ACCOMMODATION NATION

America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem.

- ROSE HOROWITCH

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books.

At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distractionfree environment, or the use of otherwiseprohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors.

Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school's lowdistraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it's taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations-often, extra time on tests has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berke ley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.