Dubious disabilities: 'It's rich kids getting extra time on tests'

Thirty-eight percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as disabled, writes Rose Horowitch in Accommodation Nation in The Atlantic. In the last 15 years, "the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations —often, extra time on tests — has grown at a breathtaking pace."

Few are students who need wheelchair ramps or sign-language interpreters, she writes. "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."

The more elite the college the more likely students are to declare themselves disabled, and request more time on tests, distraction-free testing rooms, deadline-free assignments and housing accommodations.

High achievers with affluent parents, who can afford the cost of testing, are more likely than lower-income students to receive a late diagnosis -- before taking the SAT or ACT.

“It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests," a professor told her.

Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who co-chaired the university’s disability task force, told Horowitch he's talked with university administrators about the surge. "At what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent?”

In 2008, Congress amended the Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, to broaden the definition of disability and include people with minor impairments, she writes. Universities began offering ADA accommodations for problems such as ADHD that “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.

In recent years, depression and anxiety diagnoses have skyrocketed, Horowitch writes. At Ohio State University, where 36 percent of students with disabilities have mental-health issues, ADA-protected students can receive more time on tests, extensions on take-home assignments, or permission to miss class. At Carnegie Mellon, "students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning."

Of course, there's no bright "line between having a learning or psychological disability and struggling with challenging coursework," she writes. Professors worry that accommodations are deceiving students about what the world will demand. Being able to focus is important. So is meeting deadlines.

Part of what his exams are designed to assess is the ability to solve problems in a certain amount of time, Juan Collar, a University of Chicago physics professors told the reporter. But some students are in a separate room with time and a half or even double the allotted time to complete the test.

“I feel for the students who are not taking advantage of this,” Collar said. “We have a two-speed student population.”

“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, said.

At community colleges, only 3 to 4 percent of students have disabilities, and the rate has been stable for the last 15 years, said Robert Weis, a Denison psychology professor. Most have struggled in school since early childhood, and test below average in reading and math.

By contrast, he said, about half of students with disabilities at four-year colleges “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”

A disability diagnosis has no stigma. While some students may be gaming the system, others have convinced themselves they have a "neurodevelopmental disorder" that explains their challenges, says Will Lindstrom, director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity.”