ADHD Accommodations Discussion

[MaebyFünke]

Hi all, 

I wanted to hear a bit more about the situation with exam accommodations at other schools. I also want to note before my comments that I have an ADHD diagnosis, and have declined to pursue accommodations for exams as I feel it would simply be making the problem worse. 

The accommodations office at my university has told us that 1/3rd of our class accesses accommodations. That was just at the beginning of 1L, and I suspect those numbers have gone up. I think accommodations are incredibly important and that law school should be as accessible as possible.

However, what I am seeing and what many of my friends at school have expressed, seems quite the opposite. Speaking with other students, many folks with accommodations are diagnosed with ADHD and receive anywhere from time and a half to double time. When grades are on such a tight curve, it is frustrating to know just how many of our peers are receiving additional time yet we are graded against them. This wouldn't be such an issue if the purpose of many of these examinations was simply to test how quickly you can recite this information. Any additional time students have would increase their grades substantially. And due to the formula we are curved on, this can likely send you down an entire letter grade. If we were not graded on a curve, this would not bother me in the slightest.  I think there is further frustration that many students who are known to have accommodations have received the gold medal in classes and have received spots on the deans list. To put it plainly, the system feels unfair, and I know first hand that some students are simply taking advantage of it. 

Some profs have found a way around this issue, using take home exams of 8 hours, which puts everyone on a level playing field. I think it seems that this method would be a better universal standard. I also think stop time is simply a more appropriate intervention for ADHD diagnoses. However, these are very seldom utilized at my school and instead additional writing time is often awarded. 

I'm interested to know if this is a similar problem happening at other schools, or if this is more unique to our student body and accommodations policy. Would love to hear about if you have any ideas to address this as well which are still inclusive to those with accommodations while not disadvantaging the wider student population. 

Edited April 6 by MaebyFünke

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

I’m sorry. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around this post. What’s the objection to students diagnosed with ADHD accessing accommodations? If the issue is that there are "questionable claims" and accommodations abuse, it's hard to combat this since restrictive policies may incidentally preclude people with genuine need. 
 

Take home exams have their own (significant) risks, namely, AI.

Edited April 6 by MyWifesBoyfriend

[Naj]

Imagine going through life giving a shit about someone else taking more time on an exam

[imdoingokthanksforasking]

Not sure if im interpreting your post correctly, but my school seems to be situated similarly. Its a tricky problem. Some people really do need accommodated exams that require more time. However, there are definitely people who are vocal about acquiring accommodations because they "wanted" more time, when they were already an average or above student before receiving accommodations. While I typically would not care at all about someone else taking more time on an exam, grades seem to be one of the most important factors when it comes to employment. To be graded on the same curve really isn't fair, especially when the same people are vocal about how well they do. A lot of the exams I am taking seem to be less about how well you know the content but how fast you can do it in. Hard to compete. Just food for thought. Interesting to hear its been observed elsewhere. 

[Steve from Stevenage]

2 hours ago, MaebyFünke said:

Hi all, 

I wanted to hear a bit more about the situation with exam accommodations at other schools. I also want to note before my comments that I have an ADHD diagnosis, and have declined to pursue accommodations for exams as I feel it would simply be making the problem worse.

If it's such a massive advantage and everyone is doing it... you should too!

If only to discover that it's probably not going to help you.

Lovett & Leja on how ADHD students perform worse when given extended time on exams.

Anecdotally, I got accommodations for my ADHD after my first year of law school... and my GPA went down marginally. As described by the authors, the ADHD brain is too smart to be tricked into being on time for anything. More time just means less urgency. I love my brain sometimes.

Now, they (and others) found that extra time is very beneficial for non-ADHD people! Which is why it's always very annoying to hear classmates brag about how they scammed their accommodations with a family doctor who doesn't care either way. But if you're going to waste your breath being upset at that unfairness, I'd hate to introduce you all the other unfair advantages that have a much greater impact on your outcome in law and life, like nepotism and class and race.

