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Comment by shetaye | Hacker News Reader

Regarding 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) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.

I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).

edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.

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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 accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.

If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.

The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.

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't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards?

I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.

Lots of people think a test should measure one thing (often under the slightly "main character" assumption that they'll be really good at the one truly important thing).

Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.

It certainly shouldn't be entirely a race either though.

Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.

> Also if a test is time constrained it's easier to mark. Give a failing student 8 hours and they'll write 30 pages of nonsense.

Sure that makes sense to me, but I don't see why this would not also apply to ADHD students or any other group.

And of course, there needs to be some time limit. All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.

I meant "constrained" not in the sense of having a limit at all, but in the sense that often tests are designed in such a way that it is very common that takers are unable to finish in the allotted time. If this constraint serves some purpose (i.e. speed is considered to be desirable) then I don't see why that purpose doesn't apply to everyone.

There can be a genuine need to make it fair. Some students with anxiety can take 10 minutes to read the first question, then are fine. ASD could mean slower uptake as they figure out the exam format.

So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.

As you say, hopefully the test is not overly time focused, but it's still an advantage, and a lot of these students / parents will go for every advantage they can.

If thinking speed is determined to be important and made one of the evaluation criteria, then it's important whether or not you have clinical anxiety.

If thinking speed is not important, why are we evaluating it at all?

> So let's say you have a generally fair time bonus for mild (clinical) anxiety. The issue is that it's fair for the average mild anxiety, it's an advantage if a student has extremely mild anxiety.

We might as well make races longer for athletes with longer legs. It’s unfair to the ones with shorter legs to have to move them more often.

Well, that is kind of what we do.

We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions.

Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.

> All I am saying is, instead of having a group that gets one hour and another group that gets two hours, just give everyone two hours.

This means that someone fully abled can think about and solve problems for 1h and 50 minutes, and use 10 minutes to physically write/type the answers, and someone with a disability (eg. missing a hand, using a prosthetic) only gets eg. one hour to solve the problems and one hour to write/type the answers due to the disablity making them write/type more slowly.

Same for eg. someone blind, while with proper eyesight, you might read a question in 30 seconds, someone blind reading braille might need multiple minutes to read the same text.

With unlimited time this would not be a problem, but since speed is graded too (since it's important), this causes differences in grades.

Those examples seem like reasonable, narrowly tailored accomodations to me. But the article linked in the parent comment says:

> 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.

I think these disabilities are more complex than the broken hand and blindness examples for reasons I commented on elsewhere in this thread. In your example, a student with depression or clinical anxiety presumably only needs the same 10 minutes to write/type the answers as all the other students. Which means the extra time is added for them to "think about and solve problems." That seems fundamentally different to me than the broken hand example.

The accommodation process shouldn't be easier. I had to provide documentation to an employer per ADA rules.

For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.

I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.

I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)

Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.

1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.

Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:

- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.

- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.

- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.

- Find out the position of the hour hand.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Tell myself the hour number.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Find out the position of the minute hand.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.

- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.

- Both remembered.

- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.

- Hour and start time need to be remembered.

- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.

- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.

- Remember everything

- Two math operations.

Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.

- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.

I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.

I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.

I am very sympathetic to your situation. It just seems that like either the time should matter or it shouldn't.

Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.

Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.

Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.

Now, I can imagine two situations.

1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?

2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.

Test theory is a very complex topic within psychology. But there is a lot of insight that you can gain into this based on psychological test theory.

One Problem is, that we first have to clearly define the construct that we want to measure with the test. That is not often clear and often underdefined. When designing a test, we also need to be clear about what external influences contribute to noise / error and which are created by the actual measurement. There never is a test that does not have a margin of error.

A simple / simplified example: When we measure IQ, we want to determine cognitive processing speed. So we need to have fixed time for the test. But people also may read the questions faster or slower. This is just a typical range, so when you look at actual IQ tests, they will not give a score (just the most likely score) but also a margin of error, and test theorists will be very unhappy if you don't take this margin of error seriously. Now take someone who is legally blind. That person will be far out of the margin of error of others. The margins of errors account for typical inter-personal and intra-personal (bad day, girlfriend broke up) etc occurrences. But this doesn't work here. So we try to fix this, and account for the new source of error differently, e.g. by giving more time.

So it highly depends on what you want to measure. If you are doing a test in CS, do you want to measure how well the student understood the material and how fast they can apply it? Or do you want to measure how fast the student could do an actual real-live coding task? Depending on what your answer is, you need a very different measurement strategy and you need to handle sources of error differently.

When looking at grades people usually account for these margins of errors intuitively. We don't just rely on grades when hiring, but also conduct interviews etc so we can get a clearer picture.

If your brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person, what's the argument for why grades shouldn't reflect that?

Put another way, if my brain works at a slower rate than the genius in my class, is it then unfair if my grades don't match theirs?

In general these seem like reasonable differences to consider when hiring someone for a job.

just to go off of this, I'm not bipolar but I feel we need to also consider more severe mental disorders. For example I have multiple personality disorder

Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body

Hello I'm a tiny babby

Well that’s the core of the problem. Either you’re measuring speed on a test or you’re not. If you are, then people with disabilities unfortunately do not pass the test and that’s the way it is. If you are not, then testing some students but not others is unfair.

At the end of the day setting up a system where different students have different criteria for succeeding, automatically incentivizes students to find the easiest criteria for themselves.

Tests usually do measure the speed. And often they should. But the question here is "the speed of what?". And how do you measure the speed without also measuring the speed of something else as an error?

If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this.

We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we?

That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement?

You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students.

It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.

> Tests usually measure lots of things, and speed and accuracy / fluency in the topic is one.

Why are you trying to measure speed though?

I can't think of any situation where someone was like: you have exactly 1 minute to integrate this function, or else.

Fluency yes, but speed is a poor proxy for fluency.

Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok.

Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.

Can he build more advanced concepts on top of the ones he supposedly masters?

Can he do that well?

Is he likely to continue to be able to do that as he progresses to the stuff that is actually hard?

(My guess is that the answers are yes (so far), no, and definitely not.)

Take slow processing is a really good symptom of something that needs more practice time.

> Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it

That seems like a big assumption that i don't believe is true in general.

I think its true at an individual level, as you learn more about a subject you will become faster at it. I don't think its true when comparing between different people. Especially if you throw learning disabilities into the mix which is often just code for strong in one area and weak in another, e.g. smart but slow.

Speed is a remarkably good proxy for fluency.

An excellent way to git gud at something is to do timed practice again and again. Aim for 100% correct answers AND for fast answers. Answers that took to long should be identified and practiced again (and maybe some of the theory should be re-read or read from another textbook).

Don't settle for 100% correct during practice.

Eliminating time limits on standardized tests is infeasible; it would require changes to processes on a state or national levels, and mindsets in education as a whole. It's also a complex enough issue that you'd have factions arguing for and against it six ways to Sunday. It's not going to happen.

In contrast, special-casing few disadvantaged students is a local decisions every school or university could make independently, and initially it was an easy sell - a tiny exception to help a fraction of people whom life treated particularly hard. Nobody intended for that to eventually apply to 1/3 of all students - but this is just the usual case of a dynamic system adjusting to compensate.

You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour? Or just design the tests so that there is ample time to complete them without extra time.

But putting aside standardized tests, in the context of this discussion about Stanford, I think these accommodations are being used for ordinary tests given for classes, so Stanford (or any other school) has full control to do whatever they want.

But how do you differentiate students who are able to finish the test (correctly) in an hour from those needing 2 hours for the same task?

In real life, you're rarely given unlimited time for your tasks, and workers who can do more in less time are considered better than the ones who always need deadine extensions, so why not grade that too?

I'm fine if a teacher or organization decides that thinking speed is an important criteria to evaluate, in which case I think the same time limits should apply to everyone.

I'm also fine if a teacher or organization decides they just want to evaluate competency at the underlying material, in which case I think a very generous time limit should be given. Here the time limit is not meant to constrain the test taker, but is just an logistical artifact that eventually teachers and students need to go home. The test should be designed so that any competent taker can complete well in advance of the time limit.

I only object to conditionally caring about the thinking speed of students.

> You say it is infeasible for standardized tests, but why? Is it that much harder to give 50 students and extra hour than to give 5 students an extra hour?

It's that much harder to change the rules of standardized testing for all students, for complex and possibly dubious reasons, than it is to make an exception for small number of clearly disadvantaged students. One is inviting nation-wide political discussion on the merits and fairness and consequences of the changes, the other is an isolated act of charity with (initially) no impact on the larger educational system.

Eliminating time constraints is entirely reasonable. Leaving exams early is generally an option in most standardized testing systems - though usually with some minimum time you must remain present before leaving.

Taking what is currently scheduled as a three hour exam which many students already leave after 2, and for which some have accommodations allowing them 4 hours, and just setting aside up to five hours for it for everyone, likely makes the exam a fairer test of knowledge (as opposed to a test of exam skills and pressured time management) for everyone.

Once you’ve answered all the problems, or completed an essay, additional time isn’t going to make your answers any better. So you can just get up and leave when you’re done.

I think one challenge would be preventing professors from taking advantage of the time to extend the test. I suspect the professors would generally like to extend the test to be more comprehensive, and are limited by the time limits of the test, and tests will naturally extend to fill whatever default time is allotted.

> Leaving exams early is generally an option in most standardized testing systems

I didn't because I'd use the extra time to go over my answers again looking for errors.

The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages.

It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs.

This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial.

If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.

Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.

Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.

