I don't understand why there is so little attention paid to the fundamental implications of the model of disability accomodations -- that out of inertia and tradition professors are imposing unnecessary hardships like time pressure on students that aren't really important to what they are supposed to learn.
As a math professor my attitude was always that there was never a reason to make time an important factor in an exam (or handwriting or anything else I ever saw an accomodation for) and it did nothing to help identify mastery just to pointlessly scare some students. In that kind of situation there is no reason not to give any student an accomodation like extended time.
OTOH if professors really believe that some limitation is key to the skills students need to master then an accomodation that weakens it is no different than an accomodation that gives easier problems because a student is less gifted in that subject.
**Regardless** of whether accomodations are being dispensed fairly and appropriately the system is inherently incoherent. You just can't coherently explain why you those accomodations are ok for some but not all students.
Supporting "draconian legal sanctions against any and all institutions of higher education that discriminate against people with disabilities" is just throwing up the white flag. When an institution must choose between the risk of handing out too many accommodations vs too few accommodations, the risk-reward balance means they will give out too many accommodations every time. The downside of one is some sort of nebulous unquantifiable hit to academic integrity (and you can see how much universities care about from recent grade inflation) and the other is that you get sued into oblivion. They'll make the easy choice every time.
The threat of litigation is behind basically every bureaucratic process that sucks insanely, whether academia, industry, or government. I recall an earlier article you wrote about why psychiatric inpatient hospitals are so wildly bad - it's the same thing. Given a choice between degrading the patient experience and possibly getting sued into next week, they'll degrade the patient experience every time. I would guess all of this is effectively irreversible without changes to the prevailing legal scheme.
Oh man. Another topic I have five billion thoughts on but I’ll stick to testing accommodations specifically. (Not related to higher ed but..)
My younger sister was a special ed student who never took advantage of testing accommodations to her detriment. Her test scores were horrible even when she knew the material. But she was in a mix of gen ed and special ed classes and her gen ed peers made fun of her about being in special ed and so she decided it was better to not use accommodations and fail than to draw attention to the fact she had an IEP and get bullied for it. I wonder how common that is? Maybe students are only using extended testing accommodations on standardized tests because the social stakes are lower?
That’s not to say I think there’s no diagnostic creep; I have strong and often conflicting feelings about that but I can’t deny it’s true. Just saying that an accommodation not getting used doesn’t necessarily mean the student doesn’t need it.
I think that's true. Also, I have heard people say that they worried that they would be regarded as getting special treatment or cheating the system if they used their accommodations. Or that if they used their accommodations and did well, this should not actually count, as they had it easier than everyone else.
“… but what qualifies you is not the object of your study, it’s the ideological flavor of your methodology and conclusions”
To take it a step further- the advocates who claim to “study” disability presumably conduct research of some kind and include “experts” ie people who identify as the studied disability. Including these people in studies isn’t in itself bad, but those particular voices are raised up as if they represent moral clarity and truth. The notion that because someone identifies as something they have inherently “correct” knowledge of that thing, admits of the most basic scientific mistake of bias. It has the potential to dilute the study of the “thing” itself (I see this most clearly in autism)
Advocacy takeover of institutions and supposedly empiric non biased research is incredibly worrisome
I think that people who are well-positioned to be experts are those who have disabilities who are ALSO either clinicians or researchers (such as myself). I am someone who could have benefitted greatly from various accommodations growing up and possibly in certain jobs. I overcompensated growing up and appeared very accomplished, so people didn't know, but this came at enormous costs that still affect me today. I finally did a full neuropsychological evaluation until my late 30's, and I wish that I had done it as a child. This is in addition to various other issues that made school very hard, and there are accommodations that I know of now that would have been immensely relieving, that would have helped me to be able to relax in class and feel more focused and less paralyzed by anxiety. At the same time, as a psychotherapist, I have worked with college students who seek out accommodations who (I don't think) need them at all. I have had people admit to me that they skip class sometimes just because they want to go, under the guise that they are too anxious. The system is incredibly uneven. I have worked with people who simply had to ask their disabilities office if they can have accommodations because they have anxiety, and they have been granted them. At the same time, I have worked with people who have enormous difficulties and have done neuropsych testing, yet their school would not allow them any accommodations, unless the school evaluated them (with the evaluator typically being a first year graduate student who was new to the process), and still the accommodations were scant or non-existent.
