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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?

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water before toothpaste = adhd now?

Sort of like having any kind of strong interest in any kind of niche topic apparently now magically teleports you onto the autism spectrum. No, that's not how that works . . .

Don't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore.

I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.

It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.

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

#622

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'…

Some fairly simple examples where accommodations make the test more fair: * You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription. * You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits. * You are blind, you nee…

Those are all great examples where I agree that an accommodation seems uncontroversial.

But to quote the article linked in the parent comment:

> The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.

These disabilities are more complex for multiple reasons.

One is the classification criteria. A broken hand or blindness is fairly discrete, anxiety is not. All people experience some anxiety; some experience very little, some people a great deal, and everything in between. The line between regular anxiety and clinical anxiety is inherently fuzzy. Further, a clinical anxiety diagnosis is usually made on the basis of patient questionnaires and interviews where a patient self-reports their symptoms. This is fine in the context of medicine, but if patients have an incentive to game these interviews (like more test time), it is pretty trvial to game a GAD-7 questionnaire for the desired outcome. There are no objective biomarkers we can use to make a clinical anxiety diagnosis.

Another is the scope of accommodation. The above examples have an accommodation narrowly tailored to the disability in a way that maintains fairness. Blind users get a braille test that is of no use to other students anyway. A student with a broken hand might get more time on an eassy test, but presumably would receive no extra time on a multiple choice test and their accommodation is for a period of months, not indefinite.

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

#623
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of autism diagnosis is really off the charts in MN these days...

[flagged]

A swing and a miss. Note the geographic specificity and give it another go?

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

#624
post #98
post #82

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> Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged. Fine. Where are the doctors? Why is the debate on the students?

Both are culpable.

Should we not bring up to doctors our issues or worries?

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why is everything a competition? For all of human existence there has been competition for limited resources. Until all resource scarcity is eliminated competition will remain in the natural world.

That's one theory. Counter theory: for all of human existence people have shared resources and traded among each other. Yes, for truly scarce resources trade breaks down. So is "good housing" a scarce resource on Stanford's campus? Or is their default resource allocation schema too anti-human so it's turning something that should be a simple trade and negotiation problem into a knife-fight?

America is rooted in capitalism, so the resource allocation schema of scarce goods (e.g. nice homes to raise families in) is indeed a knife-fight.

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

#626
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability". And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.

> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their c…

Abusing adderall can obviously go wrong, but if you do it right you take it once every month or so and have minimal long term effects. Stanford students arent using it for the euphoria, theyre using it so they can study all night without getting distracted. Its also not a miracle drug, you have to be in the right mindset for it to work and a lot of the people who use it dont understand that.

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

#627
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability". And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.

> Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Before readers rush out to acquire Adderall, note that "trying" it does not give an accurate picture of what it's like to take it long-term. It has a high discontinuation rate because people read comments like this online or borrow a dose from their friend and think they're going to be running around like Bradley Cooper in Limitless for the rest of their c…

Everything can be abused or used incorrectly. If you drink too much water you remove salts from your body and get sick.

With Adderall (or Vyvanse) good protocol is to get small dose, like 5-10mg early morning once every one or two weeks. Then you’ll get boost when really needed and feel uplifting for few more days.

Taking it every day is insane, ADHD or not.

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

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and th…

But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.

I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant?

I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?

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

#629
Ok, so we are raising a bunch of cheaters and liars. Great.

When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.

Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.

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

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navigating Bureaucracy 101

Given the current pace of changes and levels of uncertainty about the labor market 5-10 years from now, this may actually be the most useful skill-set the university is teaching students today.

Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
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