Thank you for doing this! My son has multiple food allergies, but none has been so problematic as his allergy to mustard. He’s in Maryland where they love to sprinkle Old Bay onto everything from salad to entree to ice cream 
We tried the regular dorms/meals for a semester and he’s moving to a single in a place with a kitchen next month… However, we did it without an official letter/etc., because luckily something opened up.
ETA: he lost 11 pounds in two months and was skinny to start
Mustard and garlic are the most difficult allergens to avoid. Defintely ask your allergist for help with accommodations, it is rough!
Of course there are many cases of legitimate diagnoses of disabling conditions which merit accommodations, but that does not mean that there is, or isn’t, widespread abuse occurring.
According to what I have read and been told, it is not difficult to get diagnosed for anxiety or depression and to use such diagnosis for getting extra testing time accommodations.
A related topic involves misuse/abuse of Adderall & Ritalin by college & high school students:
A diagnosis of anxiety or depression doesn’t necessarily necessitate extended time on testing. They would have to be a specific reason why extended time is related to the specific issue with the patient.
Sure, but families, students, and private advisors know how to work the system to get additional testing time accommodations. It’s fairly easy & not uncommon.
38% of students at Stanford University & 34% of the students at Amherst College have conditions which merit accommodations. These numbers seem unusually high. Maybe it depends upon how one defines “cheating”.
Both are populated with predominantly high SES students, so it is not surprising that their families with money are able to get the diagnoses at a higher rate than the 20.5% overall disability rate among US undergraduate students. That would be the case regardless of whether you think the level of cheating is small or large, since both honest and dishonest diagnoses are more easily gotten when one has money.
None of us know what those accommodations are at Stanford and Amherst. Those could be medical accommodations, food accommodations, note taking accommodations, room accommodations, parking accommodations, the list is longer than most imagine for what accommodations are and they are not necessarily about extra time on tests. We also don’t know how long each student has for their accommodations. If you don’t have a documented learning disability or lifelong condition (mobility, food allergies, etc) - accommodations have to be re-upped and re-considered each year.
The number of accommodations being at the levels they are doesn’t necessarily suggest anything other than by and large, many students at schools like Stanford and Amherst have access to resources from a relatively early age: money, health insurance and excellent school districts that may be more willing to test students for disabilities, and provide services with fewer fights necessary from parents.
The actual analogy I think works better is to measure other health outcomes. When a kid breaks his leg - do we think the child whose parents have excellent health insurance that provides for extensive PT sessions for rehab in addition to setting the broken bone does better because he/his parents can “work the system”, or that people with greater resources often have better outcomes because their issues are more accurately diagnosed, treated more fully and not told to settle for the barest minimum of care?
When our child who competed in gymnastics had to have a knee reconstruction - our insurance covered the surgery and as much PT as necessary. She had PT 3x/wk for 9 months. A teammate of hers also had knee reconstruction that year (Level 10 gymnasts - injuries are common). That teammate’s insurance covered the surgery and 25 PT session per year. Total. Her rehab looked very different than my daughter’s (PT had to be spaced not by what she needed, but by the physical therapist trying her best to not use up all 25 PT sessions too quickly), and years later - she is dealing with chronic knee pain because she didn’t have adequate rehab.
It also may depend on one’s definition of “fairly easy” and “not uncommon” that you assert. Do you have a reliable source with statistics to support your claim?
Just because there is some cheating, does not mean the majority or even a substantial porportion of the increase is people cheating.
And as a fairly wealthy person whose family is going through the diagnosis process right now, what we are doing would fit no definition of mine of “fairly easy.” In fact, it has been quite hard. Others in this thread have also thoroughly explained what they had to go through for their kid’s diagnosis. That does not fit my definition of “fairly easy” either.
Could there be some shady doctors/medical professionals out there who mock up documentation for some cheaters? Sure. I have little doubt they exist, as sketchy people exist in every realm where money is involved. Could there be immoral parents who have no qualms teaching their children that faking disabilities is the way to get ahead in life? Of course. Again, I have no doubt that some of these people exist. But do I think the bulk of the 38% of Stanford and whatever percent of Amherst students are liars and cheaters with zero evidence of such? Absolutely not.
I need more than assumptions or “I’ve heard” anecdotes.
