zlacker

>>delich+(OP)
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.

>>shetay+xc
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.

>>Aurorn+jx
> 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.

>>bawolf+JD
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.

>>Walter+I51
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.

>>godels+1d1
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.)

>>LorenP+yo1
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.

>>Walter+Jp1
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"