This post is coming across as snarkier than I intend it to be. It sucks when some people take advantage of things that most of us cannot, regardless of what that is. But targeting "ADHDers with time accommodations" is not it. Why don't you get involved with your school's disability club and advocate for a better system for everyone?

And in the meantime: take your accommodations where you can get them. If it helps, that's what they're there for. And if not, then at least you might not be as upset!

[pastmidnight]

I know most of the people in my year who receive additional time. If profs were to separate out everyone who writes with additional time after they’ve graded an exam, and look at the curve for the group who writes with extra time and the group that does not, I think they would be fairly similar. The group with extra time might have a few more people at the top and a few more people at the bottom, but I am just not convinced that additional time is propelling people to the top of the class the way a lot of people seem to think. Before I started law school, I would scoff at the users on here who said that part of law school performance is innate, and has nothing to do with hard work, but now that I’m about to graduate, I do think they were right. Some people come into law school with certain skills that are going to help them get better grades than their peers. Other people, no matter how hard they work and how much extra time they have, just don’t have “it”. And some of the people who do have “it” need accommodations.

I also think it’s important to note that a large chunk of people who write with extra time do not do so because they have ADHD, but because they have anxiety or a history of concussions. Extra time is a cushion for these students because they’re managing symptoms that impact their ability to actually think/write/etc. They aren’t really getting the benefit of extra time because they are not functioning optimally during the exam’s entirety.

I will say that that I am in 3L and have heard that there seems to have been an explosion in requests for extra time in the two years below me (more than the maybe ~25% in my year, and more than the 1/3 in your year), and what I’m saying might no longer hold true if, say, 50% or more of a class is receiving extra time, but that isn’t because of students with ADHD, it’s because, as @Steve from Stevenage pointed out, there are students who do not have ADHD exploiting the system.

This is a complicated issue, and I’m not sure how schools are going to resolve it. There are absolutely people who exploit the system (and openly brag about doing so), but any attempts to crack down on accommodations will inevitably impact people who legitimately need them. As others have said, the problem is not students with ADHD, it’s students who do not have ADHD who go to a family member who is a doctor or a green NP and get a bogus ADHD diagnosis, then brag about exploiting the system. The students who do this have often had every advantage in life (e.g. private school, tutors, never having to work part time, etc), and yet for some reason their ‘accomplishments’ (achieved through class privilege and cheating) are never questioned, but the accomplishments of students who legitimately have ADHD are. Seconding @Steve from Stevenage that nepotism, class, race (and gender) are going to have much, much greater impacts on your outcomes in life and law than classmates using their accommodations.

[StoneMason]

3 hours ago, Steve from Stevenage said:

Lovett & Leja on how ADHD students perform worse when given extended time on exams.

Anecdotally, I got accommodations for my ADHD after my first year of law school... and my GPA went down marginally. As described by the authors, the ADHD brain is too smart to be tricked into being on time for anything. More time just means less urgency. I love my brain sometimes.

 

Also anecdotally –– majority of the top performers, as measured by students who landed the most prestigious clerkships/jobs/etc., in my batch did not have additional time. OP's suggestion that additional time --> better grades is not proven. As someone who has not had additional time (and has not needed it), I have no problem with students who need it getting it. 

Regarding people gaming the system, I don't think this is different to any other instance in life where people will try to abuse a situation if they can get away with it. The issue in this case is that there is no practical way to find out who is lying and who has a genuine need. But since we don't even know whether it helps the gamers (or how to identify them), hyperfocusing on this issue is a losing mentality.

My unsolicited advice for OP and anyone else worried about these gamers is to stop worrying about these types of situations and focus on yourself. Otherwise, you'll spend your entire life complaining about people taking advantage of one thing or another. 

Edited April 7 by StoneMason

[BHC1]

2 hours ago, StoneMason said:

As someone who has not had additional time (and has not needed it)

I think academic accommodations are great, but let’s not kid ourselves. If you gave the average law student more time to write exams, they’d probably have better grades.

