This is the same problem with cheating on tests and homework. By making getting a higher education degree mandatory for entry level jobs to be able to afford a normal life, people are incentiviced to get the degree, not the education. By tackling this particular case of students with fake disabilities, the universities will hurt people with real disabilities. Same thing with anti cheating measures that affect people that don't cheat.
The root case of all this is making degrees mandatory on our society.
Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#942Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because > Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals. buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclus…
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…
Similar behavior is happening with hiring. Nobody cares about accomodations anymore because they have been abused.
Now people with actual disabilities have a huge uphill battle because even mentioning an accomodation might be requested puts you at the back of the line.
Sue you say? LOL. Hope you have five figures ready to throw away for a retainer just to gamble that anybody still cares.
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#943Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this how you're supposed to be doing it anyway?
ADHD is when high school chemistry class covers emulsifiers and you remember it
I do remember that (one of a few things I remember from HS chemistry) - but I fail to see how it relates to the question of whether to water the toothbrush
before putting on toothpaste, vs. watering after or not at all.
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#944American society is at the point where if you don't play these sort of games/tricks, you'll get out-competed by those who do. Bleak.
This mentality is defeatist. I rather lose fairly than cheat to win.
"Cheat" might not be the most helpful way to think about this particular situation. More like a glitch in a multiplayer game.[1]
It's not "cheating" in that players are using the system as-is, and after a critical mass of people adopt it, there is no way to play competitively without it.
The simple answer becomes to patch the behavior out of the system, although that is rarely popular with the people who have adopted the strategy and invested a lot in the system.
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#945Let me guess. Because they have rich parents that believe that this helps their child to compete? That it gives a small edge?
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#946It's funny how upset most comments are with the realization that a lot more people are disabled while most of the users in HN are probably on the spectrum
There's something a little ironic about calling every user on a website disabled on an article about overdiagnosing disability
You see, this is not overdiagnosing and not every person in the spectrum is disabled.
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you considered the fact that you may be neurodivergent? I scrolled through some of their Reddit comment history (it's linked on their profile) and I think I would peg them as probably autistic. Their patterns of emphasis, placements of sentence breaks, certain turns of phrases and pattern of emotional expression seem to closely match a few autistic friends I have & a few autistic coworkers. Research on this ha…
> it just became popular to label others Feel like my theory of mind is just fine given its predictive power.
I feel like all you predicted was the natural antithesis of the argument you made, and not actually some universal truth. Your "predictive power" is just common sense. You say people aren't neurodivergent, and your argument is then "see, you're saying people are neurodivergent again. I win."
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how my parents taught. Design questions to make the students apply their knowledge rather than regurgitate it. Forget a fact it's being applied to, look it up. Don't understand the concepts, you're stuck. Know the material, piece of cake. One time I was in my father's classroom because he was showing a film he wanted me to see. There was a quiz afterwards, he knew it wouldn't be alien to me and had me try it.…
One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake. A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyper…
Both are beyond my math, but I have found several more elementary cases where calculus shows simple relationships between related formulas.
And I recall a sci-fi short story long ago, technological civilization on a single continent with a permanently clouded sky. They had not figured out they were living on a sphere, they were having trouble with train tracks mysteriously being the wrong distance and train passengers feeling light on the high speed trains. I didn't check the guy's math but it sure seemed right when the answers looked exactly like Einstein's equations even though the units were very different. (Limiting velocity = orbital velocity, the discontinuity being weightlessness.)
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated. This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating. The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation req…
Wow. Great to know we're basically raising an entire generation without any integrity. Can't wait to be in a nursing home where all the staff are trying to meta-game for lowest amount of responsibility rather than caring for the elderly. And believe me, I'm the last person to disparage the truly disabled or those down on their luck. But 38% in a developed country is just straight up insane. Not to mention that if you…
I agree with your overall point about lack of integrity, but just to clarify this bit:
> Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?
I know people with incredibly severe ADHD, who are on medication, but in their case the medication is only able to make them reasonably functional. They still have difficult day-to-day issues.
But yeah, in general I'd say if you have something that is entirely fixable with medication, you don't need an accommodation.
The problem is that the ADA is worded such that businesses and organizations can't dig into these sorts of details, so they err on the side of accommodating in order to avoid lawsuits.
Re: Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
#950Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a difference in kind not degree to the two sets of questions. It's the difference between someone giving me a ride to work and someone doing my job for me. If the the point of the Calculus class is - ugh, it's been awhile for me so I might be messing this up - to teach the power rule or the thing being taught in English class is how to write a cogent essay in a set period of time then giving a student a calcu…
I love the ride analogy. So it sounds like you agree with me that, for an English Composition exam, all students should receive the same amount of time. Is that correct? But now I'm wondering: - if someone's typing speed is slow due to arthritis or an identifiable condition, shouldn't they get extra time? - if someone's typing speed is slow just because they never learned to touch type, should they get extra time? af…
The second hypothetical is to me less interesting. Presumably typing in this class is pre-requisite. This to me is much closer to "do my work" then "drive me to work" ; though the work in question isn't the class itself but instead the pre-requisite.
The first is getting right at the nub of thing. I think accommodations should be made but the worst accommodation is one that would advantage anyone not just a person with a condition that could hold someone back.
So - to switch hypotheticals to one that I was thinking about for no reason - you would give Stephen Hawking a speech synthesizer in Physics 101 not more time. Any student would like more time but no one able to communicate would be interested in a speech synthesizer.
That would be my version of fair in any case. Is it possible? I don't know and the incentives involved would (as I think a lot of people would agree) be pushing towards the worst kind of accommodation.