Reasonable accommodations

Exams are over. Three weeks, two exams per week, eight hours per exam, plus one take-home essay project over the previous six weeks. Each exam has six questions: pick three and write 1500 words per question. 3 x 6 x 1,500 = 27,000 words. The exams were open-book – we all took the tests at home with access to law databases – so it was less a test of our knowledge and more about ability to analyze under extremely adverse conditions. It was about psychological endurance. I am still fried.

Under the Equality Act 2010 (or the ADA if you're in the states), students with disabilities can get extra time on their exams as "reasonable accommodations". This year I went through the process of getting diagnosed with ADHD. When I told my friend and ex-colleague Sam I'd finally been diagnosed, he was unsurprised: "Yes Ernie. I know. I had been worried the French Institute for Weights and Measures would kidnap you as the ADHD Standard to put in the basement next to the Standard Meter and Standard Kilogram."

Like many others who went through their own periods of self-discovery in the isolating depravity of the pandemic, I looked into ADHD and was like, oh, well, obviously this is me. Thankfully psychiatrists have moved on from the 90’s-era understanding of “boys-who-can’t-sit-still disease” (but let’s be real, I absolutely fit that criterion as well) and have a more rigorous and complex set of diagnositc criteria. ADHD is now understood primarily as an emotional regulation disorder. Patients can’t make enough dopamine to focus on long-term tasks and block out oncoming stimuli as easily as those without the condition. This manifests in high distractibility, impulsiveness, sensory issues, and, yes, twitching. If treated, sometimes with therapy but primarily with stimulants, patients can live more or less normal lives; if untreated, they might end up broke at age 36, in Britain, attempting to become a lawyer.

Although getting diagnosed was a whole thing, getting reasonable accommodations from the school did not actually require proof. I just told them I was in the process of getting diagnosed, which was true, and by the time exams actually happened I had received the diagnosis. On my bonus time throughout the exams, I usually took little walks around Brockwell Park, dissociating. I think much better and much more clearly if I have a chance to step away from my computer and stretch my legs, let my mind wander a bit. (A famous component of the "can't-sit-still" condition.) On the subject of these reasonable accommodations, a doctor I spoke to on the NHS recently quipped, "Extra time is not extra knowledge".

Whether students should get extra time is a hot topic, because grades can directly affect your career prospects. Because the exams are grueling by design to put students under pressure, a reasonable accommodations in the form of bonus time is often viewed skeptically, even as a way of cheating. A recent op-ed in the WSJ highlighted the perceived problem – as much as one third of the class were absent from the exam hall due to reasonable accomodations, one anecdote claims. The top comment on a Reddit thread concisely sums up the concern:

No one is criticizing students who need extra time for tests because of legitimate learning disabilities. The issue here is students who don’t need extra time but profess under false pretenses that they do need it so they can perform better than they would otherwise.

I’m not really going to engage with the idea that students are faking disabilities. As my friend Alice points out, the evidence that people malinger is insanely low, and it's not worth anyone’s time playing disability police: it’s cruel, and only erodes the idea we should help people who need help. It is indeed possible that some students are doing so just so they can get better grades, even though there's no evidence of this whatsoever; personally, I can’t say that I care, but I do understand why it might upset small-minded people. There's no way to prove that all those students need that extra time for little walks in the park for their brains to function correctly. But then again, wouldn't everyone's brain function a bit better if given the chance to have a little walk in the park during the exam? How is it fair on the normies? Why should it be so easy to claim bonus time for a career-defining exam?

Jess O'Thomson, a legal researcher at the University of Leeds working on disability law, turns that argument on its head.

“If so many students are finding this form of assessment inaccessible, then that's a failure of the university,” they told me.

The artificial time limits imposed by an exam make those kinds of assessments more difficult for people who have anxiety, nuerodiversity, or other visible or invisible disabilities. To make exams accessible, they said, the answer is not to restrict the amount of students taking up reasonable accommodations: “The answer is to be creative and come up with a way of assessment that don't put students into that position in the first place." Creative assessments might mean oral exams, research papers, coursework rather than one gigantic exam period, any number of things.