Probably started out as an exception for truly difficult situations but like everything else became routinely exploited once widely known about and eventually became a defacto norm and just part of the protocol.

A lot of things start like this. You need someone with an aggressive backbone to enforce things - which these institutions won't have.

> This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

Wouldn't say this is an accurate description of the US economy.

https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...

When I graduated HS in 1982, the top 1% had 34.7% percent of the wealth. Today, the top 1% has 71.1%. So yeah, I'd say he's spot on. There have been a few dips and valleys, but the trend line is pretty strong.

That is not what that chart shows. It shows top 1% was 25% in 1982 and 35-37% now. Mostly related to the Great Recession.

That link supports the thesis if everything?

Top 0.01%, +9.1%

Top 0.1%, +13.9%

Top 1%, +15.2%

Top 10%, +6.1%

Middle 40%, -6%

Bottom 50%, -0.1%

This supports exactly GP's two statements:

> we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.

Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking

> This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.

> > we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.

> Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking

Not sure about "power" there. In my experience you get power by having a lot of free time and dedication to something else other people don't care about… which yes includes billionaires obviously, but most of the people meeting that description are just middle class retirees, so they're outnumbered.

> > This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

> Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.

It does not show it "every year", there are long periods of stagnation and some reversals. I would say it shows that recessions are bad and we should avoid having them.

nb another more innocuous explanation is: there's no reason to have a lot of wealth. To win at this game you need to hoard wealth, but most people are intentionally not even trying that. For instance, you could have a high income but spend it all on experiences or donate it all to charity.

Who is in the white house regularly dictating policy? Is it old retirees with no money or connections?

Who's at your local city council meeting getting every single proposal to build an apartment cancelled? (It's the old people.)

People move a lot between those "buckets" over their lives. It's not the same 1% decade after decade.

> 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 with the thing being evaluated.

The least controversial version would be someone that is blind gets a braile version of the test (or someone to read it to them, etc). Sure you can say that without the accomadations the blind student cannot do calculus like the other students can, but you are really just testing if they can see the question not if they "know" calculus. The point of the test is to test their ability at calculus not to test if their eyes work.

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?

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

That depends on how the test is designed.

Some tests have more material than anyone can hope to finish. Extra time is always valuable in such a test.

However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.

Most tests are designed so the average person is able to finish all the questions. In those tests more time for the average person is not helpful. They have already done it. Sure they could maybe redo all the questions, but there is very diminishing returns.

If the extra 30 minutes improves someone who needs the accomedation's score by 50%, and increases the average student's score by 2% or even not at all, clearly the same thing isn't going on.

So i would disagree that extra time helps everyone.

Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.

> why don't we just give it to all students then?

I actually think we should. Requiring people to get special accomedations biases the system to people comfortable with doing that. We should just let everyone get the time they need.

> However that type of test is generally bad because it more measures speed then skill.

Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?

> Just think about it - when was the last time you had a final exam where literally every person handed in the exam at the last moment. When i was in school, the vast majority of people handed in their exam before the time limit.

I think almost all of my high school exams and at least half of my college finals had >90% of students remaining in the exam hall when the proctor called time.

> Isn't speed and fluency part of skill and mastery of the material?

Perhaps this comes down to definitions, but i would say that in general, no, speed is not part of mastering material in intellectual pursuits.

Sometimes it might be correlated though. Other times it might be negatively correlated, e.g. someone who memorized everything but doesn't understand the principles will have high speed and low mastery.

If you saying a good test measures skill and not speed, what is the rationale for withholding the extra time from some students? I'm not saying you have to use all the time. I finished many a college exam early and left. No biggie.

I'm just saying if you are going to let some kids stay longer, let everyone stay longer. And you seem to agree on that point.

Either have a time limit for everyone or no one.

>> 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.

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 need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.

I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.

The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.

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.

>Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.

Yep. Speaking from experience, top colleges will give students with ADHD or similar conditions as much as double time or more on exams. One college I know of sends them to a disability services office to proctor it, in which they simply don't enforce time limits at all.

Coincidentally, there's an overwhelming number of students with ADHD compared to before these kinds of accommodations became standard.

having infinite time on exams is level of the the ADHD cheating iceberg

level 2 of the ADHD cheating iceberg is having medically approved methamphetamines to infinistudy before exams e.g. ritalin

Well, methamphetamine is very rarely (never?) prescribed for ADHD. Ritalin is methylphenidate.

Adderall works on some kind of amphetamine. That‘s prescribed much more often in the states. In EU land I‘ve never seen the hard stuff.

Edit: Elvance apparently has Amphetamin in it as well and I‘ve seen it in the wild here too.

Hahahahaha, I wish, but no. That's not how it works.

I take Adderall and literally fall asleep because it lets my brain shut down. It _decreases_ my anxiety.

I don't get high or hyper off of it, it literally just lets me function enough to do my laundry. It's honestly like wearing glasses.

the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation, not just time and half on tests. If you had carpet replaced in your dorm because it gave you an allergy, it would be included. So, this is just an article that is just flat out bullshit.

The bullshit nature of the article becomes clear as the author repeatedly begs the question as the sole means of making her actual argument.

Edit: To be clear there’s a lot of argument from incredulity or “obviously something is wrong,” without doing the work to establish that.

I wouldn't expect less from a site with that domain name.

> the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation,

The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.

Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.

25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:

> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.

yes, the original article is a flat out bullshit lie

https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae

it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?

this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.

the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case

Your link doesn't say "25%". It's also not an official, up-to-date statistics resource. It's website copy for the office of accessible education

The "1 in 4" number has been there as far back as Wayback Machine has that paged archived (2023): http://web.archive.org/web/20230628165315/https://oae.stanfo...

So it's definitely not a precise statistic, and it's likely out of date.

1 in 4 is 25%

it's on their website. Along with all the other details. where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.

And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.

The Atlantic journalist talked to Stanford Professor Paul Graham Fisher who was co-chair of the university’s disability task force, so I imagine they either got it from him or someone else at the school.

They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.

The number isn’t sourced. But the article does say 24% were receiving academic OR housing accommodation. So 38% registered disabled but only 24% receiving any type of accommodations sounds suspiciously like bullshit. It would require people registering and not using the thing they registered for.

But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here. Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd. The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.

There are any number of reasons for that to be the case.

1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.

> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.

Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.

you are talking complete nonsense, sorry. Nobody pays full tuition at Stanford unless you are rich, it's literally free for families making less than 150k a year.

there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.

> 1 in 4 is 25%

N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.

It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.

Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.

You are nitpicking. By that logic, since we can never know the precise number because that number is always moving, we simply don’t know what the number is and all this is moot.

> The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range.

The National Center for Education Statistics disagrees with 3-4%.

  In 2019–20, some 21 percent of undergraduates and 11 percent of 
  postbaccalaureate students reported having a disability. . .

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60

That's a different statistic. Not all students who report having a disability on a survey will be registered with their school's disability office.

Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey.

https://disability.utexas.edu/statistics/

https://irp.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/01/20...

https://dsst.fsu.edu/oas

This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:

> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-proﬁt institutions, 7% at for-proﬁt institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.

https://pnpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/StudentswithDisa...

A public two-year college? So, a community college? That's a much more specific claim than that being the case for public universities overall.

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 slightly less competitive university.

Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.

A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.

The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.

As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.

Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.

Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.

Why are frequent attendance exemptions granted? I'm totally blind and when I went to college my lack of attendance had nothing to do with the fact that I was blind and everything to do with the fact that I made poor choices like other college students. If I didn't have the mobility skills to get to class then I shouldn't have been granted an exception, I should have been told to get better mobility skills before going to college. I think the only time I asked for an attendance exemption was during finals week. There was a blizzard at the same time as one of my finals and the sidewalks and streets were not plowed. This made it incredibly dangerous for me to go to take the test. I just emailed explaining the situation and took the test the next day.

My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.

Water before toothpaste = adhd now?

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

But can’t remember if you ate today or not.

It's 5PM and I haven't eaten yet, good reminder. /joking-but-factually-true

I have a really bad episodic memory and my sense of hunger stopped working normally in my teens. It's got nothing to do with anything else.

Why does remembering a topic covered in school mean having ADHD?

It doesn't. I was being sarcastic :)

This has been the exact opposite of my experience. It feels as if I can't remember what happened yesterday, let alone during my school years.

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.

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.

If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.

I always think of the SMBC "old physicist" comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

"High-functioning" is contextual for most autistic people. (The trick is to remain in those contexts, while developing skills to push the boundary a bit further out: get good enough at it, and even your closest friends will say "wow, that meltdown came out of nowhere!".)

Autism spectrum highly favors jobs where it's basically person with data. I have seen estimates that a *majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum. I suspect I lie at the mild end of the spectrum--and I see programming as playing to my strengths and against my weaknesses.

Before software paid as well as it does now, the percent on the spectrum was definitely a high double digit %.

Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)

> I have seen estimates that a majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum*

That seems incredibly unlikely today, and doesn't at all match with my experience. Obviously I am not qualified to diagnose someone with autism, but the idea that more than 50% of my colleagues, past and present, are on the spectrum... that just doesn't pass the smell test.

I wash the brush before putting the paste on. I also doodle. I guess I have ADHD and everyone here should now accommodate my eccentricities.

> 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 request letters to anyone who makes an appointment and asks nicely.

There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.

Once it becomes widely known that getting a diagnosis is the meta-game to getting housing priority, nicer rooms, extra time on tests, and other benefits the numbers climb rapidly. When the number is approaching 38%, the system has become broken.