[Renerik]

18 hours ago, Steve from Stevenage said:

Lovett & Leja on how ADHD students perform worse when given extended time on exams.

That's not what the paper says. In the mini lit review/intro the authors discuss how students with ADHD benefit from extra time, but non-ADHD students benefit more from extra time. The study and analysis is focused on the difference in the extent of the benefit - it does not suggest that extra time lowers performance, even for students with ADHD. (The abstract is admittedly a little confusing, DM me if you don't have access to the paper through your school's library).

[scooter]

If you look at what the study was actually measuring, it has basically no relevance to the discussion here.

"Some features of this study may limit the conclusions that can be drawn. [...] our main dependent variable was a reading comprehension test where the actual stakes for participants were low, whereas accommodations are typically for exams with real implications for students’ lives. Because students’ results on the NDRT had no effect on any grades, it is possible that students did not put forth their best effort. Finally, we administered the NDRT in a highly speeded fashion (i.e., with a very short time limit), and it is likely that this affected our results, because many participants were unable to finish the test under our “standard” 10-min time limit."

[thrill]

17 hours ago, BHC1 said:

I think academic accommodations are great, but let’s not kid ourselves. If you gave the average law student more time to write exams, they’d probably have better grades.

yeah i felt like i was taking crazy pills reading this thread lol

[Scrantonicity2]

I sense you coming at this from a sincere place, but I'm going to push back pretty strongly. I had to go through the accommodation process for the first time while in law school (I had two previous degrees and worked a while). In my case, I needed accommodations for a disability I acquired during school. The process was  unhelpful, humiliating, and infantilizing. I had to grovel and bare my soul to pages of forms and faceless bureaucrats to get (in the end) a lot less than I needed. 

And...I've ended up with As and A+s in some classes where I had accommodations. Because the point is to remove disability-based barriers that arbitrarily keep people from being able to engage to their full potential.

I get that the curve can create this niggling awareness of perceived advantages that other people are getting. I actually like things like the 8-hour take-home that you mentioned (I've had a few structured similarly), because its an example of universal design (aka - creating processes without barriers in the first place).

But people are being put through the ringer to get those accommodations. If people are making it sound easy, they're either lucky, full of it, or just don't want to trauma dump on you like I just did (lol). Given how aggressively admins seem to try to gatekeep accommodations, I now feel pretty confident that people who get them need them. 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

On 4/7/2025 at 4:27 PM, Scrantonicity2 said:

But people are being put through the ringer to get those accommodations. If people are making it sound easy, they're either lucky, full of it, or just don't want to trauma dump on you like I just did (lol). Given how aggressively admins seem to try to gatekeep accommodations, I now feel pretty confident that people who get them need them. 

I have accommodations related to ADHD and some other things. If the accessibility advisor is here, they will know who I am based on my following comments. 
 

I had so much medical documentation, and that from specialists of all kinds. My accessibility advisor was speaking to me as if they did not believe me at all - despite all of my documentation. It was extremely dehumanizing and VERY upsetting.

 

So on top of that I got a psycho-educational/neuro-psych assessment done (which I recommend everyone get done as if it shows that you have a disability you can get it reimbursed via your student loan provider). 
 

It quite literally quantified my deficits. 
 

I sent it to my advisor and the next time I spoke to them on the phone, their tone had taken a 180 and they were referencing things in the psych-ed.

 

I was pissed and they also noticed my anger in my tone. 
 

Before our meeting I had already started a request to have my advisor changed. At some point my advisor was changed without me being notified. 
 

I ran into this advisor a few weeks ago and they didn’t recognize me at something we were both at. I mentioned my name and the look on their face was one of “I don’t know what to say” and the only thing that came out was “I’m glad to see you still engaged in advocacy”. 
 

I think that their approach has become more understanding. 
 

I had piles of documents from all kinds of specialists before I had the psych-ed. Even my ADHD assessment was done by a clinic that makes you see a counsellor first to rule out PTSD. Yet I experienced what I did. 
 

I can’t imagine what others who don’t have even a quarter of the documentation that I had experience. 
 

