Buy A, Fake A, Shop Around For A Learning Disorder

Ever gotten an email from a spam site screaming out an offer for pre-written college essays? Insuring you that with them, you’re guaranteed to get into the college of your choice and/or get that A+ desperately needed to bulk up your grade? On the flip side, have you ever gotten a stern lecture about plagiarism from a teacher? Had a whole list of rules and punishments laid out about it?

I’m going to assume you have. But what I won’t assume is that you’ve gotten either about a learning disorder. Today, the new fad sweeping colleges are learning disorders; specifically, learning disorders such as ADHD that grant you special favors, such as being able to spend more time on tests or getting access to special needs scholarships (and thus, taking away from those students who actually do have learning disabilities and deserve/need the money).

Learning disorders are a tricky area for many reasons. For one, the tests are can easily be fooled by simply Googling the symptoms, and applying that when testing. A study performed by Myriam J. Sollman, John D. Ranseen and David T.R. Berry concluded that by spending just five minutes with Google, their test subjects could easily fake the tests given to ascertain if someone has ADHD or not. For the experiment, college students were divided into three groups; those with ADHD, those without ADHD, and those who would pretend to have ADHD. Those pretending to have ADHD were told they would get forty five dollars if they successfully fooled the test...and most did. To quote from a article published on ScienceDirect by Allyson G. Harrison, Melanie J. Edwards and Kevin C.H. Parker: “No symptom validity scales exist to assist clinicians in identifying unusual patterns of self-reported symptoms in persons with ADHD (Harrison, 2006), nor have any patterns of test performance been identified that might aid in discriminating exaggerated from honest reporting in such assessments.”

If a student plagiarizes, it’s quite easy to catch them; there are many sites such as Turnitin which will do a quick internet search and flag any bodies of text that match closely with any other publications. Learning disorders have no such quick easy fix. Most of them have no concrete way to be diagnosed, besides the tests. As well, they’re a touchy subject; if a teacher accuses a student of plagiarizing and it turns out they really didn’t, there aren’t many repercussions. On the other hand, if a teacher accuses a student of faking a learning disorder, not only are there really no conclusive ways to prove either side right, it also has the potential to blow up into a huge discrimination ordeal.

Faking it isn’t the only way to "get" a learning disorder; there are also companies that sell the forms certifying that Student X has a learning disorder, and must get special privilege x, y, and z. Once again, how do you prove these wrong? Buying an essay from an online site can still be tracked, no matter how legitimate it appears to be. Most likely it’s published online somewhere, and will be caught by plagiarism detectors. Official forms declaring that someone has a learning disorder, however, aren’t something that can be proved false as easily.

Finally, there are also the students who shop around for learning disorders; that is, those who go to doctor after doctor until they’re diagnosed. This is an official diagnosis, not a faked test or bought papers, which makes it the hardest to catch; teachers can’t very well argue with someone who is certified to diagnose learning disorders, especially when they themselves most probably are not.

To completely aggregate this entire situation, in the few cases where students get caught faking a learning disorder there are no set lists of punishments, because colleges have never had to deal with this before. If a student plagiarizes, there is a determinable punishment, but what do you do when a student fakes a learning disorder? Yes, it’s lying. And yes, it’s wrong. But what can you do…besides revoke the special privileges and reprimand them? Anything more extreme has to be carefully considered and thought through, because it’s setting a precedent.

Learning disorder fakery is not only giving those with actual learning disorders a bad name and taking away from them, it’s also undermining our education system. Not only do we need to create a system of rules about those who fake them and get caught, we need to create a better detection system that would allow us to actually be able to apply aforementioned system of rules.

SOURCES

Can You “Fake” A Learning Disability?
Psychology Today: How Easy Is It To Fake ADHD?
ScienceDirect: Detection of Feigned ADHD in College Students
ScienceDirect: Identifying Students Faking ADHD