I thought that to get into Stanford you had to strongly score in one or more of the following characteristics; be very smart, or well-off, or child of an alumnus or excel in a desirable extracurricular pursuit (football, etc).
It turns out I was wrong: Stanford is for the disabled!
FWIW, The definition of “disabled” has greatly expanded in the past few decades.
The definition of “disabled that requires accommodation” such as a quiet room with extra test time has greatly expanded in the past few decades.
And parents (generally upper middle class and above) and figured out they can give little Suzy an edge with a sympathetic doctor.
Ancedote 1: My youngest was very much on the autism spectrum. At 18 didn’t understand money, couldn’t be trusted to cross the street safely, had at best a 3rd grade understanding of most subjects, was somewhat verbal, had an IEP, etc. One these boards there are plenty of threads for those very high functioning that are married, have kids, have professional jobs. Both of these folks are on the spectrum, but the “autism spectrum” is so broad as to being almost meaningless.
Ancedote 2: My nephew is a charter school principal in the Denver area. When tests are administered, the special “test room” for those with a 504 plan is generally filled with these two profiles:
Me, I’m from the suck it up buttercup, never let 'em see tears, would you like a backhand at the dinner table with your peas generation. However, I also am one of those middle-class parents that figured out I could hedge my bets and help my son get a potential advantage by having a 504 plan.
Am I the only one who finds it weird that there are no cites?
What do you mean? The OP included a link to an Atlantic article on the topic. Though it’s buried near the end of the article, it does indeed say:
A fairly icky way of putting it, IMHO. To take another example of disproportionate representation, George Washington University’s undergraduate population is 27% Jewish and Tulane University’s is 44%. But I would hard side-eye somebody who described GWU or Tulane as being “for the Jews”.
Yes, it’s well worth while inquiring into the causes and consequences of disproportionate representation of particular groups in student demographics. But maybe let’s not frame this inquiry in terms of overrepresented groups taking over institutions to be “for” themselves.
I meant in the article not the OP.
I think this a significant point from the article:
Complicating matters is the fact that the line between having a learning or psychological disability and struggling with challenging coursework is not always clearly defined. Having ADHD or anxiety, for example, might make it difficult to focus. But focusing is a skill that the educational system is designed to test.
I wonder what occurs when students with school accommodations graduate and enter the work force. Do job applicants inform prospective employers that they will need extra time or some other accommodation to perform their duties? Or will the ADA mandate appropriate accommodations?
Xocomil - I do not believe similar articles in the Atlantic and similar publications are generally heavily footnoted.
Upon reflection, I realized that employers can ask applicants if they would require accommodations to perform a job’s duties, and are required to provide those accommodations if reasonable. Apologies.
I thought the point of the article is that it’s not, y’know, real: “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” So if you’re, like, a B+ student, you get this extra-time accommodation and become an A- student on paper — but you’re still a B+ student who has no actual disability, and that’s good enough to hold down a job, and you beat out other B+ students to get the job thanks to your ill-gotten A- credentials, is all.
Not Stanford, but I’ve been doing exam invigilation for a universoty in the UK which has a high proportion of students registered disabled.
The accommodations for the most part are a quieter room which has just one or a handful of students in, or getting to type up an exam rather than handwrite it. Some students are also allowed to dictate their answers and have them written up by a designated writer, rather than having to physically be the one who writes or types. Most of them don’t even get extra time or it’s just a very short bit of extra time that is probably mainly psychological in benefit (say 15 minutes on a 3 hour exam), and if they do it’s sometimes not for what you’d expect, like a student with a bowel condition meaning they had to go to the bathroom every 15 minutes got a little extra time.
Initially I was pretty sceptical about all the extra accommodations, but it’s not like any of the accommdations I’ve seen actually improve a students’ knowledge or ability to reason or express themselves, which is what the exam is supposed to be testing. Except extra time, most of them wouldn’t even help a student who wasn’t disproportionately affected by exam stress or handwriting issues. Would I have wanted someone to dictate to? No. I would have liked to be able to type, because my handwriting is barely recognisable as writing, but that would have been an accommodation to the poor sod that had to read my stuff as much as to me.
It’s not like in a work situation you’re regularly stuck in a room full of others with a time limit to write stuff down with a pen, so a student’s ability to cope with that situation shouldn’t be limiting their grades.
My wife informed me that at the “quiet” test taking center at her school, there is often a line out the door. Similar to the article mentioning crowded “accommodated” settings. My wife gets around this by giving her students the option of taking tests on-line - in whatever setting they wish. 100% of her students take that option. The tests are timed. Many students have the “extra-time” accommodation. She gives them 2 hrs instead of the usual 1, but notes that they very rarely exceed 1 hour.
She teaches at a community college - DEFINITELY not Stanford. Over her 30 years of teaching, it has been a progressive exercise in increasingly dumbing down her tests and assignments, just to get a product that can be graded, as opposed to unintelligible, nonresponsive prose.
She observed that she wonders if school accommodations do students a disservice. Ought a student wish to see how they can handle stress in school, where only a grade is at stake, as opposed to in a job. (My poor paraphrasing of her comment.)