There are specific criteria that one has to meet in order to qualify, especially on high stakes testing. The report has to specifically document the disability, and if they make a recommendation for an accommodation, it has to specify how and why this accommodation can address or ameliorate the underlying disability and make the student have equal access to educational services. It’s not just a matter of “gaming the system“ and getting accommodation simply because of the diagnosis. Speaking from personal/professional experience.
Most of us would know the elephant in the room with common sense. At the same time, we have no doubt that there are many students who need legitimate help.
From this report in The Atlantic, it says most of the accommodation is for extra time.
Also, I am scratching my head to understand how much Amherst and Standford are schools for the rich. At Amherst, 284/480 received financial aid avg 68K. At Stanford, 843/1699 received financial aid avg 74K. For comparison, Rutgers NB has 49% students with FA avg 28K. Binghamton has similar figure.
Some quotes from the report
“A 2013 analysis of disability offices at 200 postsecondary institutions found that most “required little” from a student besides a doctor’s note in order to grant accommodations for ADHD. At the same time, getting such a note became easier. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.”
“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. ”
“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.”
“One-third of the students registered with Berkeley’s disability office are from low-income families“
Unless the report got all the wrong information.
If only SAT/ACT would release % of students getting extra time. Google search tells me it was <2% back when the test scores were flagged. The most recent data i found shows 5% in 2017 when scores were no longer flagged.
According to the BoE in my local HS >15% of students have IEPs. This is a wealthy area with 98% of students going to 4-yr collrges, avg SAT 1200+. My children regularly remark that a peer got a dx to get extra time at school and on SAT. They dont see themselves as cheating. They really do lose concentration or get anxious for a test and find the extra time very helpful, as would most students.
One of my friends who is a professor (teaching med students, grad students, and undergrads) told me that in her opinion, the majority of students would benefit from extra time on tests, and that if she had her way, “everyone should get extra time”… that is, her opinion is that tests should be designed to test a student’s knowledge, rather than to test how quickly a student can demonstrate that knowledge.
Thank you for this info, as I have not been able to read the article due to the paywall. I think there are two related but distinct issues in this thread - the increase in the number of students identified as having disabilities at selective colleges, and the extent to which there is cheating the system with false claims.
It seems nobody here has disputed the increase, the conversation seems to center on opinions about why the increase.
While the Stanford numbers seem higher than one might expect in the general population. The 2-year college numbers you cite from the article seem remarkably low. Again, the question that comes to mind for me for both ends is why is that the case. And, in a perfectly functioning system, what would the numbers actually be? I suspect that some of us here think it would be pretty low while others of us suspect it would be higher, maybe not far off from numbers we see at most schools.
Personally, the factoid from the piece that most of the 2-3 percent in community college with accommodations have a long history of challenges, while 1/2 in four year colleges have no such record does not surprise me. I’d expect that more students who have had years of academic struggles to end up in community college. I’d also not be surprised if the stigma of disability is stronger at community college (that sentence is speculation on my part based on experience with working class and middle class communities that seem more stigma around mental health issues and learning disability diagnoses). On the flip side, a lot of high functioning people who manage to figure out how to cope and compensate, can often do so until the work becomes too complex, voluminous, or burdensome for their ad hoc coping strategies to work). Thus, it would not suprise me that a lot of students may hit a wall and first need help when they hit college. I recognize that I have a bias based on my own adult diagnosis. Yet, when I was diagnosed, we discussed things from back when I was an elementary school student through adulthood. There were a ton of struggles I talked about that occurred all through school that my non-disabled peers did not face as a result of my undiagnosed ADHD. But I was a high flier, I got all As despite almost always rushing (sometimes in vain) to finish tests. I got all As despite always being distracted, losing things all the time, hyper focusing on unimportant things to the detriment of more important things, etc. That became harder to do in college, and yet harder again in law school. I did well enough on standardized tests despite rushing through (and somewhat guessing at the end on SAT, LSAT, and the Bar Exam). That said my standardized test scores have always lagged my performance everywhere I’ve been. I have literally never finished a test before time was up in my life. My point is, I can imagine lots of students hitting the wall for the first time in college. Especially at the uber selective schools. Is that a full half of students with accommodations? Probably not, but I would not be surprised if for most of them, the story of why they got accommodations for the first time now is legitimate and not what the quote from the article seems to imply.