It is as if the psych-ed is king. Which doesn’t make sense because not everything going on with me is a learning disability and/or ADHD. 

 

 

[WillJ]

I think it is fine if there is a word limit in the exam. However, the case is different if there is no word limit. I see people posting their answers of 6,000 words for a 3-hour-long exam (I did not realize they probably have an accommodation). I have trouble reaching 3,500 words (but I don’t think I have ADHD). I thought I was just a slow writer, but it turned out most people without an accommodation could only type 4,500 words or so in three hours...  In this case, I feel there is a great risk of unfairness because it seems like those people are taking too great an advantage from their accommodation.

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

2 hours ago, WillJ said:

In this case, I feel there is a great risk of unfairness because it seems like those people are taking too great an advantage from their accommodation.

More likely it is pre-writes. You can spot these a mile away on exam databases if large parts of the exam answer seem scripted, and there are weird sentences shoehorned in here and there. Less likely that it’s someone “gaming” the system.

Edited April 12 by MyWifesBoyfriend

[Patient0L]

On 4/6/2025 at 10:58 AM, MaebyFünke said:

I think there is further frustration that many students who are known to have accommodations have received the gold medal in classes and have received spots on the deans list.

So… does this mean that people with disabilities shouldn’t be academically successful or that people who are academically successful must not be disabled?

[SNAILS]

“Real” vs. “Fake” ADHD: Who Deserves Accommodations?

It’s not always easy to distinguish between students with “real” ADHD and those who might be taking advantage of the system—perhaps by seeing a sympathetic doctor or leveraging personal connections. Law schools grant accommodations not just for ADHD, but for a wide range of learning disabilities, mental health conditions, and personal hardships. Even within ADHD itself, no two cases are the same.

To be clear: I absolutely condemn anyone who deliberately games the system. But I also don’t believe that many students are truly doing that. More commonly, I think students with legitimate learning challenges will try to “formalize” their struggles through diagnosis and documentation. Meanwhile, other students with similar difficulties might opt out of seeking help, seeing themselves as the type who “don’t need accommodations.”

If you're losing sleep before an exam, if stress knots your stomach, or if anxiety affects your ability to focus—then you’re dealing with a learning-related issue. And that experience is incredibly common in law school.

So Should Everyone Get Accommodations?

That’s the question I keep coming back to. The sheer volume of students dealing with exam-related stress makes me wonder whether we should be accommodating everyone. Of course, that’s not practical. But sticking to a system where, say, 30% of the class gets extra time while the rest don’t inevitably distorts the grading curve. It creates a false sense of meritocracy.

Are ADHD Diagnoses Truly Objective?

Some people might claim that ADHD diagnoses rely on objective, standardized criteria. To that I say—LOL. In reality, these diagnoses are highly subjective, depending heavily on who’s doing the diagnosing. Beyond that, the outcome often hinges on how far a student is willing to go to get the diagnosis and the accommodation.

It’s not just about having a condition—it’s about being able to navigate a bureaucratic system to prove you have it.

The Real Struggles of Students with Legitimate ADHD

I’ve read comments from students who had to jump through endless hoops to get accommodations. I genuinely sympathize. It’s not fair that you had to waste time, energy, and emotional bandwidth just to access a level playing field.

But part of that struggle might be explained by the system itself becoming overloaded—with more students seeking accommodations and a growing backlash from classmates who feel the system isn’t fair.

Does Extra Time Actually Help?

Yes. In most cases, yes. I’ve asked professors after exams what I could’ve done to bump my grade up to an A or A+. The typical feedback? My analysis was solid, but I didn’t quote statutes in full, I could’ve cited case law more thoroughly, or expanded on key arguments.

This is on an open-book exam. The materials were right there in my notes. I knew where the answers were. I just didn’t have enough time to write them all down.

