Accommodation Nation- America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem.

[MichMan]

The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. 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. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that 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.

Recently, mental-health issues have joined ADHD as a primary driver of the accommodations boom. Over the past decade, the number of young people diagnosed with depression or anxiety has exploded. 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, making them the largest group of students his office serves. Many receive testing accommodations, extensions on take-home assignments, or permission to miss class. Students at Carnegie Mellon University whose severe anxiety makes concentration difficult might get extra time on tests or permission to record class sessions, Catherine Samuel, the school’s director of disability resources, told me. Students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning.

The types of accommodations vary widely. Some are uncontroversial, such as universities outfitting buildings with ramps and providing course materials in braille. These allow disabled students to access the same opportunities as their classmates. Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

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.

Professors told me that the most common—and most contentious—accommodation is the granting of extra time on exams. For students with learning disabilities, the extra time may be necessary to complete the test. But unlike a wheelchair ramp, this kind of accommodation can be exploited. Research confirms what intuition suggests: Extra time can confer an advantage to students who don’t have a disability.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/accommodation-nation/ar-AA1RyFHX

[3catwoman3]

1. I once read about a law student who needed want three times as long...

…as usual to complete assignments. I remember thinking law might not be the best career for her, seeing as lawyers charge by the minute (I know I’m exaggerating).

How many clients would want to pay triple for a lawyer to get something done?

[Ms. Toad]

3. Extra time on exams doesn't translate directly into extra time to do the work.

Exams are artificial settings to treat knowledge that are never encountered in real life. So needing double time in a setting in which you have to complete the task in as single sitting, without notes or reference tools, at a time not if your choosing, with 100 of your closest friends, in a one-time make it break exam is different from working in a law office with a full complement of legal resources, when you can get up and walk around, or shift your focus to a different task, talk to associates, work when your mind works best, etc.

At least tangentially related, I know a lot of really excellent lawyers who aren't licensed to practice law because the only way to obtain a license in most states is to pass a bar exam - a 2-day nightmare of an exam, which many holding a JD have to take more than once, and some never pass.

[MichMan]

5. I'm sure there are people skilled enough to fly airplanes, but lack FAA certification, or skilled unlicensed dentists

Last edited Tue Feb 10, 2026, 12:09 PM - Edit history (1)

I won't avail myself of their services.

As far as test taking goes, surely being given extra time is an advantage over not being given it. At least someone taking an exam isn't consulting AI to supply the answers for them. No one is arguing that someone with a learning disability doesn't deserve some accommodations, but given the explosion in numbers, there are also well founded beliefs that some are gaming the system.

FYI, my Engineering college had open book exams

[Ms. Toad]

7. I have no knowledge of how well the credentialing process works for flying or dentistry

I do have direct knowledge as to the legal field. The credentialing test bears virtually no resemblance to the practice of law.

Law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and 80% of the licensing exam in virtually every state is based on made-up law, which is invalid in every single state, and invalid under federal law. You have to memorize completely irrelevant law and apply it to pass the exam. Of that 80%, 50% is multiple choice. There is never a circumstance in which you practice law by multiple choice, applying memorized nonsense law.

20% of the exam is based on law you are given during the exam. It is also made-up law, but if you go to a new jurisdiction to practice law (or the law changes), you do have to be able to interpret the new law in the same way you are required to on the exam. It would literally be malpractice, however, to do so in 90 minutes, without being able to associate in someone familiar with the law, and without being able to review additional case law.

I guided approximately 1800 individuals who graduated after completing 3 years of study in the law through the bar exam. As did everyone I know with similar job responsibilities, I taught them how to beat the exam - how to reverse engineer the law from the fact patterns, how to "analyze" a fact pattern by copying the law and inserting facts in place of legal terms, how to eliminate trick answers in the multiple choice, etc. The ones who were most successful were skilled test takers - and those who could write confidently even though they knew very little. A number of students are the top of each class failed each year because they couldn't force their brains to dumb the law down enough to pass.

Dentistry and piloting credentialing may be better matched to the profession - as I said - I have no experience in licensing those professions. But I am confident I could teach any reasonably intelligent motivated person to pass the bar, without ever taking a single law school class.

And if you don't want a lawyer who hasn't passed the bar exam, make sure you don't hire an attorney who graduated from a Wisconsin law school . . . They are automatically licensed in Wisconsin, and after practicing for a few years can transfer their license to most states.

