Duke University professor John Staddon offers this comment on the learning disability/accommodations regime I brought up in my earlier post:

It seems to me that the question is whether getting a passing score on an exam is a right or an assessment of competence. If it’s a right, then some accommodation may be appropriate. If it’s an assessment, then the only relevant question is whether the assessment/exam/whatever does a good job or not. The argument then, I guess, is that for student X, because he is dyslexic/paralytic/whatever, the test is not valid: He is good at whatever it is despite a poor score. It seems to be the onus should be on the student to prove that (which will be very difficult in most cases). In other words, the issue is not whether the student has some disability, but whether he is in fact competent at whatever the test tests despite a poor score. And that’s something to be decided by an expert in the field, not a random psychologist.