I should preface this by saying I don’t actually know that much about education. I taught a bit in my previous life as a professor, yes, but I probably spent more time being taught how to teach than actually teaching.
Recently, the Atlantic had a piece about testing accommodations for university students, like extra time on exams, or getting to do an exam in a special distraction-free environment. The piece quotes university employees who are having more and more trouble satisfying these accommodations, and includes the statistic that 20 percent of undergraduate students at Brown and Harvard are registered as disabled.
The piece has kicked off a firestorm on social media, mostly focused on that statistic (which conveniently appears just before the piece’s paywall). People are shocked, and cynical. They feel like more and more students are cheating the system, getting accommodations that they don’t actually deserve.
I feel like there is a missing mood in these discussions, that the social media furor is approaching this from the wrong perspective. People are forgetting what exams actually ought to be for.
Exams are for the students.
Exams are measurement tools. An exam for a class says whether a student has learned the material, or whether they haven’t, and need to retake the class or do more work to get there. An entrance exam, or a standardized exam like the SAT, predicts a student’s future success: whether they will be able to benefit from the material at a university, or whether they don’t yet have the background for that particular program of study.
These are all pieces of information that are most important to the students themselves, that help them structure their decisions. If you want to learn the material, should you take the course again? Which universities are you prepared for, and which not?
We have accommodations, and concepts like disability, because we believe that there are kinds of students for whom the exams don’t give this information accurately. We think that a student with more time, or who can take the exam in a distraction-free environment, would have a more accurate idea of whether they need to retake the material, or whether they’re ready for a course of study, than a student who has to take the exam under ordinary conditions. And we think we can identify the students who this matters for, and the students for whom this doesn’t matter nearly as much.
These aren’t claims about our values, or about what students deserve. They’re empirical claims, about how test results correlate with outcomes the students want. The conversation, then, needs to be built on top of those empirical claims. Are we better at predicting the success of students that receive accommodations, or worse? Can we measure that at all, or are we just guessing? And are we communicating the consequences accurately to students, that exam results tell them something useful and statistically robust that should help them plan their lives?
Values come in later, of course. We don’t have infinite resources, as the Atlantic piece emphasizes. We can’t measure everyone with as much precision as we would like. At some level, generalization takes over and accuracy is lost. There is absolutely a debate to be had about which measurements we can afford to make, and which we can’t.
But in order to have that argument at all, we first need to agree on what we’re measuring. And I feel like most of the people talking about this piece haven’t gotten there yet.
4 gravitons 
I was a physics TA at Stanford, where the accommodation rate was over 1/3. Some of them absolutely made sense (like the transcripts for the deaf, and exams printed in Braille for the blind), but the vast majority seemed to be the end result of a zero sum game (“everybody I know who has trouble with exams already gets extra time, I should too”). Even if you didn’t believe in time pressure in education, it was not allowed to simply give everyone more time; the accommodated 1/3 always had to have more.
You can see Reddit’s r/Professors for many more stories about how accommodations actually play out. Working professors are even more cynical than the commentators on Twitter!
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You clearly haven’t taken exams in a while. Exams in many undergraduate courses, especially during the first two years, especially in subjects with large introductory classes, are all choose-a-response regurgitation of definitions designed to be taken remotely using a demeaning proctoring environment such as HonorLock and graded by computer. They benefit neither students nor faculty but only administrators maintaining a good, timely production of formally qualified graduates. Students quickly learn how to maximize their return from a minimum of investment in the class.
In upper undergraduate levels, the final exam has largely been replaced by the final project. These can be valuable or not, but tend toward the not because the students have already been socialized to exert the minimum amount of investment necessary to receive a satisfactory grade. Along with the administration’s view as students as customers whose desires should be satisfied, this means that the professor’s range of scores must be kept in the A-B range except for major derelictions. In today’s tech-heavy educational environment, social studies courses need to be known for their high grade-to-effort ratio to attract students.
Until we decide whether we want education to provide intellectual growth and analytical capacity or just a credential, exams will continue to be a meaningless exercise.
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I think most students don’t actually care much about what they’re learning. They just want a paper which states that they have a BSc with good GPA so naturally they optimise towards this with minimum effort.
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