FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth."
For example, I have OCD (real, diagnosed, not the bs "omg im so ocddddd"). I have extra time accommodations because I have to spend time dealing with my OCD symptoms. With treatment, they tend to fade into the background. They re-emerge only in high stress situations. I would seem like a perfectly normal student in class, but then clearly start struggling with these symptoms if you watched me take an exam. Consider, many other students you teach may have these same experiences.
An unpleasant fact of law-school faculty life is that, at least at my school, I'm required to grade students so that the average is between 3.2 (a high B) and 3.4 (a low B-plus). Because of the nature of my course [0], a timed final exam is about the only realistic way to spread out The Curve.
Like it or not, there are life changing impacts to others by cheating at this stuff. This is unambiguously cheating.
Success as a lawyer often requires the ability to handle a certain amount of pressure. Timed exams are one way of screening for that ability. But it's by no means a sure-fire predictor of success: Legendary trial lawyer Joe Jamail [0] flunked his first-year Torts class at UT Austin [1], yet went on to become a billionnaire.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Jamail
[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2015/12/r-i-p-to-a-billionaire-lawye...
I'm not aware of many jobs where employers don't care how fast the work gets done.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I never met Joe Jamail, but by reputation there was a lot about him that I didn't especially admire.)
But it's beyond rational dispute that Joe Jamail was one of the most successful trial lawyers of our era.
It really depends on the perception of whether the goal of the extension is to give disabled students an edge over "normal" students or to give everyone a fair(not necessarily equal) opportunity to complete the test.
To explain in more detail. The ADA says that an accommodation is when an entity (business, employer, school) makes a change of behavior. Installing a wheelchair ramp in an older inaccessible building is an accomodation. Granting extra time is an accomodation. Simply having accessible buildings or excessive time is not an accomodation.
But why the lawyers treat it differently. Business feel comfortable, when they have a ramp, arguing that no accommodation is necessary for the wheelchair bound. The standards of accessible physical design are clear. Schools do not feel comfortable saying that no accommodation is necessary for mental health issues, ever. Their lawyers advise them that it's much better to give some sort of accomodation and argue in court about sufficient accomodations vs giving no accomodation at all.
If you lie about having a disability to get extra time, you're falsely gaining an advantage over other students taking the same test. That's cheating.
I had an ADHD assessment after my mom was diagnosed (she is typical type, forgets everything), and they diagnosed me, and gave the following official recommendations:
"Patient must be provided with extra time for all tests & assignments as he cannot focus due to ADHD."
I never said I needed anything like this. In fact, I said the opposite. I would typically be one of the first to finish, because I had studied appropriately!