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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

I believe that this entire thing is a moral panic.

The only evidence anybody has ever provided is that students are top universities are more likely to have registered disabilities. The conclusion you are supposed to draw from this is that students at top universities are fraudulently accessing accommodations that make their coursework easier such that they have inflated grades and an unfair advantage in the job market. And then you are supposed to conclude that we need a large overhaul in the way that disability accommodations work at universities.

There are about five steps that are needed to go from the evidence to these conclusions, none of which are supported by evidence.

I do not believe that there is any compelling reason to seek a solution here.

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Thanks for writing this out. I don’t agree at all but that’s fine.

What is your opinion of one of the most concerning counterpoint (in my opinion): that we are normalizing prescription stimulants and accommodations for individuals that otherwise don’t need them / could succeed without them.

Know that I don’t really care too too much from a fairness standpoint, especially in the professional workplace. I’m most concerned with subjecting a generation of people to a reliance of stimulants and secondly concerned about the affects on the ability for HS and university educators to assess and evaluate their students.

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Edit: Third and less seriously, a hypothetical: if I learned that >40% of our elite students or young professionals were on Xanax, cocaine, ketamine, or encapsulated meth or required an assistant to take notes and record lectures I would be appalled. How would you interpret this?

My thought is that it is a clear signal of a social or cultural malady if our best and brightest - as a population - are strongly overrepresented in their reliance on disability accommodations or prescription drugs.

> What is your opinion of one of the most concerning counterpoint (in my opinion): that we are normalizing prescription stimulants and accommodations for individuals that otherwise don’t need them / could succeed without them.

First, the question of university accommodations is completely separate from the question of prescription medicine. I don't have any opinion about the rate of prescriptions for things like ADHD, largely because I have no information. For university accommodations I am not aware of compelling evidence that they are being over-granted for people who do not need them. Notice how all of this panic stops at "lots of people have listed disabilities" and don't actually demonstrate that these people are getting oodles of accommodations. My experience as a spouse of a professor is that a ton of students with registered disabilities nevertheless do not get any form of special treatment and there has been literally zero change in her ability to evaluate students even when they do get accommodations.

You can be concerned about stimulants if you want. That is a totally different topic.

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