In fact, changing the form of assessment might lead to better results for everyone. Cambridge law school for instance used to do in-person handwritten assessments for four hours per subject. It follows a long and noble tradition of British universities making their students go through absolutely bonkers ordeals to prove they were officially smart. "Your hand would be bleeding at the end of the exam. Half the battle was just being able to get it on to the paper,” O'Thomson said. But in response to the pandemic, Cambridge faculty switched to open-book exams in a longer time period, and O’Thomson tells me they chose to keep it after restrictions lifted because the results were simply better. The faculty realized their method of assessment had been testing, they said, “rote memorization and the ability to write quickly, rather than one’s ability to develop a legal argument. Which, one would hope, we’re trying to assess in lawyers.”

So do the insane assessments serve a purpose? In practice, although you'd definitely be under some sort of time pressure in the real world, a lawyer is unlikely to have quite such artificial time limits when drafting something for a client. But they were useful in one regard. Law is insanely competitive. My law friend Rose and I were talking yesterday — she mentioned going into a first round job interview "without any hope or expectation," and I have to admit, the crushing weight of the exams have internalized this useful attitude within me. I begrudgingly accept that the yearlong stress culminating in the assessments has taught me how to deal with the pressures of a law career and the high levels of rejection it will necessarily entail.

But there are also ways to stress students out in a controlled way without making the credentials themselves inaccessible to a huge percentage of the population. It would require reexamining how law is taught and transmitted, and in the UK, that remains the biggest obstacle. Doing school the British way taught me a very important cultural truth: here, we prefer bizarre archaic rituals that create ample opportunity performative suffering. Even if we don’t understand why we're doing those things.

In food news, I made chicken adobo last night. This is a real comfort food for me — a Filipino classic of braised chicken thighs in soy sauce that Dad used to make all the time. I think that he must have picked it up from living in Anchorage, where we are blessed with a huge diverse community of people from across the Pacific rim. (I am sure he will email me later to inform me of the details of its introduction in our kitchen).

It’s really easy: saute garlic, ginger, and green onion, add chicken, add soy sauce/enough liquid, bring to a boil and turn down to a simmer and cover, cook until tender, maybe 20 minutes. Some tricks that made last night’s iteration particularly good:

• I took skin-on thighs and put them skin side down on a dry steel pan, and seared them until the fat had rendered out and the skin had a nice brown crust. Flipped the thighs, cooked the other side briefly, and then took them off the heat.
• Cooked the aromatics in the rendered chicken fat in the pan.
• Added a teaspoon of sugar and miso paste to the aromatics and cooked them for a bit. The sugar melted and started caramelizing in the heat. (good.)
• Splash of vinegar to the braising liquid to brighten it up.
• Cilantro on top to make everything look pretty.

As a side: stir-fried green beans with chili, garlic and sesame seeds. More tips:

• The best tip I ever learned on wok cooking was off a Canadian guy who taught English in China and tried (and probably failed, but who knows) to monetize his cooking channel on Youtube. Heat up the wok without oil until ripping hot. Then turn off heat, add a tsp of vegetable or sunflower or rapeseed oil, swirl it around to create a nonstick layer, and then add your aromatics into the oil. Stir them around to coat, and THEN turn the heat back on. It prevents everything from burning.
• I used pul biber and ipek biber, two varieties of smoked chili flake from Turkey, plus chopped cilantro stems, and a gigantic handful of sesame seeds.
• Then, green beans. If I were thinking ahead I would have parboiled them before the fry, but I was drinking beers and impatient, and I had to stirfry them much longer than I intended. The result is that the aromatics were a little burned, which obviated the entire point of the first step that I just explained in laborious detail, but also everyone seemed to really dig the burny flavor, so I'll chalk this up as a win.

No pictures because we ate it too fast. Sorry. I can’t think about making content when I’m making food.