Pop quiz: Which rule in the Ontario Family Law Rules covers serving pleadings on a government agency that’s an assignee of child support? Think an extra 10 minutes might help you find it? (lol)

Other Forms of Unfairness: Nepotism, Class, Race

Accommodations aren’t the only form of unfairness in law school. For example, study groups often collaborate on take-home exams that are meant to be done solo. That’s a real problem, too.

Still, today’s conversation is about extra time and learning accommodations—not every kind of inequity under the sun. We wouldn’t excuse open racism in hiring by saying, “Well, there are other ways the system is unfair.” Likewise, we shouldn’t ignore the impact of accommodations just because other forms of privilege exist.

As for discrimination—most firms today don’t openly exclude based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. In fact, many are actively trying to reverse historic biases through DEI policies. Free market forces also play a role—if one firm passes on a top-tier candidate for a bad reason, another will likely snap them up.

Nepotism, on the other hand, still happens. But can you really fault a sole practitioner for hiring their own kid? Larger firms usually have guardrails—like hiring panels and objective evaluation criteria—to prevent that kind of favoritism.

The Free Market Paradox

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we can perfectly separate students with legitimate disabilities from those without. Even then, an interesting paradox arises.

Suppose there’s a law student—let’s call him Steve—who has ADHD and gets accommodations. If Steve needs different conditions to perform well in law school, what does that say about his ability to function as a lawyer?

Can he deliver high-quality work under the same time pressure and conditions as everyone else? If not, then is it fair to a Bay Street firm that hires him based on his stellar grades, only to discover he can’t meet the practical demands of the job?

The free market tends to sort these things out. If Steve can’t keep up, he might not get a callback. Or he might find a niche that works for him. But it raises a real question: What’s the purpose of law school grades if they don’t reflect the realities of legal work?

Edited April 12 by SNAILS

[WillJ]

12 hours ago, MyWifesBoyfriend said:

More likely it is pre-writes. You can spot these a mile away on exam databases if large parts of the exam answer seem scripted, and there are weird sentences shoehorned in here and there. Less likely that it’s someone “gaming” the system.

Anyway, I feel there is a need for a word limit so that an exam would not become a typing competition

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

1 hour ago, WillJ said:

Anyway, I feel there is a need for a word limit so that an exam would not become a typing competition

I agree. Word limits are always the better option. 

[helloall]

2 hours ago, MyWifesBoyfriend said:

I agree. Word limits are always the better option. 

SILENCE.

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

2 hours ago, helloall said:

SILENCE

It takes 0 skill to info-dump the entire course for a H. Change my mind.

Edited April 12 by MyWifesBoyfriend

[helloall]

18 hours ago, MyWifesBoyfriend said:

It takes 0 skill to info-dump the entire course for a H. Change my mind.

THAT'S THE POINT.

[StoneMason]

1 hour ago, helloall said:

THAT'S THE POINT.

This guy gets it.

[ProudCrocodile]

Apparently the process for getting accommodation varies among schools. I probably go to the same school with OP as I also heard about that 1/3 of the student body gets some sort of accommodation here. Based on the stories I heard, it is not a super onerous process to receive accommodation by defer a deadline or by extending exam time. However, I have friends from another law school in the province telling me how hard it was for them to get accommodation

[CroffleKing]

On 4/12/2025 at 2:19 AM, SNAILS said:

Are ADHD Diagnoses Truly Objective?

Some people might claim that ADHD diagnoses rely on objective, standardized criteria. To that I say—LOL. In reality, these diagnoses are highly subjective, depending heavily on who’s doing the diagnosing. Beyond that, the outcome often hinges on how far a student is willing to go to get the diagnosis and the accommodation.

It’s not just about having a condition—it’s about being able to navigate a bureaucratic system to prove you have it.

SNAILS, it really depends on how the diagnosis is done rather than who is doing it. It's true that there are many people being misdiagnosed with ADHD by family doctors, NPs, and unscrupulous psychologists or psychiatrists trying to make a quick buck through this online ADHD testing industry that has cropped up. I think you're implying agreement with this when you say depending heavily on who's doing the diagnosing, but it also seems you are implying how subjective the diagnosis is depends on the professional background of who did it which unfortunately is not the case because people get 'ripped off' by psychologists and psychiatrists when they're seeking a diagnosis all the time. It also sounds like maybe you suggest that ADHD diagnosis is always subjective which isn't true.