Of course, I acknowledge that it is also possible that 1/2 the students with accommodations at four year colleges are just gaming the system by seeking accommodations for the first time. Maybe I’m naive, but I just find that explanation less plausible than that something else is going on.
Lastly I will say that I do not know what the accommodation process is like at most schools as I have not been through it. But, the counselors at D26s school have made it sound like getting accommodations in college will not be so simple as a note from the doctor on ADHD diagnosis. They have talked about students not getting accommodations because they did not have enough specific information about the diagnosis, the limitations of the disability, and how the accommodations would allow equal access by mitigating those limitations.
This response was not intended to be a critique of your post, I found it very helpful. It is more my response and reaction to it in context with the rest of the thread and my experience with these issues.
That means that 196/480 (41%) of Amherst students and 856/1699 (50%) of Stanford students are paying list price, meaning that they come from the top ~4% of households in terms of money (i.e. enough money not to get financial aid there).
While Rutgers and Binghamton have similar percentages of list price students, most such students are paying the much lower in state list price than the list price at Amherst or Stanford, so the family money threshold for paying list price is much lower there.
What fascinates me is that this Atlantic article was recently written, but many articles on testing accommodations are over a decade old. I found one that I had written that is almost 12 years old!
IMO, one of the reasons that accommodations have soared in the past decade is that about 9 years ago (it went onto effect Oct, 2016) the DOJ made a modification/ruling to the ADA (it’s a bit onerous to read, but anyone who is willing, and can summarize, here it is: Final Regulatory Assessment, Final Rule - Amendment of ADA Title II and Title III Regulations to Implement ADA Amendments Act of 2008 ). A key point, IMO, is this : “Most of the students affected by the ADA Amendments Act are students whose impairments did not clearly meet the definition of “disability” under the ADA after the series of Supreme Court decisions beginning in 1999 reduced the scope of that coverage. For instance, under the narrowed scope of coverage, some individuals with learning disabilities or ADHD may have been denied accommodations or failed to request them in the belief that such requests would be denied. As a result, the most likely impact of the ADA Amendments Act is seen in the number of students with disabilities eligible to request and receive accommodations in testing situations.“
And in response, SAT and ACT began to accept accommodation requests if they had been already been formally documented in, accepted, implemented AND USED by an applicant (student) in their current educational placement. So in many (certainly by no means all) cases, ACT and SAT made it easier to get accommodations for standardized testing. IMO if a student is disabled and qualifies for (and uses) accommodations, they SHOULD continue to use them in their postsecondary school placement. This helps the student to succeed, which benefits both the student an the school.
The US Government Accountability office showed that the preponderance of accommodations on standardized testing was extra time, but others are available and used as well. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104430
Academic institutions can also provide additional accommodations that may not be relevant to the standardized testing situations. A student I knew who had an Autism Spectrum diagnosis and had sensory issues. One particular school offered to let him bring his own mattress to the dorm!
I found this article interesting, particularly in light of other recent reporting about grade inflation, and the number of college students requiring remedial math and yet had A/A- grades in classes like pre-calc, calc and statistics (UC San Diego sounded the alarm on the issue and articles are in the WSJ and NYT).
My D attended private school and a shocking number of students received accommodations, not just for the SAT, but for regular tests and assignments. Furthermore, they could often start the test and then leave (for lunch, another class, etc.) and return to complete the test. It should shock no one to hear that these students often did better than the students who had to take it one sitting during the time allotted. It also sometimes made the students who didn’t have accommodations feel like chumps.
I’m not saying that some students don’t have legitimate learning issues that require accommodations, but I absolutely think the “accommodations loophole” is being exploited by students who don’t really need it. Particularly those from high SES backgrounds with parents who seek a “diagnosis” for any perceived flaw in their child.
I don’t think that every weakness academically requires a diagnosis. Not everyone is a good student; not everyone is good at math, or writing, or foreign language. Is that a learning disability or just the reality that no one is good at all things? Part of school is learning to perform under pressure, with competition (in the form of classmates), and with time constraints. Not performing well under such conditions might or might not be a learning disability, it might simply mean that the student isn’t particularly good at a given subject (or, gasp, not particularly strong academically). No diagnosis needed, just human variation in intellect and subject matter talent.