It's a real problem for the students who really need these accommodations. When 38% of the students qualify for "priority" housing, you're still in competition with 1/3 of the student body for those limited resources.

> There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.

This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).

The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these accommodations directly, or perhaps via some kind of auction. Acceptance to such a school will be the “basic economy” of attendance. If you want to pick your seat, you can pay to upgrade.

Or just operate so that everyone gets the academic benefits.

My roommate in the 90s was ahead of the curve, he memorized the Cosmo quiz “do you have ADD” went to the student center, got a script that he sold or snorted, and got to take his test in a comfortable room at a time scheduled centrally.

Just randomize assignments to rooms all over campus.

That’s actually impossible (everyone gets the same benefits).

You’re talking about a lottery, which randomly distributes them - which is only fairer in the sense it’s unpredictable, not that anyone that actually needs it would get what they need.

It’s typical gaming of the system, and shortly it’s going to have to switch to punishing those gaming it or it will spiral even more out of control.

You’re overthinking it. The accommodation is a quieter room with a more generous time limit. Just provide that and use a lottery to distribute slots. I had classes that had take home finals.

My son runs into the phony accommodation game in middle school. The latest BS is to get a dyslexia diagnosis, which lets you have more time and take a 90 minute break (where they look up the answers). 9 kids discovered that they have this condition in 8th grade. Performance impacts eligibility for placement in some programs in high school.

If the kids didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But they do, and abusing accommodations and gamification of zero integrity behavior undermines society in a small way.

Oh wow snorted? Did you keep in touch how well is he doing now? I suspect he's not doing so well with the brain damage and the likely switch to other substances.

Why would snorting be so much worse than just swallowing the pill? The goal is to get the chemicals in the blood. Snorting apparently works quicker, giving you a stronger but shorter lasting effect. But the difference is not night and day.

A lot of people do recreational drugs while at college and go on just fine. George W. Bush, for example, is alleged to have taken cocaine.

I think that’s a good argument against using cocaine.

It's not really worse, but you can get a lot more in your bloodstream a lot quicker, so you've got to be careful with the dose.

Snorting will also shoot your tolerance through the roof, so taking it orally will no longer be as effective. Definitely not a road I recommend going down

> George W. Bush, for example, is alleged to have taken cocaine

And basically any big name in the financial industry has almost certainly used loads of cocaine. They’re mostly not suffering any horrible consequences.

But of course there’s a world of difference between cocaine use and addiction. An addict might start their day with a line, every day, but that’s far from typical use.

> Why would snorting be so much worse than just swallowing the pill? The goal is to get the chemicals in the blood.

When a pill is swallowed it is gradually released into the bloodstream. Some drugs are also partially degraded by the digestive system, meaning you don't get 100% into the bloodstream. For some drugs, as much as 90% or more can be destroyed in the stomach, but this is accounted for in the dosing. Your stomach contents also go through your liver, which does first-pass metabolism depending on the drug and can reduce overall concentrations.

When someone snorts a drug, it bypasses all of that. It has easy access to the brain. It spikes the concentration the brain sees far in excess of what you would get from taking the drug orally.

This spike is where the damage is amplified. A sudden spike to very high values can overwhelm the brain's protection systems, for example.

Dopamine degradation produces neurotoxic metabolites. The brain is normally decent at cleaning these up, but when you consume drugs that spill that dopamine out at excess rates and disrupt its storage in vesicles then you can also overwhelm the brain's ability to clean up safely.

The sudden spike also causes rapid downregulation of the affected receptors, leading to deeper withdrawal effects that can last for a long time.

The sudden spike is also more euphoric. Combine that with the deeper withdrawal and it's why taking a pill through the nose is far more addictive than taking it orally.

We talk every once in awhile, I actually thought about it because I bumped into him at a conference recently.

He was one of those people who are able to contain their hedonism and self-abuse to their frat-boy era. Now, he’s a grey-ish beard tech dude with an awesome wife and family.

Snorting adderall does not typically cause brain damage, and the list of substances rich white kids (I’m guessing here) would typically upgrade to is pretty much just cocaine.

Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.

The financial industry chugs along just fine despite approximately everybody using these drugs.

I’ve used cocaine regularly at social events since I was a teenager. The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered. In my whole life I’ve known two people from my circles to have developed an actual coke problem, and I know a lot of people.

At this point coke is just the cigarettes of the upper classes, but likely less harmful.

> Snorting adderall does not typically cause brain damage

"Brain damage" isn't a binary yes-or-no thing that happens to you.

It's not even clear that regular as-prescribed usage of amphetamine is without some harm potential. With regular doses and route of administration it's obviously limited or negligible, but someone insufflating (snorting) it routinely is exposing their brains to much higher concentrations and much faster onset.

Note that dopamine itself is toxic when metabolized normally, but your body is equipped to mostly handle that. Using drugs that disrupt dopamine flows in high doses can overwhelm the systems designed to keep dopamine metabolism from doing damage.

> Typical cocaine use also does not result in meaningful harm.

The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems.

> The vast majority of people I know, whether they’re 25 or 65, will not say no when offered.

Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem.

My "I do not have an actual coke problem" shirt is generating a lot of questions answered by my shirt.

I think we can probably agree that people using cocaine at social events once or twice a week are generally not the problem users.

Similarly, I don’t think you could reasonably suggest that someone who has a couple of glasses of wine during such events has a drinking problem.

> Significant drug users often don't realize how much of a bubble they're in. Also, the goalposts for having a drug problem tend to be moved around a lot when everyone you know is using drugs regularly. Typically, being unable to say no when offered a drug is a sign of having a problem

Personally, I’d consider someone who uses cocaine on a daily basis to have a problem. I’d also like to suggest that it’s pretty hard to have a cocaine problem and not use cocaine on a daily basis.

OTOH, someone who infrequently shoots up cocaine probably isn’t addicted but would be engaging in some seriously risky behaviour unless they’re able to very precisely measure their dosage. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that though, it’s certainly not a common activity among the upper socioeconomic classes.

> The works "typical" and "meaningful" are doing a lot of work here. One of my friend groups has a lot of ER nurses. They see a non-trivial number of people coming to the hospital from casual cocaine use. These cases are generally waved away as other conditions by drug users (e.g. heart attacks, etc) and therefore they don't "count" in some people's minds. Yet it's a common finding for them on blood workups for people, including young people, arriving with cardiovascular problems

To my knowledge there exists no evidence that anything less than massive cocaine use could result in new cardiovascular issues. Of course it may trigger an existing condition, but someone who has a heart attack during normal casual use of cocaine would probably be prone to have one during exercise also. The stress on the heart from cocaine usage is not particularly different from fairly normal day-to-day activities of people who do not use cocaine.

Yeah, somehow despite everyone doing cocaine at even the highest positions for many decades without any real problems, and the plethora of medical research about the effects of cocaine and how minimal all its long term side effects are and how low addiction rates really are, all below common alcohol, people still act like cocaine is this super serious life-ruining drug. The only significant life-ruining part of cocaine is law enforcement's reaction to it, unless of course you have a lot of money in which case you can just pay to lawyer your way out of it.

The biggest danger to cocaine? Using cocaine to stave off the over-dose effects of other longer-lasting drugs, and then running out of cocaine before you run out of the other drugs and then dieing from alcohol poisoning or opiate over-dose. Cops and politicians will pretend cocaine killed those people, but anyone who knows jack shit about drugs or gets to see the actual toxicology report knows better.

> This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?).

Yup. A few years ago in California, go to a weed store in Napa. "Oh, you need a medical card" "Oh, sorry". I get handed a business card, no worries, just call this doctor here, it'll be $x (can't remember) and you can get a medical card and just come back in. I had my medical card within 5 minutes on the phone on the sidewalk outside the store.

Was having stress related ED issues a fews ago. Hit up Hims, fill out the questionnaire. Physician reviews it in our online chat. "If these are your answers, I would not be able to prescribe for you. If your answer to Q3 was x, Q5 was Y, then I would. Would you like to review your answers before re-submitting?"

The deeper I read into this thread, the more it verifies the Key and Peele sketch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8JtnUpkP0s

Conversely, you get the cancer patients like my mother, who waited until her second cycle of chemo to explore cannabis, which is apparently the best antinausea medication we have, with the right strains embarrassing the best that the pharmaceutical industry has to offer. She was told that medical card approval needs to go before a state board and it takes 1-2 years; She's be dead or off chemo by then, so we gave up. It ended up being the latter.

A few years later, we've got a "walk-in clinic" a neighborhood over which advertises how easy/fast it is to get cannabis cards specifically; By this time there is no approval wait.

A few years later, recreational is legal.

Poland recently had the famous "receptomats", mostly for medical mariuana, but also a bunch of other things people wanted.

You'd pay online and quickly receive a PESEL (local equivalent of an SSN) + a 4-digit prescription code, which is all that is needed to redeem a prescription there.

> The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these accommodations directly, or perhaps via some kind of auction. Acceptance to such a school will be the “basic economy” of attendance. If you want to pick your seat, you can pay to upgrade.

I don't think you can charge more for accommodations for the disabled.

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 have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?

We’re a society of assholes. The comment above suggests selling accommodation requests.

Better yet, many of the graduates will become politicians, journalists, or prominent tech figures who will be pontificating about morality and regulating it for others.

I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.

In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.

That's what you get in a world where damn near everything is measured against some objective criteria, analyzed by a 3rd party or tracked by the government or someone at the behest thereof

None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.

The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.

Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...

Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.

I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc

Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.

I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.

Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?

There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.

