in my experience (decades ago) an additional 15 min on a 3-hour exam could make a huge difference if it means I could carefully review my answers one more time.
Personally, I don’t understand why exams are timed at all. What exactly is that testing, that you can answer a question quickly? When in life, short of having a gun to your head, would it make a difference if it takes you 15 minutes to answer a complex math question instead of 10 minutes?
In university I really struggled with written essay questions (think American History 101). I knew the stuff forward and backward but just could not write fast enough. It would become completely illegible and my hand would keep cramping. I could have used a bit of accommodation but that stuff didn’t exist in the early 90s….
I’m in HR, and we don’t expect an applicant to disclose anything like that. While we do ask all applicants if they can perform the essential functions of the job with a reasonable accommodation, the actual accommodation process wouldn’t start until after we hire the candidate. I wouldn’t advise any candidate to disclose their disability as part of the interview process unless there’s a compelling reason to do so.
I’m surprised the percentage is so high, but I’m not shocked. When I was 18, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word neurodivergent, but a lot of younger people these days identify as neurodivergent.
I am certainly not an expert in this, so I appreciate your expertise and experience.
Assume a job has any specific requirements. Say it is fast-paced in a loud, crowded restaurant. Or it requires the rapid turn-around of a certain number of phone/on-line inquiries. Or it requires 50 TPS reports per day. Or any other specific element of the job. Are you saying that you would not ask an applicant if they were able to tolerate such factors without accommodation? Or do you simply assume that the applicant and you will have the same interpretation of what is a “reasonable” accommodation?
In terms of the school/extra time accommodation, if your workplace requires 50 TPS reports per day, I think it would be preferable to ask an applicant up front if they could do that, instead of hiring them, and having them then say, “Oh, I can only give you 20 becauseof … reasons.”
Of course, I assume you could fire them if they failed to meet expectations. And then handle the EEOC/ADA complaints…
If you are able to offer any general info, do you often encounter employees requesting accommodations? If so, what sort? Any requests that you consider NOT reasonable?
As this is a different topic, I’m going to be brief so as to not incur the wrath of the OP. We already ask applicants if they can perform the essential functions of the job with a reasonable accommodation when they apply for the position. During an interview, we will typically describe the work environment and ask if that’s something they’re okay with, but I’ve never had a candidate respond in the negative.
We hire people with no disabilities who end up unable to handle the workload. Not often, but it does happen. Such a question isn’t going to be useful during an interview and might possibly get us in trouble with the EEOC.
I’m sorry, but this is really offensive. Do you believe being any of those things is mutually exclusive with disability?
I did have accommodations in college that enabled me to keep my full-ride scholarship at a 25% reduced course load. I worked my ass off and I slayed my classes. I then went on to get a Masters degree, without accomodations.
The issue of whether too many students are getting accommodations they don’t need is a better worthy of discussion, but let’s not frame it as a matter of “smart” vs “disabled,” thanks.
Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do.
Which is it? If you’ve applied for a job lately that’s with the federal government or has contracts with them, you may have filled out some variation of this form. The list of disabilities covers most people. That’s a far cry from the students who contact the disability office, bring the form to the professor to fill out, and get them.
The accommodations part sounds like the school has a culture of it being normalized, and if it becomes to be seen as an advantage with little consequence, it’s easy to see it as being something that puts you at a disadvantage not to engage in. It seems similar to what people who have grown up in endemic corruption societies have explained to me, it’s easy to get use to the normalcy and you aren’t really yourself trying to do anything wrong, so it’s easy to rationalize.
I haven’t taught at the college level in awhile, every semester I’d have 1 or 2 who requested accommodations, and I was happy to help them. 95% of the time these just an extra 30 minutes or so on a test so I just stayed with them, a few I had to send the exams to the student disability center where they proctored them.
The idea that college exam performance somehow translates to “human” performance strikes me as ludicrous.
Full disclosure, I graduated for a fairly rigorous/demanding military school with all manner of stressors built in above and beyond what you would ordinarily experience in college. At best, those stressors induced in me a higher tolerance for useless bullshit that no one should have to tolerate. I would even go so far as to say it weakened me by making me less empathetic and thus less capable of adapting to real life social stresses.
I then spent 14 years in the Navy, which culminated in my medical retirement for PTSD. You know what causes PTSD? [Traumatic] Stressors. Again, didn’t make me stronger, made me weaker.
Somehow, after leaving the Navy, I took the LSAT, and later the bar exam, without accommodation. Mostly because it was too damn hard to get accommodations for those exams and, ironically, my PTSD made it difficult for me to jump through the necessary hoops. Funny how that works. That said, I absolutely did take advantage of accommodations in law school. But you know what? My *best grades were in the 5 semesters of clinic work I had, and those were all with real clients, no tests, and therefore no accommodations. I also believe it is that work, and not my performance on written exams administered under arbitrary time constraints, that have made me the attorney I am today. Because the best preparation for working with clients… is working with clients. Not the LSAT, not law school exams, and certainly not the bar exam (the punch line is that the type of immigration work I practice wasn’t even on the bar exam). Studying for tests, though, didn’t make me a better lawyer: it just made me good at taking tests.
