Nationally, the number of college students seeking accommodations — often, extra time on tests — has been rapidly increasing, and Stanford is one of the leaders, an article in Atlantic Magazine says.
This year, 38% of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a
disability; in the fall quarter, 24% of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.
Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, said, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60%? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?”
At Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled, Atlantic reports.
The increase can be traced back to 2008 when the government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered.
That same year, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services employees, issued guidance about how schools should treat students who say they’re disabled.
The guidance said schools should give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis.
Schools began relaxing their requirements. A 2013 analysis of disability offices at 200 postsecondary institutions found that most “required little” from a student besides a doctor’s note in order to grant accommodations for ADHD.
Accommodations can include more time on tests, use of technology not available to other students, or a place to take a test that is regarded as “distraction free.”
The Atlantic article quotes Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, who said so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.
At Carnegie Mellon, students with what’s called social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning.
The article points out that many students claim a disability to game the system, allowing them to get better grades.
Studies show a significant share of students exaggerate symptoms or don’t put in enough effort to get valid results on diagnostic tests, the article said.
Disability advocates told the Atlantic that fraud is rare.
But the granting of accommodations has changed campus life. “We have a two-speed student population,” said Collar, of the University of Chicago.
Good grief!
I went through college, grad school and Medical School with ADD. Was finally diagnosed in my 50’s. No one had any “accommodations”!
Most college students are abusing the definition of disability, just as most ADHD drug users in college are taking the drugs off label to study longer and do better on tests. Greater than half the law students at UC Berkeley are taking ADHD meds. All in the name of competition to get those Big Law Firms, where they continue taking drugs to work 70 hours/week. Wonder what will happen to these kids in their middle years?
I’d say you’re nuts not to claim you’re disabled.
I was disabled following two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. I didn’t want to be disabled, and I never got in to Stanford.