I have some, albeit dated, experience in this arena. My wife is a very bright woman who is really dyslexic and at an event near graduation, the wife of the principal of her high school said, “Dear, you are dyslexic.” My wife got no accommodations and went to art school and is now an artist who shows at museums and galleries around the US, Canada and elsewhere.
My sister (a clinical neuropsychologist) pulled me aside after a visit and said that we should get ShawSon (then in the 2nd grade) tested. He was obviously extraordinarily smart but he was having trouble learning to read. She predicted that there would be a 50 point gap between verbal and performance IQ scores with performance IQ at roughly the median. I had to push the school to do the testing (because he was so bright he did not appear to be having much trouble) and later also got private testing. My sister was uncannily accurate. Even with that diagnosis, we had to negotiate to get accommodations and virtually every year the teachers would override the agreed accommodations in his IEP, which in HS included double time on testing, and I had to meet with many of them. We kept the testing up to date and the ACT accepted the accommodation but the The College Board (SAT) did not. I had to appeal to get the accommodation and ended up having a long conversation with a staff psychologist at The College Board before getting the requested accommodation. It took a year and much work on my part to get that approval. His special ed caseworker at the public HS was angry because, she said, in our affluent town, she saw families who had been able to pay for diagnoses that would get 50% extra time with no problem (and no obvious need that she could see). ShawSon attended a very highly ranked LAC and graduated summa cum laude with lots of A+s and received several awards for academic excellence.
ShawD was different. She was very anxious, which we knew. She had a very serious medical condition (it appeared she was losing her vision) and we did not identify her ADHD until we solved the medical problem. She attended a private HS and the psychologist there recommended that we get her tested and suggested a private and quite expensive clinical psychologist. This psychologist which diagnosed ADHD (which was entirely consistent with her behavior as she could not stay seated ever for a full dinner and gave us a floor show with almost every dinner). She received 50% extra time. It turned out that with the extra time, her anxiety was reduced, and she did very well on the tests and rarely used much if any extra time, but if she did not have extra time, her performance deteriorated.
@tsbna44, as to success afterwards, both kids have done very well post college. ShawSon started a company, got an MS in computational and mechanical engineering and an MBA at a prestigious school, started a fintech company (the first one is still running) and raised his seed round while still in school and was in Forbes 30 under 30. The company has been written about in the national press when they did subsequent funding rounds. That said, his disabilities affected his career choices. He chose not to go to a firm like McKinsey which would have put stress on his slower speed in reading / writing but he could easily have succeeded at a quantitative hedge fund or doing strategy/M&A for a tech firm. When he was in business school, he said, “Dad, I could be good as the CEO of a big company but I could never rise to be the CEO unless a company I started was acquired by a bigger one.” It would have been unwise to have gone to law school or tried to work as a lawyer.
ShawD studied to be a nurse practitioner and started work at age 23 as an NP. When she was doing clinical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (one of Harvard’s main teaching hospitals) as part of her schooling, more than one doctor pulled her over to say that she was so bright that she should go to medical school. She wanted to get school over with and wanted to be a mother and did not want to be in med school, internship, residency and fellowships for a near eternity. She has been doing primary care, which is a very good fit for her ADHD (new problems every half hour or fifteen minutes). It turns out that many of her patients are doctors and families of doctors at Mass General and Brigham hospitals. The company she works for asked her at age 30 to be the medical director of a clinic (where she supervises the medical work of doctors, NPs and PAs pretty much all older then she is and some much older) and the following year asked her to be the director of a second clinic as well. She is tiring of demands of primary care and is working on a certificate in psychiatric health.
@tsbna44, I think that learning disabilities that require academic accommodations need not imply weaker performance in jobs. The trick is to a career path that plays to one’s strengths and downplays reliance on one’s weaknesses. That is good advice for folks without leaning disabilities as well.
A few years ago, some affluent families were seeking some extra time and anecdotally, some were getting it. That made it harder, as someone above pointed out, for kids with legitimate learning disabilities to get the accommodations they needed. My own experience is that it took a lot of work, some skill and a fair bit of money to get accommodations for kids who need it. Many parents would not be able to thread the needle (every year for a number of years) but clearly it was possible for affluent parents to get lower levels of accommodation for kids who many not have been so deserving.