It bothers me greatly that people misuse the system and seek accommodations when they do not actually need them, as this makes people suspicious of those who actually need them.
One more thing -- on the one hand, there are many, many adults who were not recognized as children as having learning disabilities, etc. On the other hand, it makes me crazy that so many people now think they have ADHD because they saw a tiktok video about procrastination and hyperfocus. Sure, some of these people may have something going on, but some of them do not. So, it's so tricky -- because I think that the people who have disabilities but who also have a lot of self-awareness are the ones to listen so, but there are the ones who do not, or who misunderstand.
I can agree with everything you've written. My concern (my primary area of interest is autism) is most keenly felt in regards to research. My understanding is that an expert on autism is an autistic person... not a psychologist, or neurologist, or psychiatrist, or geneticist, or any other -ist you can think of, but an autistic person with no other qualifier (although there are many researchers who identify themselves as autistics who study autism). This isnt in itself a problem. The downstream problem is threefold: 1) the identity of the researcher grants that person further social authority on the topic (ie, I am a human that studies anthropology, therefore my findings are MORE valid because of my humanity). This is a biased fallacy. The identity of the researcher has nothing to do with the findings. 2) Furthermore, popular articles and studies coming out of academia and popularized by internet personalities often align in ideology. 3) The dilution of a category such as autism to include college professors and autism researchers as well as individuals who are unable to grasp concepts like "week", "month", "year", etc., means that an autism researcher can study nearly anyone and come to any conclusions that they desire, which further confirms their own biases; now with the shiny vaneer of being "scientific". Its a self fulfilling circular prophecy that generally leads back to political and social ideology.
Yup, I'm personally aware of people openly stating they don't need their disability accommodations, but as they're offered, they'll take the Uni up on it! IE people who genuinely have the diagnosis, but not the disability. When you're in a high stakes course like medicine, it's hard to stomach some students getting a free ride. Conversely, I've seen students who do struggle, struggle mightily to get reasonable accommodations out of my medical school - eg it's refused to let a student do a multiple choice exam on paper instead of on computer, something I would have thought would have been a relatively easy fix (particularly as in time gone by this particular exam was done on paper).
Very true about the monolithic ideological orthodoxy of disability studies... I don't subscribe to the orthodoxy, in that I think a disability is a negative attribute and that the functional impairment is located in the individual, not society, which would make me a pariah of I dared articulate my perspective. (The manic psychotic dr is my example... No matter what reasonable accommodations you put in place, they are not safe to practice while severely psychotic, because there is something wrong with them and their brain, not because their patients and society aren't just appropriately adjusted to having crazy doctors doctoring them while manic. It's not about changing society so that the psychotic dr can practice medicine while manic, the problem isn't in society, it's in the drs.)
"By gearing them to underperforming students, we ensure we are serving the students who are struggling the most, and ensure we will reach low SES students who are underperforming, but do not have a diagnosis (or a disability)."
This is the crux of it IMO; if universities were looking to help their disabled and struggling population, helping the underperforming would be the place to start. I don't know how achievable that would be, although there are certain things that universities could do that I have in mind, but I don't know if they would do them because they would end up losing money.
University is just not a good place to start when it comes to helping people with disabilities who are struggling, since it selects for the less struggling disabled people. If you start there, you're already overlooking the most poorly-off section of the population.
I'm not sure what would help other people with disabilities (a lot would probably depend on their particular disability), but I feel I would have been helped had there been more information on first-episode psychosis just... around somewhere, which can include university campus. FEP does tend to have an onset of late teens through twenties, ie university age.