Yep, shame is the cornerstone of civilization and the scoiety right now seems to be more and more shameless.

Yeah people don't realise this, but shame and guilt (and fear) are our 2 society building emotions. Each society has it's own mix of these, and there are also "themes" depending on which is the dominant one.

Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.

Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

> do you think something structural or cultural has changed

Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.

It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.

We've also been rebelling against traditional values for over fifty years and even celebrating it in song and movies. We've adopted a utilitarian ethic in lieu of the traditional values we've rebelled against. I think those are more salient probable causes than over-crowding, especially since the reasoning given for over-crowding as a reason uses a utilitarian ethic (people are only good because they can afford do be). A large part of virtue is doing the good thing regardless of hard times or good times.

Trump got in because he was an actual change from the normal establishment politicians. People want real change, and they did get it...

> I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome

exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).

The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.

> overly-progressive

I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.

> Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century?

That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.

I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.

Yup - and just look to the leadership of the country as a classic example of this.

The ‘winner’ is he who scams the hardest without getting consequences.

I have bad news for you about existing nursing homes.

It's not 38% of the entire population/generation, it's 38% of a tiny group who have gotten into an elite, highly selective school, and have the massive resources (not just education) to do so. But as someone else said, these are probably people who are much more likely to get placed into positions of power and authority.

No. It might be much much worse than 38% outside of these elite schools, but a little bit different. This is in fact one of the reasons public education falls off the cliff. I've seen a teacher leaving elementary after she found out that 19 kids out of 24 in her class had some kind of learning disability needing special treatment, special help, assignments specially designed for them etc. In her own words all of them were completely normal kids except maybe 1 or 2.

Is it really gaming to get a doctors note to say a pet cat will make you happier?

My stepdaughter just started college. She told the tale of a boy and a girl who tried to claim that a cat was an ESA or service animal for both of them. The one cat. For both people. Just so happened that they were a couple in high school, and this was their effort to game the system to get assigned to a dorm together (the university generally wouldn't allow a co-ed dorm assignment like that, and had rules about relationship "overnights" in the dorm.

Why would the university not allow coed dorm assignments like that or have rules about relationship overnights in the dorm. Kids going to college are adults why should those restrictions be there in the first place?

If you treat students like children, it's not surprising if they try to game the system

Because a dorm is not an apartment building, it's a place with communal spaces like bathrooms and showers so you have to share some intimacy with people living at the same floor as you. And many people are not comfortable doing so with people from the opposite sex.

Being not comfortable with it is not the same as banning it school-wide. It's perfectly reasonable to have some single-sex spaces that people can choose if they're uncomfortable. But requiring that all dorms be single-sex makes it sound like there is some other religious/conservative nonsense at play.

Regardless, this isn't Victorian England. Men and women mix and live in shared spaces. There are plenty of adult living spaces in the world where people have their own apartment/room, but share bathroom space. That's also common in lower end hotels/hostels for travelers. Requiring that college students live in gender-separated living situations is a bad way to prepare them for the real world.

Most of those dorms are not single bed. Yes, there are hostels. But you're not going to expect that it's going to be common to say "yes, I have no issue getting undressed/naked/dressed in front of my opposite sex dorm mate on a daily basis, or having to go to a bathroom and to do so within a stall" (because the dorm mate (plus whatever other dorm mates of either sex are around).

I get it - and at my stepdaughter's school there are co-ed dorms of different styles. But what they don't offer, and in this case is what the students hoped to achieve was "give us our own dorm with one bed", effectively.

The issue then also comes down to "well, college relationships aren't always the most durable things" - what happens when they break up? Who has to move out? It's not one person's space. Now the college is also on the hook for ensuring that there's sufficient vacancy (wasted) to handle these situations in other dorms.

Yes, that's a bit odd, perhaps it's a religious or otherwise conservative university?

At my (secular) university, we did have a few single-sex dorms (optional for people who were uncomfortable with a mixed-sex dorm), but all others were co-ed, though some were separated into all-male and all-female hallways where they'd share a single-sex bathroom.

IIRC even the female-only dorms had no rules about overnight stays (though males had to be escorted around the building by their female host). A university not allowing people to stay overnight reeks of puritanical values.

It's a state university, and I said that they had "rules about relationship overnights", not that they were forbidden.

Essentially it's one night a week. So, if both students, effectively two nights a week.

I don't disagree. I think it would be disrespectful to your dorm mate if your partner was just living in that space (which is already small for two, let alone three) most of the time. And you have to imagine that's at least part of the reason why such things are rules now, not suggestions.

So there are a variety of options, but my stepdaughter is in a pod/suite setup. There are four dorm rooms, each with two people, and the four share a communal/interconnected bathroom set up.

So you need to have respect for your dorm mate, and your suite mates. And you know that, unfortunately, while "be respectful and adult" should be the expectation, there's always someone that ruins that, and the next thing the college has to set rules and say "this is why you can't have nice things".

And I expect there's a bit of liability minimization on the college's part - I'm not saying I agree, but the college probably has concerns of "it's mid term, and an allegation of inappropriate behavior happens, what do you do?" (and I think there's multiple issues with that, like it's not like that can't happen in same sex dorms, but I'm just trying to think about why the college might see it that way).

> Is it really gaming to get a doctors note to say a pet cat will make you happier?

If that takes away a limited resource from someone else (e.g. dorm space) or makes it worse for others (e.g. people don't want animals in a dorm), then yes. Absolutely.

Older generations have no more integrity. Just look at the last US presidential election results - older generations were more likely to vote for Trump than younger ones. I don't think a person with integrity is likely to vote for such an openly corrupt conman.

Nah, the reality is that people have always been greedy and selfish, gaming the system where they can.

There are a lot of people around who are playing victims to get benefits. And relentlessly pushing their agenda.

> I don't think a person with integrity is likely to vote for such an openly corrupt conman.

As far as I understand, it was precisely because of situations like the one described in the article that people voted for him.

In practice, you don't need to be honest and incorruptible to win an election. You just need to be more honest and incorruptible than your opponent.

>>>> Great to know we're basically raising an entire generation without any integrity.

Are you talking about the generation of doctors writing the disability assessments?

Most young people are still fine. Neither of my kids ever claimed to be disabled.

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.

To me this is just the logical end result of capitalism where the only thing that really matters is profit at any cost. Many people would be fine with being an average person living moderate life, but capitalism is always incentivizing people to exploit and abuse others in the name of profit and the average person is constantly getting screwed and everyone knows it. And there are only 2 real solutions to escaping that problem, eschew modern society and live a subsidence life, or find a way into the top percentage of society so you have more money than you need so you can ignore most of those problems.

Shitty boss/job? Having extra money lets you tell them to fuck themselves and move to another job at any time. If you don't have extra money, well you are not going to be able to tell your shitty boss to shove it unless you want to risk becoming homeless and destitute. Legal trouble? Well money is the solution, which is why poor people are so often screwed over by legal trouble because they can't lawyer their way out. Etc etc

universities should have their own experts who give final diagnosis and are unapelable and thats it, all the psychopathic circus which is abusing real disabled people would be out

As a 100% blind person, I am schocked to read this. In a sense, my hunch that DEI is a big fucking scam has just been confirmed yet again. Besides, I wish a real, life-changing disability onto all of these faking people. The children, and their parents.

What a weird take. What does this have to do with DEI?

Well, if everyone and their dog gets special status due to DEI, it apparently makes even more people want to join in on the fun. Isn't that obvious?

No? "DEI" has nothing to do with the ADA.

Presumably the University could do their own assessment to see what is appropriate? Not just rely on a note?

They rely on the note in order not to do their own assessment. It's outsourcing.

Admin staff or teachers of the university are not entitled to assess that.

That would mean the university hiring doctors, or at least paying a doctor to do the test.

The US is a ridiculously litigious country. It could end up being very, very expensive if they did their own assessments, even if they hired doctors to do so.

It is more litigious than the UK, but UK universities have Special Educational Needs specialists. It would be very very unusual for a family doctor (what we would call a General Practitioner) to be willing to make a diagnosis on this, they would insist on referring you to a specialist, although in many cases that may not be a medical doctor at all. ADHD, Nuerodiversity, Dyslexia are all assessed by specialists. In all professions it is considered unethical to act outside of your area of competence...

> putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste

Wat? I had no idea I had a disability!

Same here. My logic is that my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria, which is kinda gross but also not that different from a lot of other surfaces and environments, and that it's going to collect some amount of stuff floating around. A quick rinse is going to dislodge a good fraction of what has accumulated over the course of a day.

I thought I was just being logical, but apparently I also have a deficit of attention. Okay, then. I guess I'd rather bear that burden than brush my teeth with shi... sorry, I probably should terminate that sentence before I get carried away.

> My logic is that

I just assumed a bit of water in advance would prevent toothpaste from directly/easily adhering to the bristles, keeping more of it "in useful circulation" as it were.

> kinda gross

A few months back I needed some hydrogen peroxide, but the available bottle was more than I was likely to use before it degraded into H20... So, naturally, I started messing around looking for other applications. (It worked great on certain oily gunks that resist isopropyl.)

One weird outcome from that is I've been putting a drop on the bristles of my toothbrush, although it's more of an idle experiment to see if the foaming action dislodges visible crud (i.e. toothpaste near the base) in-between uses, as opposed to a disinfection right before use.

Hey, interesting idea using it against the shower gunk. Definitely going to try it.

And, yes, definitely water first. It's sitting out there exposed, rinse it off!

Let us know if the peroxide gets rid of the shower gunk. I've tried all kinds of cleaners to no avail.

