That's really only a problem for tests that are less about right/wrong answers and instead have some sort of art to them, like English, Literature, etc. For sciences, maths, and all the things where there's an objectively right answer you're either doing it right or you're not. None of those need time limits. People either know the answers and the method to get to them, or they don't.
STEM exams can have partial grades based on the completeness of your answer. They were rarely simple right/wrong multiple choice tests. And it was those where I ran out of time, and I hated the fact that I didn't even get to answer some questions because of this fact.
Edit: And some exams deliberately had more tasks in them than what could reasonably be answered in time, so you had to optimize by seeking out the high scoring questions first.
The more I think about it, the more I realize just how much of my higher education was only about gaming the system and not actually learning anything.
Testing should be standardized and done in a testing center on campus, not proctored by each professor. It has numerous benefits:
For all the money my university spent on Vice Chancellors for Supporting Israel and whatever, setting up a centralized testing center would have actually improved everyone's lives and the quality of education.
My high school was based around this idea of student independence and was set up a lot more like a post-secondary institution than many high schools (probably better "college prep" than a lot of hyper restrictive cram institutions that advertise themselves as such), and we had a testing center! Things were all set up for "go at your own pace", so they couldn't be having subject teachers proctoring exams whenever one kid got to that point in the course, so instead they had a centralized testing center where you could book an appointment ahead, or walk in anytime prior to the final hour of the day. It was great. Tests were held in one specific place, which was really helpful for getting into the right mindset to take a test.
exactly one time i would've benefitted from more time on a test, and it was a test question on a unit we didn't get to in class, but i might have been able to work it out from first principles if i had all day instead of a couple hours (and assuming i cared enough to try, which i recall not being the case at the time).
I nearly failed my session because i could no longer afford medecine. I can't use my insurance since my parents are gonna find out, and they "don't believe in that stuff", so they'll throw it out.
Watching everything crash when you know it's preventable is the worst feeling I've ever gotten
I really don't want to hear anything about it until academic performance is decoupled from economic opportunity. Because until then pretty much anything short of bribery is fair game IMO when it means actually having a career... and this is coming from someone who never cheated in school
There's a kernel of truth in here, which is that there's an increasing number of (mostly white, mostly rich) kids getting "diagnosed" as "disabled" because their parents are willing and able to pay to shop around for an expensive doctor to say that they have ADHD and thus need double-time on all assessments. This is at least sometimes pretty transparently just a way for some wealthy families to buy their way into unfair advantages for their kids so they can "beat" their peers.
The right response to this is not to make it harder to get a disability diagnosis, though. Instead, we should be trying to design classes and assessments that don't require these kinds of accommodations in the first place because they're built from the ground up with accessibility and equity in mind. That would require us to actually structurally rethink education, though, which we are pretty unwilling to do.
Hot take: If double time on assessments is even slightly helpful for you, you should have it. Most people don’t find it helpful, because most people finish exams with time left over. There is no faking the need for more time.
I'm just really not a fan of timed assessments in general. I don't think putting most people in a position where they're forced to fight the clock to come up with answers yields a good measure of their understanding or ability of most things. I've always been much more inclined to give things as take-home assignments (essays, exams, etc.) with a few days to ruminate on things. Unfortunately, the emergence of LLMs has made this a challenge as well.
I agree that anyone who needs added time on an assessment should have it. However, if your assessment is designed such that almost everyone needs more time, you have a bad assessment. There's a lot of that out there, though, which then both penalizes people who didn't jump through the hoops to get extra time and unfairly advantages folks who don't generally need added time but got it anyway to have a cushion. I have seen many, many students who absolutely will take every second they're allotted on an in-class assessment even though they definitely don't need it (this is true even for lots of students who don't have accommodations).
have seen many, many students who absolutely will take every second they're allotted on an in-class assessment even though they definitely don't need it (this is true even for lots of students who don't have accommodations).
when we had our little "test-taking strategy" lessons one of the things they told us is that second-guessing yourself is usually wrong if you're not confident, so I always just blasted through that shit (unless it was computational and we had to work out actual math) and never understood what other people were doing with their time. especially the other former gifted children who had better handwriting and could mechanically fill in the circles faster.
Being uncharitable to myself, this basically describes me. Back in the day my parents paid a few thousand bucks to send me to a neuropsych in my final year of college because I was struggling hard. I was gunning for that adderall scrip - had copped a couple from friends and they made me seem like the superhuman scholar of my dreams (the first hit is quite something!). Then the neuropsych came back with a report that was like "surprise actually you are autist" and I was like wtf. These days of course I could have had a 20 minute zoom call with a pill mill and got my amphetamines. I didn't get my drugs but it did give me extensions on some assignments, even extending a couple months past the end of the formal school year. Sometimes I still have nightmares that there are assignments I have yet to complete before they'll give me my degree. Anyway without that advantage I definitely would have just failed out.
NT: “but i dont experience any issues like they’re talking about. must be made up :)”
what do these people think it means to be neurodivergent? ☠️
This is why I say it's NT people that lack empathy. If you can't conceive of others having different problems than you experience, how can you claim to be empathetic?
NTs are so self-centered that they think we voluntarily put ourselves through a lifetime of hell and suffering just to con them or some shit.
Imagine seeing an amputee and saying they must have cut their own limbs off for free parking. That’s what legions of NTs do day in and day out.