I daresay the same is true of much of the college curriculum: it doesn’t make you any better at socializing or performing in the work place. It only makes you good at taking tests. Under conditions that in no way correlate to the actual workplace. It’s elitist, and I had to go back to school in my 30s to accept that. 20-year-old ASL, often insufferable on the old Snopes message board of 20 years ago, no doubt had the opposite opinion—probably because he’d never done anything outside of go to school, and when that’s the one thing you have ever done in your life and you’ve done well at it, it’s no surprise you’d want to insist that it is somehow a mark of superiority to do well under such arbitrary conditions.
*ETA: Actually, as I think it over, my two absolute best classes (top grade in the class) were classes in which I either elected or was required to submit an essay in lieu of a traditional final exam. Again, no accommodation for that. Just did the research and took the time I needed to complete it by the end of the semester. Same as everyone else.
A lot of therapy. Mostly CBT and ACT. I did struggle with PTSD a great deal in graduate school because my classes contained a lot of triggering content (child abuse, severe mental illness, etc.) It didn’t help that I had requested not to be assigned with perpetrators of abuse (standard question they ask for internship placement) and they put me in a partial hospital setting as a therapist for severely mentally ill adults who had been court mandated to be there due to abuse or neglect of their children. When I went to my academic advisor though, and said, “Hey, I kinda said I didn’t want this,” they pulled me out immediately.
By then I was struggling so much I decided to do prolonged exposure therapy for my PTSD. I did it while in graduate school. That’s two hours a day of intentionally driving yourself to the highest possible level of distress for about three solid months. On top of a full course load and 24 hours a week of internship.
It worked, though! I had some symptoms then that I haven’t seen in fifteen years.
And this was easier than undergrad. It took a lot of effort for me to get this particular education. I value it very much.
Most of the elementary schools stopped teaching cursive handwriting maybe thirty years ago. And now, all of a sudden, because of AI facilitated cheating, filling a blue book with legible prose seems an essential skill. Of course, some people are better at printing, even if they spent half of third grade learning cursive, but I feel being able to do either helps a lot.
As for your wife, she possibly needs a lower class load. You read claims that AI is going to take away everyone’s jobs, but right now it means we need more teachers.
As for how to work this in with helping the disabled, I doubt the educational benefit where tests are tightly timed, and have no problem with allowing more time.
I once had a philosophy professor whose tests were all one-on-one in person verbal. Of course it was a small seminar. While writing should be taught in college, I thought it was just right for that class and should be used more. Would anyone today ask for a disability accomodation for that?
Lastly, 38 percent disabled means lots and lots of administrative employees to administer that. And since even Stanford has some budget limit, it means fewer profs and bigger classes. And I’d think those with learning disabilities might benefit from smaller classes. This doesn’t argue against some accommodations, but 38 percent sounds like something is wrong.
When I discovered grant writing in grad school, I thought, “Holy shit, I’ve already been doing this for years.” Your RFP is like a syllabus, with clearly laid out expectations. You read each question carefully and answer as completely and concisely as possible in nice academic language. You follow instructions precisely. And if you get the grant, it’s like getting an A+!
That part of the job is the easiest part. The hardest part is when you’re in a group project from hell and can rely on nobody but yourself to get it done. Or operating under a massive deficit due to enormous government cuts and trying to figure out how to generate more revenue when every other org is just as desperate. They didn’t address that in my internship.
It’s not just psychological disabilities. One of our summer reading books this past year was about a high school student in a wheelchair, and all of the difficulties she has from accommodations that are supposed to be in place, but really aren’t. She eventually has to give up on her dream school, because one of the major routes through campus is a gravel path, inaccessible to a wheelchair, which they’re not willing to pave because tradition, and the school’s official accessibility coordinator can only ever remember one student in a wheelchair ever attending there (for one semester). Meanwhile Stanford was the one school she found which actually does take accessibility seriously, with enough other students in wheelchairs (who are thriving there) that they’re able to assign her another student in a chair to be her host on her shadowing visit day.
Thinking about what disability is going to hurt you the most, in getting maximum benefit from Stanford, among those able to be admitted, I wonder if it is social anxiety. In general, it is super-common. Specifically, I’m thinking of anxiety over going to professor’s office hours. What do I say to her? This is especially acute if you went to an average high school and thus didn’t grow up with the kind of people who are on the Stanford faculty.
I know they tell students at orientation to go to office hours, but that’s for everyone.
Is social anxiety considered a disability that they accommodate?
Another social anxiety issue may be that it is even worse at state schools with middling graduation rates. Inability to smooze the faculty, due to social anxiety, must be a big factor in dropping out.
I don’t remember the name of the school she didn’t go to, but I think it was fictitious, because the author apparently felt more comfortable mentioning a school as doing a good job than one that wasn’t. I do remember that it was in New York City (which is also a city that’s not very accommodating to wheelchairs).
There are accommodations and accommodations. I took a lot of high-stress timed actuarial exams. I took one of them when i was seven months pregnant. I requested (and was granted) the accommodation of sitting near the door and being allowed as many restroom breaks as i needed. I didn’t request extra time. I probably could have, but i was always fast at taking exams, and didn’t expect to spend all that long in the restroom. But i did get up to pee a few times in the 4 hours, when the norm is zero or one time.
You know what, that disability never affected my ability to do my job. (And i did work through two pregnancies. At work, i asked for the accommodation of being allowed to put my feet up in my desk. No one counted my bathroom breaks, so i didn’t have to ask for that.)
But I’m sure i was included in the count of “disability accommodations” for that exam.