Oh...I have so much to say about everything I've read here, but taking it all on would wipe out all bandwidth for the next few days.
Let me just say this: accessing accommodations at the university level is no picnic at far too many schools, as they seem to feel that compliance w/federal law such as ADA and Section 504 is optional, or a suggestion. More often than not, the battle is due to the sheer ignorance, and often accompanying ego, of the decision makers.
Also...throughout history, there have always been accommodations of various types in a multitude of areas of life, and there have always been those who take advantage of opportunities to lie, to get these unneeded accomms or assistance. Abuse of this sort results in life becoming much harder for those in true need, as they are required to jump through more and more hoops to "prove" their need, and people who need these things already have challenging enough lives without requiring even more from them.
People need to worry more about those w/needs and supporting them, and stop centering cheaters and liars in this- ultimately, it's those with needs who suffer, and not those who take advantage of systems. Disabled people- kids, adults, etc- already work harder than any non disabled person will ever understand, and the focus needs to be on THEIR needs.
Thankfully, laws are followed in determining the appropriateness of accommodations. Reading Laws, Policies, and Processes: Tools for Postsecondary Student Accommodations gives a good overview of how provision of accommodations is determined. The person who helps determine accommodations can sometimes make a determination based on the interaction with the student and will sometimes need more information or documentation. Things are far more complicated in some ways than imagined because of legal considerations and in some ways easier. Many people have more than one disability and side effects of medication can also have an impact on functioning as can the experience of pain and fatigue. There are certainly students at the community college who request accommodations and will have documentation indicating they were diagnosed for certain disabilities in high school or earlier. When people require psychological or neuropsychological exams for taking licensing exams sometimes state sponsored agencies like ACCES-VR can assist with helping to find affordable assessments. An ADHD diagnosis that was not given on the basis of testing but was given by a licensed professional will often suffice at the college level but not necessarily on licensing exams.
I don't understand why there is so little attention paid to the fundamental implications of the model of disability accomodations -- that out of inertia and tradition professors are imposing unnecessary hardships like time pressure on students that aren't really important to what they are supposed to learn.
As a math professor my attitude was always that there was never a reason to make time an important factor in an exam (or handwriting or anything else I ever saw an accomodation for) and it did nothing to help identify mastery just to pointlessly scare some students. In that kind of situation there is no reason not to give any student an accomodation like extended time.
OTOH if professors really believe that some limitation is key to the skills students need to master then an accomodation that weakens it is no different than an accomodation that gives easier problems because a student is less gifted in that subject.
**Regardless** of whether accomodations are being dispensed fairly and appropriately the system is inherently incoherent. You just can't coherently explain why you those accomodations are ok for some but not all students.
Supporting "draconian legal sanctions against any and all institutions of higher education that discriminate against people with disabilities" is just throwing up the white flag. When an institution must choose between the risk of handing out too many accommodations vs too few accommodations, the risk-reward balance means they will give out too many accommodations every time. The downside of one is some sort of nebulous unquantifiable hit to academic integrity (and you can see how much universities care about from recent grade inflation) and the other is that you get sued into oblivion. They'll make the easy choice every time.
The threat of litigation is behind basically every bureaucratic process that sucks insanely, whether academia, industry, or government. I recall an earlier article you wrote about why psychiatric inpatient hospitals are so wildly bad - it's the same thing. Given a choice between degrading the patient experience and possibly getting sued into next week, they'll degrade the patient experience every time. I would guess all of this is effectively irreversible without changes to the prevailing legal scheme.
Oh man. Another topic I have five billion thoughts on but I’ll stick to testing accommodations specifically. (Not related to higher ed but..)
My younger sister was a special ed student who never took advantage of testing accommodations to her detriment. Her test scores were horrible even when she knew the material. But she was in a mix of gen ed and special ed classes and her gen ed peers made fun of her about being in special ed and so she decided it was better to not use accommodations and fail than to draw attention to the fact she had an IEP and get bullied for it. I wonder how common that is? Maybe students are only using extended testing accommodations on standardized tests because the social stakes are lower?
