If you don’t need them, don’t claim them

Written by Cindy Chen, Staff Writer

I recently took part in an LSAT prep course where an instructor strongly implied that students should seek testing accommodations if they could obtain them, regardless of their true need. Across standardized testing — whether that be for graduate school, professional licensure, scholarships, or college admissions — accommodations have, in some circles, become a strategic loophole for success. In a time when elite admissions are as competitive as ever, it becomes easy to rationalize the slippery slope: If the system allows it, why not?

And yet, what may appear at first glance as a victimless strategy — after all, extra time does not visibly subtract minutes from someone else — carries consequences that are far less visible.

At their core, accommodations exist so that students with documented disabilities, such as dyslexia or ADHD, are not penalized for challenges they did not choose and cannot simply will away. They were not created to inflate scores or reward those willing to exploit them. By “those willing to exploit,” I do not mean students with invisible or borderline diagnoses, nor those navigating legitimate medical gray areas. I mean individuals who do not personally believe they have a disability and pursue accommodations solely as a strategic maneuver.

When students seek them with underhanded intentions, accommodations fail to correct inequity and begin to reproduce it. A recent and widely controversial study found that roughly 40% of Stanford students have disability accommodations, compared to 4% to 6% at community colleges. This is no coincidence. This system disproportionately benefits privileged individuals — those with access to expensive diagnostic evaluations, as well as the informal guidance of tutors, private consultants, and admissions counselors who know how to maneuver the approval process. 

For those considering this path as a viable option, it is worth confronting who it hurts the most. Students with legitimate disabilities already face skepticism from their peers and instructors, whether it is apparent or not. When students pursue accommodations without genuine need, they dilute trust in the system itself and in their classmates who truly need it. A study by the U.S. Department of Education found that many students with documented disabilities are reluctant to request accommodations precisely because they fear being perceived as exploiting the system or receiving special treatment.

Professional entrance exams provide a clear illustration of what is at stake. Tests such as the LSAT, MCAT, bar exam, or CPA exam are not merely assessments of aptitude; they offer a gateway to professions that are explicitly rooted in fairness and ethical responsibility. It was lawyers who fought for the same ADA Amendment Act that made accommodations possible today. The credibility of these institutions rests, in part, on the legitimacy of the entry into them. To manipulate a system designed to correct disadvantages is self-defeating.

To those weighing this path, I urge you to pause. If you must undermine fairness to prove your professional or academic abilities, consider what that says about your fitness to practice it.

Make classrooms accommodating but keep testing fair

Written by Nicholas Reason, Senior Staff Writer

Proctoring tests at the college level has never been more complicated. Professors must administer fair evaluations to hundreds of students at once while watching hawkishly for smart devices, AI usage, and all the analog forms of cheating students have been using since long before the dawn of the internet. However, while professors monitor their lecture halls with increased wariness, fewer of their students are actually in the room testing under the same constraints. Instead, a surging number of college students are taking exams in disability-inclusive testing centers that grant accommodations such as a distraction-free environment, extra time, or access to otherwise banned materials and technology. Extra time, the most frequently granted accommodation in a university setting, is also the most exploitable — and must be done away with. 

Although there are fairness and efficacy concerns with other forms of accommodations, giving certain students extra time is especially controversial in a world where time is often the biggest constraint on exams. Exam rooms are regularly packed from start to finish, with students frantically scribbling until the final minute of allotted time. As professors revert to older forms of testing like blue books to deter cheating with AI, time will only become more important on college tests. 

It is a near-impossible task to fairly distribute extra time. Time and one-half and double time, the two most commonly granted amounts of extra time, don’t offer a wide range of options. With finals commonly lasting upward of three hours, the difference between these two accommodations can be up to an hour and a half — a gap that appears arbitrary when compared to the variety in the type and severity of conditions that cause students to apply for accommodations. If students’ respective needs are diverse, the accommodations they are granted should reflect that wide range of abilities, too.