IIRC the regular hydrogen peroxide didn't do much against those discolorations.

One of the niche magic ingredients to look for is TSP. Alongside bleach (consult proper sources for actual ratios) the combination becomes more powerful against mildews.

I'm reluctant to mix anything with bleach(!)

I'd rather play with sodium hypochlorite than live in a dwelling with mildew.

You can use baking soda and hydrogen peroxide for a whole range of cleaning applications, as well as clearing a stopped up toilet.

Mr Plumber has never worked for me clearing a clog. What does work is a wire with a hook on the end for the sinks, and a plunger for the toilet.

look on the bright side. Fecal transplants are expensive but this way it's free. Sorry, that's not me talking, it's my ADHD ;-)

My logic is that it's more pleasant with some water there. I just feels a bit more juicy and nice.

> my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria

I can't believe I've never thought of this, but now I am entirely grossed out and will start rinsing my toothbrush before using it.

(I guess that means you gave me ADHD! It's infectious via text!)

> Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests.

Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can do something.

In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. I suspect there is a correlation between people who think things through and people who do well in school.

> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly.

Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.

In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.

This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.

It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.

I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.

But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.

I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.

I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper.

Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.

> scrap pieces of paper

The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.

You didn't have both? Scrap for trying out ideas, double-checking, making mistakes and then "blue books" for the stuff you hand in (with the answers + all the steps you choose to show).

No need. I just X'd out failed approaches. There were always plenty of pages in the blue book.

When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays.

Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.

I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.

> the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint

Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.

I remember a Linear II test where we had to do Gram-Schmidt on a few large matrices and the prof was a stickler for showing steps. I'm not sure if writing was the limiting factor but it was definitely a major factor. Quantum mechanics is also one of those where there can be a lot of intermediate steps if you don't have things like group theory under your belt (and you usually don't if you're in Griffiths).

I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.

I had an abstract algebra exam where for the last question, I couldn’t remember the theorem to do it in a sensible way, but could see that the brute force approach only needed ~40 modular multiplications. That came down to the wire!

Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.

Lucky you.

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 their answers are still correct.

They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor.

If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.

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?

I don't think test speed is correlated with that.

Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.

"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?"

I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...

That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.

I'm always surprised by comments like the gp's. Even working on different types of programming jobs I would be surprised if the majority of time is spent on actually writing lines. The majority of my time is spent on understanding the codebase and how the new requirements best fit in there. I do see people jumping in straight to /a/ solution, but every time I've seen that happen it is hacky and ends up creating more problems than solutions.

I'm also surprised at how common it is for people to openly discuss how irrelevant leetcode is to the actual work on the job but how it is still the status quo. On one hand we like to claim that an academic education is not beneficial but in the other hand use it as the main testing method.

I think why I'm most surprised is we, more than most other jobs, have a publicly visible "proof of competence." Most of us have git repos that are publicly available! I can totally understand that this isn't universal, but in very few industries is there such a publicly visible record of work. Who else has that? Artists? I'm not sure why this isn't more heavily weighted than these weird code tests that we've developed a secondary market to help people optimize for. It feels like a huge waste of money and time.

In this context, time constraints are measured in hours and are very informative regarding the student’s capacity to prioritise, plan and carry out their work under pressure.

It is actually very informative when one person can

Agreed. Frankly test taking doesn't correlate to job performance well by any metric.

For example, get 90% on a test, that's applauded and earns a distinction. In a job context, 90% gets you fired. I don't want a worker who produces "90% well soldered boards". I don't want software that runs on "90% of our customers computers". Or a bug in every 10 lines of released code.

A test puts an arbitrary time limit on a task. In the real world time is seldom the goal. Correctness is more important. (Well, the mechanic was going to put all the wheel nuts on, but he ran out of time.)

College tests are largely a test of memory, not knowledge or understanding. "List the 7 layers of OSI in order." In the real world you can just Google it. Testing understanding is much harder to mark though, Testing memory is easy to set, easy to mark.

Some courses are moving away from timed tests, and more towards assignments through the year. That's a better measure (but alas also easier to cheat. )

Well, it probably correlates to solving leetcode problems within 45 minute interview time limit.

If I'm paying a professional by the hour, yes, it matters if he can do it in one hour rather than two.

I once hired a civil engineer to do a job for me, and he started billing me for time spent learning how to do it. I refused to pay him. (There was nothing unusual about the job, it was a simple repair task.)

That's a tricky one that I find myself pondering a lot as a contractor.

I've ultimately decided that if it's something I'm required to learn for this specific task then I'm billing for the time spent doing that. But if it's something that I figure I should know as a person being hired to do a task in this particular domain then I won't bill for it.

To me it's the difference between hiring a mechanic to 'rebuild an engine' and 'rebuild a rare X764-DB-23 model of an exotic engine.'

It's reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild an engine but it isn't necessarily reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild that particular engine and therefore it's reasonable for that mechanic to charge you for their time spent learning the nuances and details of that particular engine by reading the manual, watching youtube tear down videos, or searching /r/mechanic/ on Reddit for commentary about that specific video.

It's important to strike a balance between these kinds of things as a contractor. You don't want to undervalue your time and you don't want to charge unreasonable rates.

I agree with your assessment. In my case, I am a mechanical engineer and what he was billing me for smelled of being scammed - he thought I was ignorant. I confronted him on it and he backed down.

I've had similar experiences with auto repair shops. Recently I got a BS estimate for an alternator replacement, and a BS explanation. Fortunately, I had done my homework beforehand and knew everything about how to replace the alternator on my particular car, and the service rep knew he was outmaneuvered and gave me a fair price.

Women believe they are targeted by auto mechanics, but they target men as much as they can, too.

Caltech had timed exams (2-3 hours) and infinite time exams, at the discretion of the professor.

The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it.

Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.

That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.

At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock.

Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.

Besides, I actually wanted to learn the stuff.

> if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.

I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal

It doesn't always work, that's for sure. I suspect one of the things the admissions committee did was try to filter out the cheaters. Explaining how the honor system worked was part of the freshman orientation camp (held on Catalina Island).

One reason it did work is the students liked being trusted, and they did not like anyone that would threaten the system, and would turn them in.

BTW, that was 50 years ago. I have no information on how the honor system is fairing today.

In the upper division of my undergrad physics degree that was really common. Open book, open everything except peers. I personally loved those exams and my grades went way up. I could walk away for a few minutes if I was stuck, maybe grab a beer to relax, and get back and solve the problems. But I think this is much harder to do and getting even more difficult. I was at a small university and you really couldn't google the answers. It was really easy to write google proof questions. But a key part was that the classes were small, so it was pretty obvious if people were cheating.

I went to grad school in CS after a few years of work and when I taught I centered the classes around projects. This was more difficult in lower division classes but very effective in upper. But it is more work on the person running the class.

I don't think there's a clear solution that can be applied to all fields or all classes, but I do think it is important people rethink how to do things.

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. 5 minutes later I turn it in, the class thinks I gave up. Then he says I aced it. But I graded an awful lot of his tests, I know that when I didn't know the material I wouldn't stand a chance. The day I found a question that I could guess was notable enough to me that I asked my mother about it. (A case of not knowing the fact. Her supplying the information that the tribe in question was a stone age culture in the New Guinea jungles made the why apparent.)

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 hyperbolic transforms. The trick there was to know how the Fourier transforms (based on sine/cosine) were derived, and just substitute in sinh/cosh.

If you were a formula plugger or just memorized facts, you'd be dead in the water.

I do think that's one of the reasons it's easier to do in physics. You're taught to see math as a language and therefore need to interpret it. With that in mind who cares if you memorize formulas and can churn out some algorithmic computation. You'll memorize formulas "accidentally" as you use them frequently. But if you don't know how to interpret the math you're completely fucked and frankly probably won't do well as a physicist. Much of the job is translating back and forth.

I actually loved my classical mechanics class. The professor was really good and in the homeworks he'd come up with creative problems. The hardest part was always starting. Once you could get the right setup then you could churn away like any other (maybe needing to know a few tricks here and there).

Coming over to CS I was a bit surprised how test based things were. I'm still surprised how everyone thinks you can test your program to prove its correctness. Or that people gravely misinterpret the previous sentence as "don't write tests" rather than "tests only say so much"

It's normal for young engineers to believe they can write code that cannot fail, design parts that cannot fail, design bridges that cannot fall down, etc. Fortunately, it was beaten into me in my first job that the idea is not to create designs that cannot fail, but to create designs that can tolerate failure. It's a very different mindset.

Unfortunately I don't think this is being beaten out of people these days. I meet plenty of people that are seniors at quite reputable companies that believe that and it scares me...

What I hear sometimes is along the lines of "I know my program has crashed, but I know it can continue to run safely."

What was your first job?

Designing machinery parts for the 757 airplane.

Reminds me of this article - https://firstthings.com/math-is-erotic/ - strangely titled “Math is Erotic” but talking about the relationship between Maxwells Equation and water waves, and magneticism.

Funny enough, I was going to include those relationships in my original comment but pulled them out for brevity. Was going to be something like "I think it is really hard to get a physics degree and not stumble upon the similarities of Gravity and Electromagnetism where there's a striking similarity in forms. I think most people start by thinking there's some link to the unification (and imagine solving a TOE) but you end up finding incredible beauty in something seemingly simple like the inverse square law." I actually remember one of my favorite lectures (and expanded on as a homework question) was deriving why everything is in inverse square law and not some variation like r^1.9 or r^1.5. It just completely changed how I saw these equations and even the process of analysis. I was a pure experimentalist before that class and gained a lifelong appreciation for theory because of it. I'm in ML now, so definitely still in application/experimentalist mindset but when I stumbled upon this Knuth quote it resonated strongly

  If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.