That’s not to say I think there’s no diagnostic creep; I have strong and often conflicting feelings about that but I can’t deny it’s true. Just saying that an accommodation not getting used doesn’t necessarily mean the student doesn’t need it.
I think that's true. Also, I have heard people say that they worried that they would be regarded as getting special treatment or cheating the system if they used their accommodations. Or that if they used their accommodations and did well, this should not actually count, as they had it easier than everyone else.
“… but what qualifies you is not the object of your study, it’s the ideological flavor of your methodology and conclusions”
To take it a step further- the advocates who claim to “study” disability presumably conduct research of some kind and include “experts” ie people who identify as the studied disability. Including these people in studies isn’t in itself bad, but those particular voices are raised up as if they represent moral clarity and truth. The notion that because someone identifies as something they have inherently “correct” knowledge of that thing, admits of the most basic scientific mistake of bias. It has the potential to dilute the study of the “thing” itself (I see this most clearly in autism)
Advocacy takeover of institutions and supposedly empiric non biased research is incredibly worrisome
I think that people who are well-positioned to be experts are those who have disabilities who are ALSO either clinicians or researchers (such as myself). I am someone who could have benefitted greatly from various accommodations growing up and possibly in certain jobs. I overcompensated growing up and appeared very accomplished, so people didn't know, but this came at enormous costs that still affect me today. I finally did a full neuropsychological evaluation until my late 30's, and I wish that I had done it as a child. This is in addition to various other issues that made school very hard, and there are accommodations that I know of now that would have been immensely relieving, that would have helped me to be able to relax in class and feel more focused and less paralyzed by anxiety. At the same time, as a psychotherapist, I have worked with college students who seek out accommodations who (I don't think) need them at all. I have had people admit to me that they skip class sometimes just because they want to go, under the guise that they are too anxious. The system is incredibly uneven. I have worked with people who simply had to ask their disabilities office if they can have accommodations because they have anxiety, and they have been granted them. At the same time, I have worked with people who have enormous difficulties and have done neuropsych testing, yet their school would not allow them any accommodations, unless the school evaluated them (with the evaluator typically being a first year graduate student who was new to the process), and still the accommodations were scant or non-existent.
It bothers me greatly that people misuse the system and seek accommodations when they do not actually need them, as this makes people suspicious of those who actually need them.
One more thing -- on the one hand, there are many, many adults who were not recognized as children as having learning disabilities, etc. On the other hand, it makes me crazy that so many people now think they have ADHD because they saw a tiktok video about procrastination and hyperfocus. Sure, some of these people may have something going on, but some of them do not. So, it's so tricky -- because I think that the people who have disabilities but who also have a lot of self-awareness are the ones to listen so, but there are the ones who do not, or who misunderstand.
I can agree with everything you've written. My concern (my primary area of interest is autism) is most keenly felt in regards to research. My understanding is that an expert on autism is an autistic person... not a psychologist, or neurologist, or psychiatrist, or geneticist, or any other -ist you can think of, but an autistic person with no other qualifier (although there are many researchers who identify themselves as autistics who study autism). This isnt in itself a problem. The downstream problem is threefold: 1) the identity of the researcher grants that person further social authority on the topic (ie, I am a human that studies anthropology, therefore my findings are MORE valid because of my humanity). This is a biased fallacy. The identity of the researcher has nothing to do with the findings. 2) Furthermore, popular articles and studies coming out of academia and popularized by internet personalities often align in ideology. 3) The dilution of a category such as autism to include college professors and autism researchers as well as individuals who are unable to grasp concepts like "week", "month", "year", etc., means that an autism researcher can study nearly anyone and come to any conclusions that they desire, which further confirms their own biases; now with the shiny vaneer of being "scientific". Its a self fulfilling circular prophecy that generally leads back to political and social ideology.
