Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

I think they mean to refute the article's suggestion that tiktok and misinformation are the cause by highlighting that they received accommodations at a young age.

>You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations

They didn't share the nature of their current accommodations.

In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.

Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.

A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.

The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.

As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.

Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.

Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.

> Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.

> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?

Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:

> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.

https://archive.is/20250413091646/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

Oh certainly.

As for a systemic solution, I imagine you could probably handle exam scheduling at the university level once enrollment is over and drop week has passed. Of course this only works if the entire university is on board. Otherwise the system breaks down at the edges super quickly.

Once enrollment is more or less fixed I imagine you could generate a fairly optimal arrangement of final exams with an SMT solver + linear programming. Give 5.5 hours per exam, 2x a day, with a 1 hour allocation for breakfast + travel and a 1 hour allocation for lunch + travel. That gives you 14 hours. Breakfast at 0700 if one is so inclined, exam 0800-1330, lunch 1330-1430, exam 1430-2000.

You could do 6 hour exams but you'd have to offer extended hours on dining halls in that case since students may not be eating until 9pm/2100 or later.

With 5 days, 2 exam slots a day, that's 10 exam slots per student. Most students are going to bunched into relatively similar courses per semester (with some degree of variation) and students essentially never take more than 8 classes in a semester (I did 7 one semester and 8 the next and they just about killed me and generally I didn't see undergrad students taking more than 5-6).

A solver should be generally able to find a solution to that optimizing for most even distribution of exams. Doubly so if the university starts finals a little early and does 6 or 7 days instead of 5 (i.e. starting on the friday or thursday before). And if a complete solution is not available, a solver could identify which particular courses are causing the optimization to fail and the admin could negotiate solutions from there.

And of course you can improve upon this if the university incentivizes/pressures X% of courses in a program to offer no-exam/project based finals instead. Personally I hated project based finals (too much to do already and you end up forced to choose where you allocate your time) but I understand they are preferable for some students and they'd reduce the load during finals week assuming they are required to be due before finals and not during.

> Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.

Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.

And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.

I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.