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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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at whose feet should we lay the blame for this state of affairs? The administrators? Legislators? Assorted departments of education?

The ones who mandate that schools provide such obvious performance improving ”accommodations” in the first place. I don’t really see how actually meaningful true accommodations would significantly improve performance for regular students.

Say someone is dyslexic and requires accommodation? No problem, don’t grade anyone on irrelevant typos (outside core writing courses in elementary / high school)

Another person has adhd with faulty executive function and requires extra time to return an assignment? Again no problem, they get to return it a day or two late but with a third of the max points subtracted (or similar significant but not immediately ruinous amount).

A person can’t handle doing the exam with distractions around them? They get to do it in a sparse room under TA surveillance.

Someone's "not a good test taker" and needs to redo? Again, simple. Everyone gets say one redo attempt and anyone needing more than that has to return an extra 20 solved problems before being allowed to retake. The catch: said problems are hard level and simply being able to solve them at all essentially guarantees that you've studied enough to pass with a good grade (this is how I passed Circuit Theory 2 with all the Laplace stuff and transmission lines).

The point is that those accommodations only help against actual problems but don’t provide any meaningful benefit for someone who doesn’t truly require them (and in some cases outright reduce their grade / require significant extra work).