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

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

#481

Post by skeeter2020 »

jaredklewis wrote: post #395
Aurornis wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do. Another big acc…

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can'…

>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained?

A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.

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

#482

Post by jaredklewis »

bawolff wrote: post #450
jaredklewis wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can'…

> An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths If you can't do calculus, extra time is not going to help you. Its not like an extra 30 minutes in a closed room environment is going to let you rederrive calculus from first principles. The theory behind these accomedations is that certain people are disadvantaged in ways that have nothing to do…

The braille example you give makes absolutely perfect sense. The blind student is being evaluated same as the other students and the accommodation given to the blind student (a Braille version of the test) would be of no use to the other students.

But extra test time is fundamentally different, as it would be of value to anyone taking the test.

If getting the problems in Braille helps the student demonstrate their ability to do Calculus, we give them the test in Braille. If getting 30 minutes of extra time helps all students demonstrate their ability to do calculus, why don't we just give it to all students then?

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

#483

Post by mmmlinux »

Phithagoras wrote: post #433
Aurornis wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do. Another big acc…

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…

Water before toothpaste = adhd now?

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

#484

Post by dctoedt »

Sparkle-san wrote: post #427
dctoedt wrote: post #100

I'm mostly a law professor these days. When final-exam time rolls around (as in, this week), I raise my eyebrows when I'm sent the list of students who get 50% extra time. I wouldn't presume to judge the propriety of any given student's accommodation. But many of the accommodated students seem to have done just fine in class discussions during the semester. FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of che…

I don't see how getting 50% extra time on exams is anything remotely close to cheating. Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.

> Almost nothing I do in my day to day job comes close to being as time-boxed or arbitrarily restrictive as exams were in college.

An unpleasant fact of law-school faculty life is that, at least at my school, I'm required to grade students so that the average is between 3.2 (a high B) and 3.4 (a low B-plus). Because of the nature of my course [0], a timed final exam is about the only realistic way to spread out The Curve.

[0] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Syllabus.html

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

#486

Post by ghc »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #397
yAak wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyslexia isn’t curable. It doesn’t magically go away with help, techniques, or accommodations —- it just becomes more manageable. He/she probably wouldn’t have gotten into an elite university without that help through childhood.

I am aware, my daughter has Dyslexia. But this is not a thread about elementary school accommodations, it is about university level accommodations. The question is why the author implies he needs the same or similar accommodations at 20ish that he did at 5ish. Or does he?

> needs the same or similar accommodations

You inferred or assumed that...OP didn't say it. It's common sense that accommodations would be different for children just learning to read vs. university students.

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

#487

Post by jaredklewis »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #481
jaredklewis wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can'…

>> Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? A few examples: competitive tests based on adapting the questions to see how "deep" an individual can get within a specific time. IRL there are lots of tasks that need to be done well and quickly; a correct plodder isn't acceptable.

That makes sense to me, but in that case I also just don't understand why one group gets more time than another group. If the test is meant to evaluate thinking speed, then you can't give some groups more time, because now it doesn't evaluate thinking speed anymore.

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

#488

Post by [deleted] »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #314
jph00 wrote: post #147

Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education. So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highl…

Your point about Stanford having a larger-than-average proportion of 'extremely gifted' kids is reasonable. Perhaps the smartest 20% at Stanford are drawn from the smartest 0.1% nationally. But I think you're too dismissive of this part: The professors Horowitz interviewed largely back up this theory. "You hear 'students with disabilities' and it's not kids in wheelchairs," one professor told Horowitch. "It's just no…

[deleted]

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

#489

Post by fwip »

ixwt wrote: post #62

Timed tests encourage wrote memorization and reflexive knowledge. They don't encourage what is reflective of the modern real world knowledge recollection. In almost all scenarios, you have a book to reference for knowledge, much less search engines (and now LLMs). Almost nothing is memorized today, in the work world. What you know, in my experience, comes from frequent usage. Your timespan to work on most things is o…

Sort of. There are some things that a person entering a field is expected to know without needing to look them up, because if you don't know it you won't develop good intuition or be able to execute your work in a timely manner. Most of the stuff you learn in your freshman year is this type of thing, while the later years tend to have more open-book tests.

This is also the kind of thing that you check for in an interview - somebody who needs to look up how to write a for loop isn't going to get hired as a C programmer, and somebody who isn't familiar with Ohm's law will flunk their electronics interview. So there's a very pragmatic reason to make sure that students have the basics memorized.

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