As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.
That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic.
The way my brain works is just fundamentally incompatible with school. Starting from fundamentals and building up just doesn't work for me. Especially when we spend six months on fundamentals that I grokked in the first three weeks. The way I learn is totally backwards. I start from the top, high-level concepts and dig down into the fundamentals when I hit something I don't understand. The tradeoff is that the way I think is so radically different from my colleagues that I can come up with novel solutions to any problem posed to me. On the other hand, solving problems is almost a compulsion.
That said, if I had the option I'd choose a normal childhood over being a smart engineer. Life has been extremely unkind to me.
lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.