If the testing involves performance based measures that involve completing a number of novel tasks while a clinical or educational psychologist (or even better, a neuropsychologist) and their assistant observe and record the performance and then a statistical analysis is conducted to determine where someone fits compared to a norm group, it becomes very objective/standardized. When that is coupled with psychometric tests for malingering or other attempts to distort the scores, it's pretty solid. That is then coupled with things like interviewing the person and collateral sources, as well as records review in the report and then the formulation of the diagnosis.

To your point though, most people don't go through this process and find the easier route to get the answer and obviously there are people who got diagnosed through this pathway who do have ADHD and there are also many who go through that pathway who don't have ADHD but got the diagnosis - in the best case scenario, they get accommodations and medication they don't truly need and the underlying cause of their focus/attention/concentration issues is never found (anxiety, depression, trauma and many other issues commonly cause these symptoms) or the actual learning disability isn't identified (like specific learning disability like dyslexia or dysgraphia). In worst case scenarios, people end up on a high daily dose psychostimulant when they don't need it and experience an amphetamine induced psychosis or mania and don't get insight into what the medication is doing to them until it's too late because they feel euphoric, goal directed, and motivated. I do agree with you that it's not true that a ton of people are intentional trying to get the diagnosis to game the system for accommodations - usually they have something legit going on, and it gets misinterpreted as ADHD by the person experiencing it and by their doctor.

If the diagnosis comes from talking to a family doctor for 10 minutes and filling out a questionnaire with 5 questions on it, or these phone or video call based ADHD diagnosing services or weird clinics that exist just to diagnose ADHD without doing a full assessment, it's definitely suspect. While ADHD specifically is a diagnosis made based on behavioral observation if you review the diagnostic criteria, the 'state of the art' of assessing for ADHD involves collateral info from informants and review of records to establish some reasonableness in assuming symptoms were present since childhood, a semi-structured interview protocol that takes an hour or two (like the DIVA), completion of self-report measures with embedded validity measures to detect attempts to manipulate the test (like the Brown EF/A, BRIEF, or Conners), and performance based psychometric assessments that look at executive functioning (like the DKEFS, Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure, or Wisconsin Card Sort Test). 

I note this to illustrate that there are definitely some criteria schools could be applying to better distinguish an affirmative diagnosis that most other mental health professionals would agree with and agree that the assessment protocol was reliable and produced a valid diagnosis, vs a diagnosis most mental health professionals would treat as a 'rule out' 'provisional diagnosis' 'suspected' sort of level of certainty if they looked at how someone else came to the opinion about the person in front of them. I also feel like if all schools made it very clear that they require a more in-depth assessment, it would reduce some of the hardships people experience when they're told they have ADHD when really it's something else that also qualifies for accommodations and requires different treatment than ADHD and would as a secondary benefit in my mind remedy some of the concerns people raise about fairness.

Many schools do require more than a note from a psychologist or doctor or at least a summary from the person who formulated the diagnosis detailing how they came to the diagnosis and expect to see norm-referenced psychometric tests included for things like 1.5x/2x time, a distraction free private testing room that is proctored, or other significant accommodations. Some will also take evidence from high school that the person qualified for an individualized education plan and what those accommodations were. Many schools also don't care and just need some kind of note to establish documentation and that is super easy for most people to get if they have time and money, and I feel like that's a problem that should be easily addressed.

In my view for anyone wondering if they're taking advantage of something unfairly: if schools aren't going to put in place a more clearly defined standard for what they'll accept I don't think it's something students should be concerning themselves with. If you think you have ADHD and got told that by someone who can diagnose the condition and is willing to write it down, it's kind of on the health care provider and the school if something ends up being unfair or someone gets hurt or develops a substance use problem by being given a prescription to take stimulants daily when they don't need them.