This sweeping approach is part of a larger, well-intentioned but flawed strategy. In 2008, the ADA Amendment Act expanded the legal definition of disability to be interpreted in favor of broad coverage, reducing the emphasis on extensive analysis. In subsequent years, colleges followed suit, pursuing a maximally inclusive stance on granting accommodations. Administrators signed off on growing numbers of requests, operating under the logic that broad inclusivity helped more students than a selective model that could risk mistakenly denying accommodations to some who met the threshold. After 2008, the term “disabled” not only legally applied to more students, but it became much easier for them to receive accommodations. The percentage of students receiving accommodations surged, tripling and even quintupling on some campuses. At some elite schools, the undergraduate population with registered disabilities is approaching 40%.

Setting aside questions of accessibility and distribution, extra time raises questions about the fundamental purpose of testing. In fields like law and medicine, it is not just the retention of material that is required, but also the ability to process new information and act upon it quickly. The weight of a college degree depends on employers having faith that these skills were adequately developed and assessed. 

Not to mention, a student’s testing speed may be affected by a plethora of factors, many of which don’t involve a disability. Some students are naturally faster readers than others. Some can type or write faster. Students whose first language is not English may find that text-heavy exams take them longer than native speakers. Students dealing with these challenges have little or no recourse.

It is important that lectures and discussion sections are as accessible as possible. Features like ramps for wheelchairs, live captioning during lectures, and access to course material in braille are uncontroversial features that universities should, and do, offer in order to create an academic environment that is more accessible to those with disabilities. But features that enable physical access to spaces have no effect on evaluation, making them unexploitable. The same cannot be said for extra time on tests. If college testing is going to survive the array of threats to its legitimacy, testing accommodations must be carefully rethought to ensure fairness, and all students must receive the same amount of time on tests.

Accommodations: A right inaccessible to millions

Written by Jaechan Lee, Senior Staff Writer

In my freshman year of high school, my undiagnosed ADHD and anxiety made it difficult to sit through class and impossible to study at home, resulting in my 2.5 GPA. For my family, it was hard to believe that someone with so much potential could be on track to drop out of school. 

Without insurance that covered mental health, I was lucky enough to get a diagnosis, prescription medication, and weekly therapy at a nonprofit. My teachers always offered a quiet space and some extra time during tests, as well as case-by-case flexibility for deadlines. These accommodations allowed me to thrive throughout the rest of high school and became crucial for my admission to this university. 

Implementing stricter regulations to access testing accommodations would only punish the poorest students who need it the most. Considering that half of all American adults are under or uninsured, testing accommodations need to be readily accessible to everyone — not just those who have regular access to psychiatric care.

Many people without disabilities wonder why we need an “unfair advantage” in the first place, falsely claiming that because workplaces will not offer these accommodations, they should not exist at all. This ignores the fact that many workplaces do, in fact, offer reasonable accommodations, such as flexible schedules, quieter workspaces, and written instructions, to help workers contribute to their fullest potential. Likewise, accommodations for tests allow students to demonstrate their actual knowledge in an environment that minimizes external factors that put them at a disadvantage. A 2023 ACT study found that students with disabilities who received accommodations, particularly on a retest after initially testing without them, tended to show larger score gains. The authors noted that “accommodations may help reduce construct-irrelevant barriers and allow students to better demonstrate academic ability.” 

As with any system, fraud may be an issue as some students try to gain an unfair advantage. Reports suggest that many Ivy League and private schools have exorbitantly high rates of accommodations, such as 38% of students at Stanford and 20% at Harvard. But at the University of California, where students are less privileged, only 9% of UC students receive accommodations, slightly lower than the national average. Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that while 4.2% of high school students in wealthy districts had access to extra time, only 1.6% of students in less privileged areas had the same. At UC San Diego, complaints about the Office for Students with Disabilities and disability access are frequent. Many face difficulty getting accommodations — a primary motivation for the school’s recent establishment of the Disability Resource Hub. 

Just because a few are abusing the system does not mean that we should make it difficult across the board. Perhaps in local cases, like at Stanford, it would be best practice to raise standards for accommodations while expanding universal healthcare access on campus. When grade schools, universities, and the media characterize accommodations with fraud, broader society cannot support people, especially the working class, with the most common disorders.