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.)

A couple of my upperclassmen professors used open-everything exams, notes, textbook, even the Internet was allowed. Although time was tight so if you felt like you had to Google something, you better not have to do it a second time.

My time was pre-intertoobs. My freshman year was the last year one saw slide rules and punch cards.

The ASR-33 teletype lasted another year.

I ceased knowing everything about my computer in the late 80s.

Why should students care how long it took for other students to perform the test? Is this because tests are graded on a curve? If so, that's the real problem

Meanwhile my uni required brain scans for adhd accommodations it was asinine

Imaging (brain scans) cannot be used for ADHD diagnosis. There is no standard for it. There were a couple quack doctors who pushed the idea (Dr. Amen is the famous one) but it's not an accepted medical practice.

I think someone misunderstood, or they were telling you a lie.

If your rant is about the USA: Are we really going to try to turn this into a war against the ADA?

I counter: If students are requesting specific accommodations en-mass, maybe schools should rethink overall decisions. Maybe housing shouldn't be shared. Maybe the workload should be relaxed.

Disabilities are far more commonplace than you might imagine. The number of disabled people per 1,000 likely hasn't changed, but our recognition of disabilities such as autism, anxiety disorders, etc. has gotten better.

I'm sure a very small amount of folks do abuse the system, but I'd bet money that most actually have disabilities.

If you still think otherwise, think again: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid 30s, and with autism in my mid 40s. This is through extended, multiple hour testing. Nobody told me I had these issues. I was simply told I was a terrible person that didn't do his school work and behaved poorly at school. Now, with an understanding of autism, ADHD, and the new anxiety disorder I have thanks to a recent brain injury, I'm able to finally address this stuff.

I also aced higher level, computer centric stuff, and set a record for one of the quickest to graduate in my state at a technical school (2 months instead of 2 years).

Bottom line is that you should not be making poor assumptions about people abusing the system without evidence to prove it.

On "parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability" -- for the purposes of standardized testing we've found it extremely difficult and feedback we've heard from others on message boards echoes our experience.

I do feel like a test that is so focused on speed rather than ability seems like it loses a lot of its utility. There's a bunch of math I can't do. It doesn't matter if you give me an hour or two -- I won't be able to do it. But distinguishing between the ability to solve a problem in 30s versus 40s seems to be missing the point.

> If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures

Why is that gated like that?

The reasons I've encountered range from philosophy ("Students don't retain knowledge as well if they rely on recordings") to environment ("I want students to be able to ask questions and be wrong without being recorded") to petty ("I don't like lecturing to a half-empty room").

How come those aren't arguments against recording by students with disability?

They are, but it's a compromise with helping those students succeed.

I’ve been playing a bunch of cool board games recently. Some of them are incredibly complicated and yet really well balanced*. Hiring these game designers to “rebalance” the mechanics of school disability allowances would be a really smart move. After all, a good board game designer’s job is to ensure a fair competition while people literally try to game the system.

Also it would be fun if you had to pick a star card every semester for one off mechanics like:

“red letter day: papers submitted in tuesdays must use red pen and will be graded in black ink”;

“balogna bingo: all sandwich labels through April will include a random number — match four numbers with another student and your next lunch is free!”; or

“vocabulary dairy: free froyo every week for the students in the 90th percentile for how many times they use the words important, therefore, or however in their papers, but you have to agree to buy a Manual of Style (and provide proof of purchase at the froyo counter)”.

*Ironically one is called RA https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12/ra

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.

They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.

It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.

Wow that's interesting! Could you share your sources?

I’m not sure what you mean by “interesting”, can you please explain, ideally by citing a few reputable dictionaries?

I dont know why you're getting downvoted, I see this all the time and its infuriating. Its a deflection tactic to burn peoples time.

I think you answered your own question as to why this is getting downvoted lol

The person I replied to was clearly using sarcasm

Source for amphetamines being a performance enhancing drug? Try some lol.

Really, they're habit forming and destructive so don't take them, but the reason they're so popular is they really do kick you up.

> Try some lol.

Trying amphetamines classically gives short-term euphoria and confidence boost.

There have been a few studies on this. If you give college students amphetamines they will report performing dramatically better, but their actual performance is maybe slightly improved at best and some measures are worsened: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/6/3/58

The notable thing is that they all report doing much better despite the actual results not matching their self-assessment.

So don't "try some" and then think you're going to be speeding around like a superhuman for the rest of your life if you get a prescription.

It's much more likely that ADHD diagnosis is easier to get when trying to get disability benefits and has practically no downsides for the student.

It's much harder to fake deafness or blindness to get that extra housing and exam benefits.

> Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.

My research was done a long time ago. I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless. Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?

Regardless, your overall point is interesting. Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm. If that ostensible harm isn't reflected in reality, and there is a net benefit in having a certain age group accelerate (and, presumably, deepen) their education, perhaps this type of overwhelming regulatory control is a mistake. In that sense, it's a shame that these policies are imposed federally, as comparative data would be helpful.

> I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless.

There is no conclusive research on humans, but you have these backwards. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is thought to have less risk for neurotoxicity than Adderall (amphetamine). Amphetamine enters the neuron and disrupts some internal functions as part of its mechanism of action, while Ritalin does not.

Both drugs will induce tolerance, though. The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.

There are also some entertaining studies where researchers give one group of students placebo and another group of students Adderall, then have them self-rate their performance. The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test. If you've ever seen the confidence boost that comes from people taking their first stimulant doses, this won't come as a big surprise. These early effects (euphoria, excess energy) dissipate with long-term treatment, but it fools a lot of early users and students who borrow a couple pills from a friend.

> The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.

They lasted me 12 years so far. Same dosage.

> The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test.

A feeling of euphoria means your dosage is too high, and people without ADHD probably shouldn’t take these drugs.

If the studies involved people that were on the drugs normally, it’s also not a particularly surprising result. The drugs induce a very real chemical dependency, and you will not feel like yourself or that you are performing when you are off of them.

That is honestly my only complaint. Without the drug, I am essentially a vegetable. If I go cold turkey, I can barely stay awake. However, it’s still a lot better than my life was before.

I went to university at a time that Adderall was commonplace, and am now old enough to see how it turned out for the individuals. At college, it was common for students to illicitly purchase Adderall to use as a stimulate to cram for a test/paper etc. It was likewise common for students to abuse these drugs by taking pills at a faster than prescribed pace to work for 48 hours straight amongst other habits.

In the workplace, I saw the same folks struggle to work consistently without abusive dosages of such drugs. A close friend eventually went into in-patient care for psychosis due to his interaction with Adderall.

Like any drug, the effect wears off - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years. As I recall, the standard dosages of Adderall cease to be effective after 7-10 years due to changes in tolerance. Individuals trying to maintain the same therapeutic effect will either escalate their usage beyond "safe" levels or revert to their unmedicated habits.

The person you're replying to asked for a source, not an anecdote.

In my experience, Adderall does lose effectiveness but Vyvanse is much hardier. I’ve been receiving treatment for ADHD for about 4 years. My current Vyvanse dose is marginally higher than my original Adderall dose, but I’m considering reducing it down to below my original Adderall dose.

Cognitive behavioral therapy does excel at treating ADHD! But 5 years of therapy is what, 16 times more expensive than 5 years of medication? Maybe more? Not to mention the time commitment.

But adderall and vyvanse aren’t the same drug at all. You cannot directly compare dosages. 50mg of vyvanse is roughly equivalent to 20mg of adderall. As a prodrug, Vyvanse must be processed by the liver for it to function.

Indeed. That's why I'm underscoring that my Vyvanse dosage (20mg) is only midly higher than my Adderall dose was a few years ago (15mg).

Lmao, imagine saying this kind of slop to someone with diabetes.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy matches insulin after 5 years”

(because they die - so they’re no longer counted)

The results seem pretty clear that CBT can be quite effective in helping with ADHD.

Unlike insulin, which cannot be produced with any sort of therapy, it does seem that ADHD can be significantly improved.

I'm sorry though that the facts seem to bother you so much.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22480189/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28413900/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32036811/

Imagine posting “sorry that the facts bother you” and then linking to

- A study with a sample a size < 50

- A study that says that medication improves outcomes over CBT

- A study that says that evidence for CBT improving ADHD symptoms comes from studies with such small sample sizes that the conclusions could be the result of bias

The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them. The first two don’t really say that and the third one literally refutes that position.

>The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them.

Fortunately for them, that's often the case. I've seen at least a couple internet arguments with LLM-generated "sources" that didn't actually exist.

I prefer to cycle between addictions of modafinil and caffeine, you shouldn't chronically use 1 drug forever

You get addicted to modafinil? I've tried it. It doesn't cure ADHD but it is remarkably like if those boomer newspaper comic jokes about coffee were actually real.

But… it's not addictive at all. Taking it made me not want to take it again. I was just like damn, I kind of smell like sulfur now.

Adderall doesn't particularly have long-term tolerance. If you're developing tolerance to it, you have a magnesium deficiency and should take magnesium threonate supplements. (Not oxide, the cheap ones, that doesn't work.)

And then remember to drink water, exercise and get enough sleep.

> Cognitive Behavioral Therapy matches prescription drugs at treating ADHD after 5 years.