[MichMan]

11. Why require a law degree at all?

If college exams and passing the bar don't matter, why not just let anyone set up practice as a lawyer? They can use Chat GPT

[Ms. Toad]

14. I said nothing about college exams not mattering.

What I said is that the bar exam is not an indication of competency in the law.

While I'm not overly thrilled with the emphasis on traditional, one exam per course decides your fate tradition, that is changing, especially after the first year. The current law school evaluation of competency is based on performance of tasks much more closely related to the practice of law than the bar exam is. Evaluations are made by dozens of individuals who each have an opportunity to interact with you in the classroom for months each semester and who are better able to assess whether you actually know the law and legal analysis - or are just confidently spouting BS that sounds good.

I regularly reviewed essays written on the bar exam - BS essays, written with confidence - even when completely wrong from a legal perspective - tend to earn higher scores than those more legally accurate, but written less confidently.

Which brings me to ChatGPT (and the claims that it passed the bar exam). ChatGPT is the confident but stupid student taken to the extreme. It spouts legal gibberish with absolute confidence - which tends to score well on the bar exam. For a while, Ohio had essays that did actually test Ohio law. I tested ChatGPT on some of those essays. It applied the nonsense law used in the current exam (near opposite to Ohio law). I reminded it that Ohio law was different It apologized and spouted the same nonsense. I corrected it, and gave it the specific law. It apologized again, and it still ignored the law. It was only when I expressly connected it's application of the law to the elements it was messing up that it finally got it right.

But - it's first answer would have passed, and was -in fact- similar to the published (legally incorrect) answer that year. (Each year they publish a single essay that earned a high score). So no, ChatGPT isn't a substitute for a law license, and in fact supports my position that the credentialing exam has little to do with whether a person with a JD is actually competent to practice the law.

[MichMan]

15. "Exams are artificial settings to treat knowledge that are never encountered in real life."

Sorry, I must have misunderstood what you were saying

[Scrivener7]

2. Oh noes!!! Extra time???? Those commies!

[MichMan]

6. "As more elite students get accommodations, the system worsens the problem it was designed to solve."

Collar, the University of Chicago physics professor, said that part of what his exams are designed to assess is the ability to solve problems in a certain amount of time. But now many of his 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,” he told me. “We have a two-speed student population.”

The surge itself is undeniable. Soon, some schools may have more students receiving accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “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 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” 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.

As more elite students get accommodations, the system worsens the problem it was designed to solve. The ADA was supposed to make college more equitable. Instead, accommodations have become another way for the most privileged students to press their advantage.

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

No one is more skeptical of the accommodations system than the academics who study it. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, pointed me to a Department of Education study that found that middle and high schoolers with disabilities tend to have below-average reading and math skills. These students are half as likely to enroll in a four-year institution as students without disabilities and twice as likely to attend a two-year or community college. If the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so called Ivy Plus schools.

In fact, the opposite appears to be true. 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. He and his co-authors found that students with learning disabilities who request accommodations at community colleges “tend to have histories of academic problems beginning in childhood” and evidence of ongoing impairment. At four-year institutions, by contrast, about half of these students “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”

No one can say precisely how many students should qualify for accommodations. The higher prevalence at more selective institutions could reflect the fact that wealthy families and well-resourced schools are better positioned to get students with disabilities the help they need. Even with the lowered bar for a diagnosis, obtaining one can cost thousands of dollars. And as more students with disabilities get help in middle and high school, that could at least partially explain their enrollment at top colleges.

Still, some students are clearly taking advantage of an easily gamed system. The Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal showed that there are wealthy parents who are willing to pay unscrupulous doctors to provide disability diagnoses to their nondisabled children, securing them extra time on standardized tests. Studies have found that a significant share of students exaggerate symptoms or don’t put in enough effort to get valid results on diagnostic tests. When Weis and his colleagues looked at how students receiving accommodations for learning disabilities at a selective liberal-arts school performed on reading, math, and IQ tests, most had above-average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

8. Why not eliminate the "advantage" and give everyone more time?

[MichMan]

9. I suspect, regardless of how much time was allowed, there are those that would still say they need more time.

Maybe the amount of time given now is already sufficient?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

10. Why not try it?

[MichMan]

12. How much time?

2 hours? 4 hours? 8? 12?

I'm sure the professor or exam proctors have nothing better to do but sit there waiting until everyone decides to leave.

[Initech]

13. So many of our problems are the direct result of the republican party's meddling.