Tell me that you don't understand Asperger's-type autism without telling me that you don't understand Asperger's-type autism.
Yup, I'm personally aware of people openly stating they don't need their disability accommodations, but as they're offered, they'll take the Uni up on it! IE people who genuinely have the diagnosis, but not the disability. When you're in a high stakes course like medicine, it's hard to stomach some students getting a free ride. Conversely, I've seen students who do struggle, struggle mightily to get reasonable accommodations out of my medical school - eg it's refused to let a student do a multiple choice exam on paper instead of on computer, something I would have thought would have been a relatively easy fix (particularly as in time gone by this particular exam was done on paper).
Very true about the monolithic ideological orthodoxy of disability studies... I don't subscribe to the orthodoxy, in that I think a disability is a negative attribute and that the functional impairment is located in the individual, not society, which would make me a pariah of I dared articulate my perspective. (The manic psychotic dr is my example... No matter what reasonable accommodations you put in place, they are not safe to practice while severely psychotic, because there is something wrong with them and their brain, not because their patients and society aren't just appropriately adjusted to having crazy doctors doctoring them while manic. It's not about changing society so that the psychotic dr can practice medicine while manic, the problem isn't in society, it's in the drs.)
"By gearing them to underperforming students, we ensure we are serving the students who are struggling the most, and ensure we will reach low SES students who are underperforming, but do not have a diagnosis (or a disability)."
This is the crux of it IMO; if universities were looking to help their disabled and struggling population, helping the underperforming would be the place to start. I don't know how achievable that would be, although there are certain things that universities could do that I have in mind, but I don't know if they would do them because they would end up losing money.
University is just not a good place to start when it comes to helping people with disabilities who are struggling, since it selects for the less struggling disabled people. If you start there, you're already overlooking the most poorly-off section of the population.
I'm not sure what would help other people with disabilities (a lot would probably depend on their particular disability), but I feel I would have been helped had there been more information on first-episode psychosis just... around somewhere, which can include university campus. FEP does tend to have an onset of late teens through twenties, ie university age.
Oh...I have so much to say about everything I've read here, but taking it all on would wipe out all bandwidth for the next few days.
Let me just say this: accessing accommodations at the university level is no picnic at far too many schools, as they seem to feel that compliance w/federal law such as ADA and Section 504 is optional, or a suggestion. More often than not, the battle is due to the sheer ignorance, and often accompanying ego, of the decision makers.
Also...throughout history, there have always been accommodations of various types in a multitude of areas of life, and there have always been those who take advantage of opportunities to lie, to get these unneeded accomms or assistance. Abuse of this sort results in life becoming much harder for those in true need, as they are required to jump through more and more hoops to "prove" their need, and people who need these things already have challenging enough lives without requiring even more from them.
People need to worry more about those w/needs and supporting them, and stop centering cheaters and liars in this- ultimately, it's those with needs who suffer, and not those who take advantage of systems. Disabled people- kids, adults, etc- already work harder than any non disabled person will ever understand, and the focus needs to be on THEIR needs.
Thankfully, laws are followed in determining the appropriateness of accommodations. Reading Laws, Policies, and Processes: Tools for Postsecondary Student Accommodations gives a good overview of how provision of accommodations is determined. The person who helps determine accommodations can sometimes make a determination based on the interaction with the student and will sometimes need more information or documentation. Things are far more complicated in some ways than imagined because of legal considerations and in some ways easier. Many people have more than one disability and side effects of medication can also have an impact on functioning as can the experience of pain and fatigue. There are certainly students at the community college who request accommodations and will have documentation indicating they were diagnosed for certain disabilities in high school or earlier. When people require psychological or neuropsychological exams for taking licensing exams sometimes state sponsored agencies like ACCES-VR can assist with helping to find affordable assessments. An ADHD diagnosis that was not given on the basis of testing but was given by a licensed professional will often suffice at the college level but not necessarily on licensing exams.