Apropos of anything else, 5 years of weekly CBT to get to the same result is a _lot_. 260 hours of therapy that, on my current health insurance would cost nearly $12,000 in copays. And during that 5 years you're still dealing with your ADHD to some heavy extent.

> Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.

> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?

Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:

> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.

https://archive.is/20250413091646/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

there is so much wrong with the first few paragraphs of this article

1. some of the things they list as "disabilities" are sicknesses which _can_ be disabling but not per see disabilities

2. all of the things listed aren't one/off but have not just huge gradients, but huge variations. You might be afflicted in a way which "disables" you from living a normal live or job but still might be able to handle university due to how it differs.

3. non of the things list is per-see/directly reducing your ability to have deep understanding in a specialized field. ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university. It's also might make more "traditionally structured jobs" hardly possible for you and bad luck with how professors handle their courses is more likely to screw you over. Anxiety is often enough more topic specific, e.g. social anxiety. This means it can be disabling for many normal jobs but not affect you in universities which don't require you physical presence, but if they do you basically wait out the course and then learn after being back home. In rare cases it can also help with crunch learning before an exam. Etc. etc.

Actually if we go a step future all of the named health issues can make it more likely for you to end up in high standard universities. Hyper focus on specific topics from ADHD might have started your journey into science even as a child. Anxiety might have lead to you studying more. Since might have been an escape from a painful reality which later lead to you developing depression.

If we consider how high standard universities can cause a lot of stress which can cause an out brake of anxiety or depression in some people it just is another data point why we would expect higher number of health issues (if you lump a bunch of very different issues together like they do).

Later they then also throw in autism in the list of mental issues, even through autism always had been higher represented in academia due to how it sometimes comes with "special interests" and make socializing as a child harder, i.e. it can lead to a child very early and very long term focusing on scientific topics out of their fully own interest. (But it doesn't have to, it can also thoroughly destroy you live to a point "learning to cope with it" isn't possible anymore and you are basically crippled as long as you don't luck out massively with your job and environment.)

Honestly the whole article has a undertone of people with "autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression" shouldn't be "elite" university and any accommodations for them should be cut.

Now to be fair accommodations have to be reasonable and you have to learn to cope with your issues. Idk. how they are handled in the US, but from what I have seen in the EU that is normally the case. E.g. with dyslexia and subtle nerve damage making hand writing harder I could have gotten a slight time extensions for any non-multiple choice exams. I didn't bother because it didn't matter all (but one) exams where done in a way where if you know the topic well you can finish in 60-70% of the time and if you don't even 3x time would not help you much (and the extension was like flat 15min). That is except if my nerve damage or dyslexia where worse then I really would have needed the time, not for solving questions but for writing down answers. There was one exam which tested more if you had crammed in all knowledge then testing understanding, in that exam due to dyslexia and my hands not being able to write quite as fast as normal I actually last some points, not because I didn't know but because I wasn't able to write fast enough.

The point here is if done well people which don't need accommodations shouldn't have a huge benefits even if they get them, but people needing it not getting it can mean punishing them for thing unrelated to actual skills. Live will do so enough after university, no need to force it into universities which should focus on excellence of knowledge and understanding.

>ADHD sometimes comes with hyper focus, which if it manifest in the right way can help you in university.

"Hyperfocus" is a clinical term for focus that is excessive enough to be an impairment. People often conflate it with the term "Special interest" used for Autism, but it's completely different, it refers to the inability to pull focus away from something despite wanting and needing to. It is, definitionally, without benefit. If there's a benefit, it's not hyperfocus.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. ADHD is characterized by poor ability to direct attention. People know about it causing a lack of attention to things that need attention, but it can also cause attention to things that don't need it.

yes I don't mean "special interest"

and I'm aware that people with ADHD don't really have any way to direct it

and that it can easily lead to them neglecting everything from them self, over work to social relationships

so it will help more then it hurts in university

but it still can matter before, even if it's just a parent mistaking a hyper focus on some science topic with a special interest in it and then exposing you to more science related stuff earlier one in life

Just training for working at McKinsey after graduation

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

I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.

What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is:

- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)

- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.

through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)

It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.

This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.

Yes, but people who lie are also at fault

Hate the game (the system and the people who set it up and are maintaining it), not the player.

I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.

Add it to their LinkedIn and final evaluation and the problem solves itself

30% of passengers ask for wheelchairs on long distance flights from India. That's how the system gets abused for priority boarding.

It really seems strange to me that single rooms haven't become the norm, especially in light of how many people clearly prefer them. It's one thing to share a kitchen or bathroom in an apartment, but after college, how many people ever share bedrooms with anyone except a partner?

More single young adults 18-29 live with a roommate than alone. Of course people clearly prefer living alone. But it's more expensive. Housing is already expensive, so something that makes it even more expensive is possibly not the best idea.

>In 1990 7.4% of single young adults were living with a roommate, increasing to 8.1% in 2000. From 2010 through 2022 the share was stable, reaching 8.7% in 2022.

>From 1990 through 2016 the share of single young adults living alone remained relatively stable, ranging from 6.0% to 6.8%. However, the share increased to 8.2% in 2022.

Although I think this does include current students.

https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP...

>with a roommate

But in the same bedroom? Because outside the context of a college dorm, I don't think I've really come across "roommate" as referring to sharing a bedroom, and sharing a 2BR apartment is a significantly different situation.

Funny that it keeps getting rediscovered that the statement from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs includes two variables: needs and ability both can and will be reward-hacked.

I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.

The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.

There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.

If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?

In the culture I grew up in, this was considered cheating.

A culture that honored truth telling and integrity. Was that long ago or far away?

"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."

Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.

I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).

So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.

I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).

Sounds entirely consistent with the original story…everyone claims a mental health need because so many others are doing it.

Maybe the difference isn’t morality but accepted norms? Or maybe it’s that single room accommodation is possible now and it wasn’t then?

No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.

This is tragedy of the commons exactly. Whether it's moral depends entirely on the ethical theory you subscribe to.

> a problem with Stanford's definitions

Only if students aren't lying on their application.

> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.

That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.

It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.

What is the honorable value that leads to "I'll get mine screw everybody else"?

I live in liberal cities. Nearly every car drive and bicycle rider has the attitude "F everyone else, I'm going to break every law if I find it inconvenient to myself. Who cares if it affects others"

This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"

People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.

I worded it in a way flexible to meet everyone's morals. Absent someone trying to performatively live a truly philosophically deontological life every person has some line where they will avail themselves of some available lever to remove some awful situation even if someone else might call it "cheating".

Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.

Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.

> people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe

Uh yeah. Moral judgments are about personal beliefs

> The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.

I'm glad you had no problem with "dumpster fuck".

Well, there's meaning and then there's personal style. I didn't want to cramp yours :-)

The direct result of this thinking is that people who need the accommodation face difficulty in getting it.

You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.

But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)

Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.

You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.

> You don’t have to donate to the collection plate

Hey, if they stop using the money I donate to advertise that my neighbors are abominations in the eyes of God they can have my money again.

The "collection plate" could just as well mean a panhandler's hat. The point is charitable giving, not christian specifically.

The problem is that people simply have no investment in a community anymore. This is a direct consequence of globalization and capitalism. Travel to a foreign land, exploit the locals, and return home. Westerners are just now realizing that they're on the receiving end of it now.

I think you're reading more into what I said than what I intended.

I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.

There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.

The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.

Some levers are accessible to everyone, but the implied social contract is that you only pull it if you actually need it, because the system doesn't have enough resources for everyone to do it.

Yes, I agree.

Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.

If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.

Teenagers aren’t getting disability accommodations. Their parents are.

What? The parents of the college students in the article are not the ones being given extra time on tests and being given solo on-campus housing.

What disability accomodations do you think the parents are receiving?

- The parents are getting them FOR their kids. - why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers

> The parents are getting them FOR their kids.

That's not mentioned in the article. Is this your personal speculation or do you have something to support that claim? The article seems to make it clear that it is the students themselves getting these accommodations, so your claim is directly contradicting the article we're commenting on.

> why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers

Well they're definitionally teenagers, and if you know of a way to make teenagers act en masse accountable to society's values, that would be a novel development in social human history going back to Ancient Greece. So barring that, we should treat the teenagers whose brains have not yet developed enough to grasp society-wide consequences for personal actions as such.

If you lie (or exaggerate) about a disability and claim a benefit, you could be denying somebody with more serious disabilities getting the help they need.

I agree. That's not what's happening here.

My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".

The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.

I agree with you that cheating is a loaded word, but the question at the end here that the rules or standards enable users to work around it therefore it's not cheating is a bad semantic argument. We can use the exact same argument to excuse every kind of rule breaking that people do. If a hacker drains a billion dollars out of a smart contract, then they literally were only able to do so because the coded rules of the smart contract itself enabled it through whatever flaw the hacker identified. That doesn't make it less illegal or not cheating for the hacker. It feels like victim blaming to point the finger at the institution being exploited or people who get hacked and say its their problem not the individuals intentionally exploiting them.

> a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation

That point is probably behind someone at Stanford.

This attitude was one of the things that collapsed the former Eastern Bloc. "He who does not steal is stealing from his own family."

Stealing from work was so normalized in the former USSR that it wasn't even considered stealing, just "carrying out". Jobs in meatpacking facilities were highly desired because even though nominal wages were low, workers could make so much more by selling on the black market. The entire system was rotten from top to bottom.

And when everybody else does it (and all assume that everybody does), it really ends up being true. That's why it's so hard to get out of this hole - telling people to "start with yourself" won't cut it, they need to see that others are doing the same as well rather than trying to benefit from the opportunity.