The educational system is falling apart (as part of the larger social and economic system that is undergoing upheaval as well). One of the reasons is that we have chosen a system in which a college degree is a credential required to access most career paths. So, we get language and marketing from colleges, businesses and the government that a degree is all about “career preparation”- which for most people is at best tangentially related to their undergraduate focus. College is a huge investment with a promise of a big payout at the end. And let’s be clear, the payout is a financial one, not an intellectual one. Is the degree about measuring knowledge in a particular field, or is the content just a historical artifact, or a vehicle that makes job skills training palatable to the student?
This varies depending on course of study, of course, but it’s all kind of a mess, with students who are simply trying to figure out how to move forward with their lives bearing the brunt of that mess.
I’ve quoted three folks in this thread who have said:
… this is probably not the thread to dive deep into any of those, but the fact that we can’t even all agree on what colleges are for, what a college degree means, or what grades tell us or don’t, means that problems in our universities (and public school systems) simply become Rorschach tests revealing our own personal biases and narrow understandings of school, the workplace and society.
I think they almost certainly do, in many cases. There is a concept of antifragility (which I understand is at least a little bit controversial when applied to people) which says that human development may be an anti-fragile system which actually requires stressful situations to reach maximum strength.
If you remove stressors during development you don’t actually make stronger humans, you make weaker ones.
Well, you sort of are, no? I’ve certainly been in large working-group situations where many, many people are literally watching me try to solve a problem in real-time to help move the conversation forward. Often these were at least somewhat difficult technical problems. It’s insanely stressful, and is often putting your professional reputation on the line.
Things like cross-examining a witness, or working in an ER, or making split-second financial decisions all require this same set of analysis/synthesis under time pressure skills. Those skills don’t just happen - they have to be developed and tested.
If you wanted to start another thread on this topic, I would happily participate.
None of those things are contra-indicative of having a learning disability, though.
Which of your suggestions for work situations require writing with a pen? I can’t see that any do.
It’s certainly never come up for me so far, the last time I had to write something using a pen which was longer than a quick note was my last in person exam.
This is fortunate, because I am not good at writing with a pen. I’m not that slow, by my hand typically cramps up by about half a page in, I skip words from sentences, squash letters and the end result resembles the death throes of of a spider falling into ink and flailing around on some paper.
Luckily, this is irrelevant to my ability to make fast decisions or to communicate verbally, so it’s had minimal impact other than in exams.
If you insist on making a student handwrite an exam when that is something that they find difficult, even though that is irrelevant to the skill the exam is intended to test, they will grade lower than their skills and understanding would otherwise warrant. Someone with great understanding and interpretation whose handwriting is slow and awkward may even grade lower than someone who hasn’t got as good a grasp of the materials but has good, fast handwriting.
Your current students take essay tests via pen? I know when I was in college/law school 40 years ago, I scribbled blue books with pen, but had assumed that was a thing of the past. (In fact, one semester I camped out in a friend’s apt to borrowed his PC to write my semester ending essay assignments. First tme I used a PC. God, I’m old!) Could imagine allowing students to wear noise-cancelling headphones if noise were an issue.
Yep, increasingly moving back to handwriting for a lot of exams. Most classes will largely be graded from assignments completed at home, but there’s typically an in-person component as well. Part of the reason for this is so they can spot if the competency level of the in-person and at-home parts are very different. Some students will put more effort into getting someone else to do their assignments that it would ever take to do it themselves…
They could do the in-person part on the computer, and it sometimes is, but the university would need to supply an appropriate computer per student for all the exams and just they don’t have enough. Most students use their own laptops in class and though there’s some loaner ones available, there’s not enough for everyone. They get broken a lot. I think there are 3 rooms with ~30 desktop computers each in for student use- mostly just for some specific classes, but they may have 200+ students taking various exams at the same time.
It’s not feasible to ensure that all the student’s own laptops have no internet access for the duration of the exam, and if they don’t do that, you have groups of students swapping anwers, AI answers, and general shenanigans all over the place.
The current compromise is to have most of the students hand-write the exams, and just those who have accommodation requirements specifying such are given computer access to locked-down desktop computers. There’s one PC in every room for lecturer use, so they can use them.
I’m just a PhD student invigilating, so I don’t get a full view of the decision making process for this, but I work with several of the lecturers.
It is hard enough for my wife to figure out the CONTENT of students’ typed submissions. Can’t imagine how impossible it would be if she had to decipher their chicken scratching as well.
In fact, here in the states, I would be surprised if half of the students could write/print well enough to complete a timed test.
I know nothing about what it would take to shutdown internet access for a test taking room. I’m completely ignorant about such things, but I could imagine having the test done on a platform that automatically shut down if any other program was running or if a student clicked to ANY other program. Fuck - as often as I UNINTENTIONALLY shutdown programs and lose material, that shouldn’t be impossible to engineer! 
Just tell the fuckers - “Close everything on your computer other than the test program. Your program will shut down completing your exam as soon as you click anywhere other than in the program.”