The Atlantic recently published an article about the increasing prevalence of students asking for disability accommodations like extra time on exams. While accommodations were historically supposed to help disabled students participate equitably in college, it says, wealthier students are now weaponizing disability to get ahead. What once was a tool of fairness has now warped into something that puts the entire system into question.
I am sympathetic to this. Disability is not a costume to be worn and taken off at will, and I am loathe to make another path for wealthy students to get ahead given increasing levels of wealth inequality in the US. Receiving accommodations is already a phenomenon steeped in privilege: students have to be officially diagnosed, know that accommodations exist, and know how to navigate that process. An official diagnosis can be difficult to acquire in a system where physicians are less likely to take women's pain seriously and medical racism pervades emergency care. Even someone like Serena Williams — a wealthy woman experienced with maintaining her health — is not immune to the long history of disparate medical treatment and the skepticism of doctors. Being taken seriously and receiving the correct paperwork can be itself a difficult task, to say nothing of knowing that all of these options are available to you. You can't ask for something that you don't know exists, and some may not even recognize that the "quirk" they've practiced controlling is, in fact, a learning disability. The stigma associated with being called "disabled" can also be an effective deterrent to accessing medical care, and it often carries with it tropes of being an inspiration for simply existing or the implication that being disabled is the same as being helpless. All this to say: yes, we should make accommodations accessible to those who really need it, particularly in a world filled with academic ableism that already makes it difficult for disabled students to thrive. Wealthy, able-bodied people need not apply.
Trying to root out malingerers, however, often makes it harder for "truly" disabled students to get help: many of them are reluctant to get help for fear of being called a faker, especially if they do not feel "disabled enough." Is an ambulatory wheelchair user "disabled enough" for the school to invest in a permanent ramp if they often climb stairs with a cane and only occasionally use their chair? How do you know whether or not a student is really in chronic pain or if they're simply cosplaying an invisible disability during an exam? Fairness is important, but so is the lived reality for disabled students who often find it difficult to ask for help in the first place. As with the disability advocates who were interviewed in the article, in practice, I would rather 10 "non-disabled" (however this is determined) students get accommodations than for 1 disabled student to be denied them. It's also useful to remember that the designation of disability is itself deeply political and personal: for some Deaf people, deafness is not a disability but a linguistic minority with a distinct cultural identity. Being an institutional body that can determine someone's disability status (along with the individual privilege of being able to disclose disability without fear of retribution or stigma) is itself an expression of political power.
Ultimately, policing disability to try and find the "fakers" is a form of means testing, where universities become the forced arbiters of who is or isn't deserving of accommodations. When are students disabled vs. disabled enough to require accommodations? This line will always be unclear, and it often depends on what the individual student wants or needs. Someone with a mood disorder may be sufficiently treated such that they don't need extra time, while others benefit from some additional help. Condemning the people who are faking disability — however warranted — often just makes it difficult for "actually" disabled people to be taken seriously, especially if they do not sufficiently "perform" their disability in public.
To me, the more pertinent question that this debate brings up is whether or not these accommodations are effective in the first place — that is, if timed exams are an accurate measure of conceptual mastery. Extra time on an exam for someone with ADHD still means that students are being tested on how well they can mask. Extra time doesn't magically make dyslexia go away. Extra time is actually just a proxy for "equity," where the implication is that extra time makes the test-taking experience comparable between disabled and non-disabled students. Focusing this discussion about who deserves disability accommodations occludes a broader pedagogical issue.
I will be the first to acknowledge that there can be immense value in timed exams. Being able to do times tables quickly, for example, is something that students really hone using timed tests. Measuring the speed and accuracy of recall makes sense in certain disciplines for specific skills. But particularly in the humanities and social sciences, this measurement does not necessarily capture whether a student can critically engage or even comprehend the content. This is about a mismatch in pedagogy: measuring speed and accuracy makes sense with learning multiplication, since one of the learning objectives is to be able to recall results quickly as a foundation for more advanced mathematics. It doesn't necessarily make sense for, say, analyzing the themes in Beowulf or being able to explain complex economic phenomena. Instead, the tool of evaluation needs to match the learning objective and method.
