Disabilities

I received an interesting question recently from Nick, instructor at Mentor Test Prep in DC:

Several LSAT students have asked me what sort of discount an LSAT score that is won under accommodated testing conditions (usually extra time) is given in the minds of law school admissions officers.

I've told most of them that you likely won't hear it from the lips of admissions officers, but I imagine there would be a not-insubstantial discounting of that score, given the implications for the student's ability to excel under the strict timing requirements of law school exams and later practice.

Would you care to tackle that one?  I'm operating on pure gut instinct, and I'd like to be able to speak with some measure of authority on this matter.

This is a controversial topic, and I’m sure I’ll be receiving some hate mail in response, but here goes.

First: As an applicant, purely for admissions purposes, you're likely better off applying with a higher accommodated score than a lower unaccommodated one. (For human development purposes, though, I agree with Paragon to Pieces that accommodations can have a corrupting effect.) Law schools care an inordinate amount about the numbers, no matter what they say publicly. They don’t have to report accommodated scores to the ABA (and by extension to US News), but even so, higher numbers are always better. What an applicant has to worry about is how he stacks up with his higher accommodated number against someone with the same unaccommodated number. Better to be in that particular horse race, though, than to be outside of striking distance because of a lower number.

Second: Plenty of admissions officers are skeptical about accommodations for learning disabilities. They won't say that, but it's true. LSAC might accommodate someone who has trouble “processing information quickly” (or some variation on that theme), and law schools might accommodate such a person in the classroom. The real world won’t, however, and I worry – and plenty of admissions officers worry – about how people who lack skills that are fundamental to practicing law are going to do when they’re outside of the protective cocoon of law school.

Third: Admissions officers generally don’t like to read the reports that explain what the disability is, or what the specific accommodations were. All they look at is the asterisk next to the LSAT score designating it as accommodated. There are universities whose in-house counsel won’t even let admissions officers read the underlying reports. Why? Because knowing what the disability is opens admissions officers up to lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Universities prefer to live in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell regime.

Fourth: What all that means for applicants is that if your disability is a physical one (rather than a learning disability), it’s in your interest to write an addendum explaining the nature of the disability. Someone who’s in a wheelchair is still going to have an easier time practicing law than someone who has trouble processing words quickly. If your disability is a learning disability, keep your mouth shut. Do not volunteer any information about the disability; just take the upside of the higher score, and the upside of don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

Fifth: This whole issue is likely to go the way of the dodo. As a result of lawsuits (naturally), neither the GMAT, the GRE, nor the SAT designates scores as accommodated anymore. The days of asterisked LSAT scores have to be numbered. See here, here, and here.

More Ivey Files postings on this issue here and here.

Interesting posting at blog 'Number 2 Pencil' here. (Her "About Me" page is interesting too.)

Article by an attorney who specializes in accommodations issues here.

Article in favor of non-designated scores here.

You read that correctly. A University of Michigan Law School student is claiming that he is being discriminated against on law school exams because of his slow typing skills.

How on God's green earth do people like that expect to function in the real world? Does he think a judge is going to care that he missed an appeal deadline because he couldn't type quickly enough? Or that the SEC will overlook that late 8-K filing? Or that a client will forgive him for tanking the acquisition just because he couldn't crank out the letter of intent?

His summer law firm apparently already fired him -- hmmmm, wonder why. Naturally he is suing the firm as well.

See here for more of my thoughts on this entitlement complex.

Sue Shellenbarger's most recent "Work & Family" column in the Wall Street Journal -- "Young Workers With Dyslexia, ADD Find Office Less Accommodating Than School" -- resonated with me. She notes that employers have not kept pace with the recent growth in diagnoses of learning disabilities and the accommodations Gen Y students have grown accustomed to at school.

I have mixed feelings about her call for more accommodations. I would guestimate that at least half of the Gen Y college students and recent grads I work with have been diagnosed with a learning disability, which makes me wonder whether something still counts as a disability when it seems increasingly to be the norm.

I also wonder -- and worry -- about the students who receive such generous accommodations in college (from both their schools and their parents) that they emerge from college convinced they can't handle even basic tasks. I worked with a recent college graduate a few years ago who refused, based on his disability, to assemble a list of graduate schools he was interested in and their deadlines. That's it. School, deadline. School, deadline. Repeat twelve times. I even showed him where to find the deadlines on the grad school websites. He was convinced he couldn't do it and reacted with shock and anger when I told him I wouldn't do it for him. I felt like the first person to say to him, "you must do this yourself."

Perhaps I was. I didn't need to ask him how he'd graduated from college -- a good one
-- with that (perceived) incapacity, because I knew that his parents
and school administrators had basically absolved him of having to do
anything for himself. I did, however, ask him how he would ever hold down a job if he couldn't handle a task as rudimentary as that one. All those accommodations had really set him up for failure. It was depressing. At what point are these accommodations exacerbating learning disabilities, and creating life disabiltities? Consider the accommodations that Shellenbarger recommends employers make available for this influx of learning disabled millennials:

• tape recorders to record or dictate information
• frequent short breaks
• quiet workspace
• specific filing or organizational systems
• varied presentation methods during training

The one that I find most unrealistic is the fourth -- since when is it the boss's job to keep an employee organized? Even the article, which is very pro-accommodations, quotes a Disabilities Act lawyer about employees who "have an undue sense of entitlement":

Attorney Patricia H. Latham of Washington, D.C., tells of a client with ADD who kept arriving to work late. "They're angry with me, and I don't think they should be, because that's part of my problem," the woman said and asked Ms. Latham to write her bosses a letter. Ms. Latham refused, telling the woman, "your employer doesn't have to put up with your being late to work."

There's no question in my mind that colleges and the parents of Gen Y feed that completely bonkers sense of entitlement and incapability. Could there possibly be a worse way to prepare college students for the working world?

The article also made me ponder the number of people who manage to wrangle learning disability diagnoses to secure accommodations on their standardized admissions tests. I know for a fact that some people game the system, and somewhere licensed professionals all sign off on this stuff, which makes it awfully hard to tell applicants, "that's bad -- don't do it." Interestingly, after being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the makers of the GMAT exam no longer indicate on their score reports whether the test taker has been accommodated. LSAT score reports still do, but surely some litigious applicant (or more likely the applicant's parent) is putting a stop to that as I type.