The problem is the promotion of values and behaviors that plague a low-trust society. I think making excuses for it is truly inappropriate and immoral.

While on the one hand I get where you're coming from, on the other hand I simply say "One does not have to go to Stanford."

I suppose stanford does optimize for cheating, but this still seems excessive

I use the word "cheating" like I use the word "hacking." The connotation can be either good or bad or contextually. You are defeating a system. The intent of the cheater/hacker is where we get into moral judgements. (This is a great sub-thread.)

Sadly, society also optimizes for cheating. Meritocracy is a myth.

In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.

This is what it comes down to

Or Stanford is influential enough that it creates the future new world, which now will have far more cheating.

I reviewed incoming applications during one Oxbridge academic application cycle. I raised some serious concerns, nobody listened, and therefore I refuse to take part on that any longer. Basically, lots of students are pretending to be disabled to enhance their chances with applications that are not particularly outstanding, taking spots from truly disabled students.

All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system.

I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks.

Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.

> Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability

It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact.

I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.

That was my point, it is not a disability from an education POV, or at least I would not consider it as such without an independent audit.

> The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud.

If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not:

1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations

2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties

3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!

In the context of academics I’d call it manipulating, exploiting or scamming the housing system, rather than cheating. Just because academic cheating is the center-of-gravity for this type of conversation, and, IMO, a much much bigger deal.

If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?

This whole comment thread has been a crazy way to find out the ways people justify immoral behavior to themselves.

This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.

So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.

That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.

(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)

"It's always been this way" and "everyone does it" are what bad people say to justify themselves.

Donald Trump won twice. Republican party is mostly cheering everything he does. Ho won by lying a lot. Media mostly sanewashed it. Meanwhile, GOP complained they did not sanewashed it enough.

HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago.

The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.

This isn't about Trump, it's about a lack of morality among students at one of the (formerly) most prestigious universities in the US.

Compared to what Trump does, what his voters cheers on, what the whole his party defends, those students are still basically saints. It is profoundly hypocritical to look at who gets to win and lead, to look at what does not bother his voters at all and then complain abet ... check notes ... someone getting single room on some exaggerated claim.

And frankly, with HN praising Uber, Tesla and the rest of SV constantly breaking laws and rules companies, again, those students are practically saints.

OP worried about this:

> Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.

Trump winning second time, the people who lead government and GOP, the critical mass thing already happened. There was no moral already among significant share of population. Trying to pearl clutch over students is almost funny in that context.

It’s all connected. We are in an era where cheating is applauded and shame is non existent. Trump is not the sole cause of it but he is a contributor.

Do you think my comment is doing that? Or are you just commenting on the other comments.

FWIW, just to be clear, I don’t think “manipulating, exploiting or scamming” are good things to do!

> If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?

It isn't, but if I'm on the hiring end and I know you play games like this, I'm not hiring you. I can work with less competent folks much better.

I suppose so, but nonetheless it still likely harms the rest of the students who are honest by raising the price of housing for all students.

The diploma or credentials should be marked with the conditions of admission. That would prevent abuse from those who don't or shouldn't qualify for special admission conditions.

...and punish those who genuinely develop or suffer from some new condition after admittal.

And make real disabled people unemployable.

It means that the action we should take in response to this article is "building more dorms with singles" rather than "we need to rethink the way that we are making accommodations for disabilities in educational contexts".

That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.

I worked in residential life while in college and can tell you that placing freshmen in singles is a horrible idea. It leads to isolation and lets mental health issues fester. Some need it but you do not want to place anyone who doesn’t into a room alone especially in their first year.

Meh. I think you're overstating it. To meet your anecdata, I had both the first college year, and single > double by a large margin.

It depends on the person. I lived alone in my last year of undergrad and it sent me into a deep depression. I figured out that living alone was too much isolation for me and moved back in with a roommate. That helped to pull me out of my depression and be able to finish my degree.

I don't think people advocating for more single rooms would say that no multi-occupancy rooms should exist for people who do want them.

I would not classify it as anecdata. This was research backed policy adopted by most US universities. Residential life and the Dean of Students office are usually doing a lot to cooperate with other universities. This part of US colleges is not competing with each other so they routinely share data, go to conferences together multiple times a year, and res. life directors move from college to college every few years so they all know each other incredibly well.

The point is that everyone who gets a single is super happy about it the same way that a drug addict is always happy when they get their drug of choice for free: of course it’s great. Of course it isn’t the best thing for you in the long run. I say this as someone who hated being in a double my first year and spent the next three in a single.

As far as I am concerned having apartments of 4-8 students where each has their own small room but shares a common space is ideal. But usually this is reserved for sophomore year and later.

I agree in that freshmen should get the "experience" at least once. However, the way Stanford has arranged housing has meant that a good number of students will not live in a single for any of their 4 years.

Yet here in the UK it's perfectly normal. When I went to uni in 2000 in our halls there were 15 rooms per floor ber block, 2 of which were twins and 13 were single.

The people in the twins were not happy - they hadn't asked for them.

I knew one person who dropped out in the first 3 months (for mental purposes), and that was someone who shared a room.

Before you went to college, did you have a bedroom to yourself in your parents' home?

Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.

Lol, what an uniquely USA point of view.

I can't say I agree since I seen many people struggling with being forced into close quarters with a complete stranger that they might have nothing in common with or actively dislike and have nowhere truly private.

Maybe its fine for many extroverts, but forcing an introvert into a room with others is a great way to drive many people absolutely mental.

True, but unfortunately the response from Stanford has been to introduce triple and quad rooms ;)

This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).

I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.

The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.

I mean, they watch our president, who got a JET for god knows what, and after seeing that, why shouldn't they grab for the bag?

Cheating to get limited housing benefits starves those limited resources from truly disabled students who actually need them.

Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.

Still shitty privileged behavior, and any doctor providing a diagnosis just to get a kid a better dorm room, should immediately have his or her license revoked.

I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.

Yes, my comment doesn't apply to you. Sorry if I implied that it did.

Did anyone else actually enjoy dorm life? I was a freshman some years ago, so maybe it’s generational, but it was a very fond time.

I guess it’s probably high variance. My roomate was a great dude. I can easily see how it could go the other way.

i remember being woken up at 3am by him vomiting in the middle of the room. In the morning he used my swiffer to clean up his vomit. I told him to keep the swiffer .

On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.

Yeah fair fair. It's high variance. My roommate once had a bunch of his highschool friends over for a weekend and one of them sleep-peed onto my roommate's stack of books.

I had a bad roommate who when I asked the people in the house to turn the music down he would tell them to turn it up, and he constantly had annoying guests in our tiny room. Fuck Patrick you know who you are..

Seems like evidence of profound moral decline that students would do that.

not even moral decline! I’d personally feel like a fraud every day if I “made it“ by using 5 different _unnecessary_ accommodations. Where is the satisfaction in that?

I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters.

People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.

It doesn't bury the lede; housing isn't mentioned at all, anywhere in the article.

Your additional insights are interesting and believable, however.

Is this better or worse than nepo babies, white privilege or other normal social status benefits for college?

Being born to rich white people doesn't provide positive reinforcement for sleazy behavior at an age where people are likely to take the lesson seriously.

So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;

Were full atm. Please stand inline behind the ICE bootlickers

It would be interesting to test that maybe by looking at the disability rate before and after the honor code was changed recently. If there was an increase in disabilities, it might be because other cheating options on exams were limited.

For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.

Follow the incentives

"buries the lede"

oh how I hate this phrase

It's used inaccurately in OP's comment, too, because housing isn't mentioned in the article at all. So it's not "buried."

Uh it leaves out one of the more important things that you also get more time for exams

this is very educational, on how being a victim an a psychopath helps you in life:)

Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things.

The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias...

I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions.

[rant]

Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about.

[/rant]

So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you?

[0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis.

[1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased

[2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM)

[3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8

[4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say?

[5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.

>> I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet

Maybe, but my single data point: I'm on the board for a condo corporation and even though we spend a lot of time dealing with pet policies and the damage pets (read: dogs) cause, we have a total of ZERO pets registered (and paying the monthly fee), and these are overwhelmingly owners not renters who might be excluded from having pets to begin with.

I appreciate the insight, I'm definitely conjecturing there and I'm sure there's a lot of variables.

I'm curious, is this a few bad owners ruining it for everyone or commonplace. My suspicion is the former, as those things typically follow power distributions.

But I think the complete lack of options forces people's hands. If you're a pet owner, what do you do? The option of paying a pet deposit and monthly fee is either simply not available or extremely limited. So I think it is a bit natural that the abuse of the ESA system happened. My options are get rid of my cat or get an ESA. It's an obvious choice. And with the ESA you cannot deny me rent nor charge extra. That's why I call it the nuclear option. I've always offered to pay a deposit but when told there's a no pet policy it turns into "oh, sorry, I 'forgot' to mention she's an ESA". Most people I know with ESAs never make the first offer.

Truth is that there was an arms race and the pet owners won. The question now is if it is more profitable to charge for pets or get no extra money for ESAs. Either way people will not give up their pets. I have a legitimate rec but I know you can get them for pretty cheap. So whats the move from here? I suspect the best move is for landlords to at least try to get money for the pets that are there anyways.

Note: the ESA issue is only a minor part of my comment. I don't personally care about this issue beyond keeping my cat. But the other uses I'm much more concerned about

>but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse.

This is a good point. I suspect that even without increased awareness around ADHD or autism, we'd still be seeing an increase in diagnoses because of the increased intensity of modern stuff

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