It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions,
Sounds like an a problem of wealth inequality which should be addressed
And I don't know, unless the test is time sensitive somehow I don't think it matters much to give people more time if they want it. I don't think most kids are taking bomb defusing classes.
I think making accommodations universal would avoid the income inequality problem, too.
Is this not the exact same playbook used by them with pretendian/affirmative action stuff too? Seems like the common issue is rich assholes and the market interfering with an education system/market.
If you have a competitive system that determines a significant portion of your life, people will find every advantage they can. Currently, getting into T20s and performing well in them is a large predictor of future success; this means every advantage students and families can find, they will take. This article doesn't touch on law school, where accommodations gaining is likely more prevalent (I've seen anecdotes supporting this but not full research) because a fixed portion of the class gets As and you need to outperform peers as opposed to just do well. The easiest way to fix this and make education more meritocratic is to standardize college admissions into a single test (such as the way China, Japan, Ireland or Türkiye handles things), because wealth is less effective at gaming test scores as opposed to the rest of an application (see the MIT SAT decision). You'll still see people finding advantages once in schools, but it'd be less prevalent than today.
It's interesting how the bourgeoisie seems to always get the memo on how to frame a thing pretty much exactly at the same time. There was one of these "it's not ADHD, I just have bad personal habits" articles just a few days back in Finnish national news.
Discourses be discoursing for the ruling class.
I have ADHD and bad habits 
We had this in Denmark as well. Recently our prime minister stated in an interview that she would like to have "fewer children with [neoro-developmental] diagnoses". For a few months her minister of education has been doing the rounds talking about how a lot of behavioural issues in public schools are actually just because of bad parenting, labelling the children with the slur "PDO", the initials of "piss-poorly raised" used as a mockery of neoro-developmental conditions like ADHD or ASD.
By the way, that minister used to be a communist in his youth but now he is a social democrat and a massive asshole.
Social fascists fascisting as always.
The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.
This is the theme for most of the article, disability diagnosis as tool for the elite kids to jockey ahead of the other elite kids. The problem here is that is the opposite of what the headline and subheadline are implying; “Accommodation Nation”, this is a whole country issue, not one of just the Ivy Plus, “America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem”, colleges writ large experience this. They’re casting doubt on the validity of all neurodivergent claims up top and then only let on a few paragraphs down that it’s a much narrower issue.
“If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”
I don’t buy this argument because real world problem solving doesn’t look like a college test. College test, 90 minutes, no talking to your neighbors about the problem. Real world, at worst you’re talking end of day deadlines, usually days or weeks, and active collaboration with colleagues is encouraged.
More generally, I’d just like to point out the double speak of TPTB loving neurodivergence when it means hyper fixating on debugging code for 10 hours straight, but when it comes to needing the slightest variation in academic environment suddenly they’ve got a problem with it.
There's a reason I never got into programming, despite my dad's best efforts to get kid me into it. I'd either utterly hate it, or hyperfixate for days straight at a time. I also really hated the stereotype of the ND tech savant then and still kinda dislike it now. The idea that I didn't just have to try this thing, I had to be good at it to be useful despite my issues.
I'd either utterly hate it, or hyperfixate for days straight at a time.
I do both.
I've heard a lot of programmers say stuff to that effect.
The premise of the article seems more or less correct. Students can pay to get diagnosed with learning disabilities^[not in a Dr. Spaceman diagnosis-mill type of way, but moreso it just takes money to get diagnosed and a massive chunk of the population meets criteria for diagnosis of various disorders.] and receive a competitive advantage as a result. This makes diagnosed learning disorders that warrant accomadtion overrepresented high-income populations (who are already overrepresented in higher education) and gives them an advantage, causing them to be overrepresented in higher education. The US gives massive advantages for accommodations (1.5 to 2x time as compared to GCSEs which offer 1.25x and the gaokao which offers no extra time for learning disabilities). There's a massive advantage here, so people use it and are rewarded.
Yes and the solution is to make testing more accessible and not even more policing of the legitimacy of ND diagnoses.
When I was in college I had to fight tooth and nail for the barest of accommodations and I was still struggling. The reactions from the profs when I sent them the accommodation file typically ranged from annoyance to condescending suspicion. My grades still generally lagged behind NT students.
The professor quoted in the article pretty obviously doesn’t give a shit about the accessibility of testing and just want to tell their ND students to go fuck themselves.
Good on America for doing more to help the ND compared to others.
The solution to that is just allowing these accommodations for anyone regardless of diagnosis, on a “If it helps you it’s for you” basis.
There’s no difference between 1.25x time and 2x time on exams for most people, because most exams are designed so most people finish with time left over.
We really need to normalize disabilities as a fact of life more and have more accessibility tools be "if it helps you it's for you". I feel weird using "accessible" stuff that's a Big Deal to use, even stuff that looking at its technical design is better for everyone including perfectly abled folks. If I have to look like a jerk or disclose my neurodivergence for an accessibility tool, I'm not going to try it. If it's just available for anyone to use, and I'm not depriving someone with a physical disability of access to it, I'll try anything that looks useful.
The Atlantic, home of "child-killing can be legal"
I think very bad things should happen to every Atlantic writer
I see a different issue. Rather than fixing systemic societal issues that cause and exacerbate issues, accommodate issues -- in school; after that, learn to be more exploitative than the system, enjoy a better life, assuming you can avoid mental illness that punish the self rather than others. And of course wealthier families find a way to exploit the system in their favor, but level the wealth playing field? Gfy.