Let me take an example from my own classes. In my intro to media studies class, students should understand concepts like surveillance capitalism and algorithmic fairness. In data visualization, students should be able to use a software like Tableau to explore new datasets and sketch potential designs. I want students to be able to do both of these things expeditiously — being able to recall the definition or create a chart quickly is helpful for learning more advanced methods or case studies in class. But speed here is not an accurate proxy for comprehension, so a timed exam does not necessarily help me evaluate whether or not we achieved the learning objectives.
The prevalence of the timed exam in universities, however, seems to suggest that it is a largely effective barometer for student performance. This could hold true for a number of reasons: it's easily adapted from homework assignments and it is a scaleable evaluation tool, particularly in classes with hundreds of students. Administering interactive oral exams is simply not possible in those contexts; feeding scantrons into a machine is. But it's also useful to remember that professors receive little to no pedagogical training in graduate school, making it easy to default to familiar teaching tools. These instructors were brought up on (and usually succeeded in) completing these timed exams, so it's an easy choice to replicate as they begin teaching their own classes. That said, pedagogical research shows that time-limited tests are actually less reliable and less reflective of actual comprehension, and there is some evidence that increased time does not always enhance student performance in terms of higher scores. In one study, the longer a student took to complete an exam, the worse they did. (The original article uses the LSAT as a counter-example, which I don't dispute, but my point is that more time = higher scores is not always so straightforward.) I could certainly administer timed exams in my own classes, but I'm not convinced that an ill-prepared student with longer exam time would necessarily beat out a well-prepared student with normal exam time. Even if I were comparing between two ill-prepared students with normal vs. extra time, I've found that additional time doesn't necessarily help, since they didn't know how to answer the question in the first place.
Regardless of efficacy, the article points to a broader problem where students are too protected, too coddled, or too timid in the face of "normal struggles." Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's Coddling of the American Mind documents a similar phenomenon, where "good intentions" (trigger warnings, safe spaces) harm a generation in the long term. In Taiwan, the neologism is the "strawberry generation": students who grow up in overprotective households (like fruit in greenhouses) become easily bruised by the vicissitudes of life. Accommodations seem to be the latest example of these "good intentions" which, to these cultural critics, are harmful over time. In this case, The Atlantic identifies something even more insidious. It's not just that students are pathologizing otherwise normal difficulties, but that the weaponization of disability intensifies inequalities in an educational system already stratified by class.
I have no doubt that there are those who unfairly hide behind disability in the name of academic advancement. But research does show that more and more young people are being diagnosed with conditions like ADHD and depression, which could lead to this increase in disability accommodation requests. Is it because young people are pathologizing the otherwise normal challenges that come with growing up? Maybe. But the increase in diagnoses could also be related to a host of other things: higher rates of testing and treatment that is now covered by insurance, youth frustration with political inaction in the face of climate disaster, or excessive use of social media. We could debate whether or not those things are actual contributors or contrived excuses, as it could be all of these reasons and more (or none of these at all).
Even if a large portion of these students seeking accommodations are "faking it," I don't know that policing student disability status makes education more equitable. For every wealthy student abusing the system, there is a disabled student who is afraid of being accused of malingering or who believes that their disability isn't enough to warrant accommodations. Besides, documenting disability is expensive: it requires access to and a relationship with a healthcare provider willing to provide the correct documentation. Someone has to collect, review, and file this paperwork, and there are often follow-ups between the university and the doctor's office — time and money that is often shouldered by the student. Does that advantage students with generational wealth who know how to play the game? Sure, but that's true of many things in higher education. The alternative, however, is for disabled students to be increasingly dismissed, self-censored, or forced to self-accommodate. To combat this perceived malingering, universities are either forced to demand more information (thus increasing cost / effort required for documentation) or deny more requests (leading to some disabled students being denied because they weren’t “disabled enough” to deserve them). Neither of these outcomes make the playing field more even.
The true failure in this entire debate to me isn't students abusing the system for more exam time. The failure, rather, is in the structures of academia that rely on timed exams as one of the main barometers of success. While they are valuable in some contexts, they are often used as evaluation tools even when speed and accuracy of recall are not the primary learning objectives. We could spend our time trying to limit the number of students trying to get disability accommodations. We could also spend that time trying to build better academic infrastructure to support disabled students, and to reimagine learning as a vibrant intellectual conversation where success is not measured in timed responses.