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0 pointsmindslight1mo ago0 comments

I agree that there certainly seems to be a problem here. I just don't think the article does any work at substantiating it, nor laying out any avenues of reform. I stated it better in a response to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46922246

Furthermore in the current political environment, such analysis-free rants aren't just chum that makes like-minded rambling uncles need more blood pressure meds, but rather can end up being fuel for someone-must-do-something-type destructionist rallying cries that only serve to facilitate more grift by the performative strongman administration - compounding the very problem!

Constructively, the difficulty is that reforming institutions and restoring societal trust is very hard. Here we've got at least four things that need to be done simultaneously -

1. restoring belief that the system will significantly punish you if you lie/exaggerate about having a disability

2. restoring trust in the system such that people, both internal and external to the institution, aren't inclined to panic over "xx% of students claiming disability"

3. reforming the general system for people without disabilities, eg testing methodologies and cramped housing accommodations

4. generally reforming what counts as a disability that makes sense to even try and mitigate

Fail at doing any one of these and we've still got similar pressure to cheat, so the problem will only ever retreat a bit rather than having formed self-reinforcing cultural values.

(I'm addressing the problem referenced by the article, not the adjacent problem you've described)

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impossiblefork1mo ago

Ah, I don't think that's the right solution.

I think the right solution is strict test-based admissions, like in Sweden, and forbidding schools from admitting other than on test results. In addition to that, making things like getting top government jobs also test based. In Sweden we do this for diplomats. You have to get a university degree, but whether you get in doesn't depend primarily on prestige or interviews, it depends on whether you pass a somewhat difficult test.

In this way you ensure that what university you went to doesn't really matter, and over time what I imagine is a more distributed university system where co-operation with institutions and someone's particular ideas matters more than what institutions he's associated with, and where the extreme prestige of particular schools disappears.

I think it's especially important to eliminate the hoop jumping, so that people can know that, as long as the extreme prestige universities exist, they can get into them if they perform well enough on exams, with nothing being able to interfere with that-- no individual judgement, no subjectivity, no hoop you haven't jumped. Just pure merit, like the Swedish or French system.

mindslightOP1mo ago

You're talking about a completely different problem. From the first paragraph of the article:

> her fellow students were claiming they were disabled to receive accommodations like extra time on tests, excused absences and the best housing on campus

As far as the problem you're talking about, I get what you're describing and agree it sounds appealing. The problem in the US is the university hierarchy is one of the things used to perpetuate class, so the people who are able to change it generally benefit from how it currently is.

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