Well said, @shawbridge . IIRC, your S was in HS/applying to college before the DOJ made its ruling (that went into effect Jan 2017) that made it “easier” (its never really “easy”) to get accommodations on standardized testing if the student had a formal IEP or 504, testing that documented their disability, and that the recommended accommodations were implemented by the school AND USED by the student in class (this is important to note, @cuppasbux that to qualify for the accommodation on standardized testing, the accommodation needs to not just be in place, but USED by the student in their academic setting,meaning essentially- if they don’t need to use it in school, they don’t need it on standardized testing) to be promptly granted by the College board. With your 2E s’s longstanding, documented disability and the accommodations in place and used in school, you would likely (hopefully) not have the battle today that you had back then. Here’s College Board’s info on this: Documentation Guidelines: Extended Time – Accommodations | College Board
My S23 has a visual disability, and had a formal IEP in school starting in 6th grade. Due to his visual issues, learning to read was delayed, he wasn’t able to read well until he was properly diagnosed and got extra support from his school, and his reading speed has always been quite slow (according to the tests he has at the vision specialist clinic, it currently requires more than 150% of the time for him to read the same material as other students his age).
Once we figured out there was something wrong, it was straightforward to get accommodations and support for this disability in the public school system, as they had staff and processes in place to evaluate and support him fully, at no cost to our family. It was also very straightforward for him to get appropriate accommodations at UCB.
In “real life” you wouldn’t notice his disability at all. His glasses have fancy high-index high-magnification progressive lenses that don’t look unusual (unless you try looking through them). Nobody is standing over him with a stopwatch to see how fast he can read… unless it’s for a timed test. So he really needs that 150% time on tests.
Looking at the DSP link I posted, my son is one of only 62 students at UCB with a visual disability. My sister also attended UCB quite some time ago. She has dyslexia, which was categorized as a learning disability. There are 287 current students at UCB in this category.
However, the vast majority of students at UCB with disabilities are listed as having either psychological/emotional disabilities (2528 students), or ADD/ADHD (1675 students). I understand that these conditions are common, but I admit it is tempting to wonder why so many students are diagnosed with them, at both this school and at other prestigious universities.
Thinking about psychological and emotional disabilities specifically (the biggest category), I actually wonder if some of the anxiety and/or depression these students are experiencing is tied to what it takes to get in to these prestigious universities?
My D26 (who, incidentally, is not diagnosed with any disability at this time) attended a prestigious summer program last summer, filled with high performing, smart, ambitious students. She was really struck by how extremely anxious and stressed most of these students appeared, and how much of their time and attention seemed to be obsessively focused on making themselves strong candidates for college admissions. Talking to these students made D realize how most of them attend high schools with a much higher pressure vibe than her HS (she attends a public HS with a wide range of students).
Could this be part of the reason that highly prestigious schools have a high percentage of students getting diagnosed with psychological/emotional disability?
I don’t disagree with much of what you say, but this sentence in particular makes it sound as if your belief is that most of the students with accommodations don’t really need them. Maybe that is not what you meant by your use of “some” contrasted with the exploitation of a “loophole” but that is how I read it. I’m not sure I agree with that.
I do empathize with the kids at your child’s school feeling like chumps because of their perception of what was happening with accommodations. That is a theme I hear in lots of different realms and for my kid at least I use those as opportunities to emphasize the importance of being a moral actor, even in the face of perceived unfairness. It is an issue that will come to all parents with respect to AI soon if it hasn’t already. But there are so many realms where folks believe (correctly or not) that others are cheating the system so they need to cheat too because everyone is doing it. I push back on that notion hard with my kid. I think of Ken Griffey Jr in the steroid era of baseball and how the path I want her to be on is that one regardless of what everyone else is doing. I feel there is a deep personal cost that comes with cheating which is almost never worth the “reward.”
All of that said, if in fact it were the case that all of the students who were doing the best at my kid’s school were those who had extra time testing accommodations, I would have a serious talk with the school about how they are measuring performance. Because it should not be that time is the key factor in determining who the best students are (as opposed to substantive knowledge). And, it should not be that the students with disabilities are generally outperforming those without. That is not the point of accommodations, and it creates perverse incentives that lead to the types of concerns that folks here have raised.