Good rant (actually, it was much better than that, it was informative and well-written) and all I can say is I’m sorry you had to go through all that. I totally agree that it sucks.
They were all true but by co-workers of friends. The woman with anxiety issues was told that she needed to be on-time. She did but found a new job a couple of weeks later. The guy with ADD was allowed to Zoom in because HR didn’t want to deal with it (according to my friend the path of least resistance is HR’s MO). HR is currently building a paper trail on the the guy with PTSD.
I still think the framing of your OP was problematic, and I think @Dr.Drake’s evaluation of all four scenarios in post #130 was pretty spot on. I might also suggest that perhaps your friends had their own biases that may have served to filter or taint how they relayed their stories to you (such as with your friend offering their own marginally or not at all informed opinion of why HR was allowing a particular accommodation). I have found that relaying others’ stories of interactions with members of marginalized groups, often the subject of certain stereotypes, can be perilous for that reason.
Because, again, the one example that you personally witnessed and relayed to us, it turns out, resulted in neither special treatment nor accommodation, and if anything, going off my personal experience, would seem to stand as much for the proposition that people who need accommodations often don’t get them (for whatever reason, be it administrative hurdles, the nature of their condition, or both), and that accommodations pose a particular challenge in academia where particular forms of examination and associated constraints are as much or more a matter of administrative convenience as actually evaluating the students’ preparedness to enter the workplace.
The college I taught at was great with this. All I had to do is send an online form to our Accommodation Specialist and lo and behold, the student got effective help. Sometimes the student would come to me with a note detailing the accommodations they’d need, but often I just noticed the student was doing much better. In most of those cases, they were meeting regularly with a school counselor or a professional.
I asked the Accommodation Specialist* what happened when they got a form from a teacher (which really just said “Hiram Jablonsky is having some trouble in my class, and I don’t know why”).
*Let’s call him Scott (Hi, Scott!).
Scott explained that he’d meet with the student, and he’d ask “Did you have a Plan in high school?” Then it would all pour out, how Miss Schlobotnik at Central High helped put together a series of accommodations and techniques for studying and coping in the classroom. And the student would often tell Scott what their diagnosis was (he was very approachable). He’d also direct them to which counselor would be the best fit, and discuss other options.
Earlier, you said the OP “posted this to shit on and mock these people”. Now you say it was merely “problematic”.
I like your newer evaluation more and I find it more persuasive without the name-calling.
Never mind
That’s understandable but this is the Pit, and while interesting and productive discussions do occur here, it’s also the place to vent. On other posters too. So the name-calling is par for the course.
If someone says something that triggers you, fire away here. It can even be healthy to do so.
Your post reminds me of a Malcom Gladwell podcast (Revisionist History) about taking the LSAT and how he and an intern of his faired on it, and about law schools and their rankings. Not about people with disabilities, but maybe similar in ways.
If the thread title had been, “I am Black so I can do anything I want.” would you still say that it doesn’t malign Black people at all?
If it had then been followed by fictional or vague third hand stories that play on Black stereotypes, that wouldn’t have been maligning at all?
And the reason that it is damaging is because people share stories like in the OP, leaving the implication that this is not a rare thing, but very common. It’s also damaging when you have an OP like this one, where further stories are asked to be shared to increase that perception.
I spent some time thinking about this and wondering if it’s a fair analogy, and actually I think it is - and my conclusion is you are right, on reflection it’s not the best way to frame the issue if the aim is to support disability rights. Better, I think, would have been something like “I pit people who act like assholes then falsely claim it’s because of a disability” [I acknowledge that the original intent of the OP was not to make a Pit thread]. Would you agree? And it follows from there that (in my view) “I pit people who act like assholes then falsely claim it’s due to race” would also be acceptable and (at least potentially) not racist. Similarly, the points in the OP itself could have been couched in terms that made it clearer that it was falsely claiming a disability (or ‘using’ a genuine disability as an excuse for just behaving poorly) that was the issue. I agree with you that it’s, thankfully, rare. But it does need to be called out when it happens.
Thank you for helping me to think in a different way about the issue.
For what its worth, entrances exams are supossed to predict academic success, not future job perfoemance. They aren’t as strongly correlated as grades, but there is a correlation.
99% of the problems with standardized tests could be fixed by making them untimed and adaptive for everyone. (Adaptive means that everyone takes a different test: if you do well on a set of items, you get a harder set. When you miss several in a set, you get easier questions. This makes it possible to make a test much shorter).
SAT is going digital and adaptive next year. I wish it would be untimed. The reality is, therr ARE parents who doctor shop to get their kids accomodations they use on the SAT, and kids who clearly need accomodationsbut who do not have them for a myriad of reasons. Just making it untimed for everyone seems like the best solution.
If only the world of work were also untimed.
In an era when most college educations are at least partly vocational, we do a disservice to people who expend the time and money to obtain a degree via accommodation in a field where the same accommodations are not really available in the working world.
This is what I believe happened with the person I hired.
He had a genuine disability. I have no idea how he was able to graduate from engineering school, but he did. I have another coworker who graduated from the same engineering school, and she said some of the students were approved for accommodations, including have a tutor “help” them take exams. 
So he graduates and gets a job in the real world, working in my group. He couldn’t comprehend written documentation. He didn’t understand Ohm’s law, despite having an EE degree. I assigned him a simple project that involved testing circuit breakers. I gave him lots of basic reading material on circuit breakers, e.g. online tutorials, Wiki articles. I quizzed him on circuit breakers a week later (“What do they do?” “How are they rated?”), and it was obvious he had absolutely no idea of how they worked: he said a circuit breaker gives a circuit “a rest,” and said AC breakers connect in parallel with the load while DC breakers are in series with the load. Had no idea what a circuit breaker’s current rating meant. I had to pull him off the project.
This went on for months, with various projects. I finally had to let him go. HR initially said I couldn’t get rid of him. I spent months trying to gather enough paperwork to fire him.
IMO his school did a grave disservice to him by “helping” him get an engineering degree, since I cannot imagine him functioning as an engineer. The school has set him up for one failure after another.
Not on the time span of most standardized tests. For example, on the no-calculator section of the PSAT you get 25 minutes to answer 17 math questions. Many students would do substantially better if they had 40 minutes instead, or even 5 extra minutes. I really don’t feel there is a vast difference in skill level between the kid who can perfectly answer those 17 problems in 25 minutes and the kid who could do the same if only he had 10 or 15 more minutes. It has no reflection on your ability to keep up with a workplace pace.
I’ve had this argument with my son’s teachers while he was USES (Undiagnosed Special Education Student). Are you testing his math knowledge or his math fluency? Because those are two very different things.
I agree- but extending the time is not the same as making the test untimed. And while I’m not sure that there is any kid who will do better answering those 17 math problems if only he could take two hours instead of 40 minutes, I’m pretty sure there are other standardized tests where that’s possible - I’m certain there are people who would do better on the essay portion of the GRE if there was no time limit at all.
The nice thing about adaptive tests is they really can’t go that long. It “finds your level” pretty quickly and once you start missing a ton, its over.
I’d be okay with a really long time limit, like 9 hours for a test that averages 3.
I agree. Also, that school did a disservice to their own reputation, since now you know that you can’t trust someone who has a degree from that school to have the knowledge that such a degree should certify.
Yes. And, more generally, it’s important to be clear on what a particular test is supposed to be assessing. If what you’re trying to assess is whether a student can do something (read, calculate, etc.) quickly, then of course a timed test is appropriate.
Then why have a time limit, instead of having the time as part of the score?