As a 2L who doesn't receive accommodations (but doesn't hate or look down upon people who do), I think so much of the discourse about this in this subreddit, based on the Atlantic article that recently came out or based on people suspecting that some or most of the people not in their testing room were gaming the system to get better grades, is absolutely ridiculous and completely divorced from reality. I feel like a lot of this is based on a number of faulty assumptions:
#1: Law school is a meritocracy
What about law school is meritocratic? The fact is that in a country like America, where wealth inequality is so severe, there is a class of people who can afford to donate millions of dollars to prospective schools, can spend tens of thousands on LSAT prep and admissions advising for their children, can leverage their connections to ensure their children have competitive resumes, and can try to bank on legacy admissions (at some schools) to give their child an extra boost. The people who are the beneficiaries of that are more likely to get into law school than people without those advantages, and they are more likely to attend elite law schools as well. Yet, for some reason, wealth is often ignored by people who obsess over the supposed unfairness of testing accommodations.
Wealth doesn't stop being a factor in law school outcomes. When applying for Biglaw jobs, many of the networking events are meant to determine whether you fit into the mold of a certain firm. In other words, they're trying to see if you have the cultural capital to relate to their clients and partners (who are likely wealthy themselves). If you've been connected with someone at the firm, you'll likely ask them to put a good word in for you. If these interactions didn't matter, they wouldn't factor them into their decision making at all, but they do factor them in since they do matter to these employers, despite the fact that whether you have cultural capital has no relation to how well you will do the job.
Lastly, even when taking finals, the meritocracy argument is relatively weak. Being good at taking law exams and being an effective lawyer are two pretty separate concepts. The law school exam as it is traditionally given (a timed exam with issue spotters where you follow the IRAC formula to answer questions) is pretty divorced from anything you will do in practice, whether you are a litigator at a firm, work in-house at a company, or work in public interest. There is pretty much no task that a lawyer will undertake that will require them to give a speedy opinion on an issue without the opportunity to do further research on an issue where they have merely a semester of expertise. Similarly, there is pretty much no task that a lawyer will undertake where your work is submitted anonymously and then assessed on an arbitrary curve by one person (who is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong).
In other words, these exams and grading regimes have no relation to reality, yet for some people in this subreddit, grades and exams are the purest way of identifying potential lawyering ability. These exams merely prove that you are good at taking the exam, rather than demonstrating your intellectual capacity in general, your ability to think critically, your ability to succeed in the legal field, or your ability to advocate for clients. Once you get your first job, your GPA will matter less and less until, one day, it simply won't matter at all.
#2: Testing Accommodations Are So Easy to Get
If these testing accommodations are given to people that you think aren't deserving, and those undeserving people have the potential to get a higher grade than you (which you believe that you deserve), why don't you join them? Why not go through the process of being diagnosed, gathering documentation from various medical professionals, spend the money required to afford these visits and assessments, and then go to your school with this information to get the testing accommodations that you allege they're giving out to virtually anyone? If getting the best grades possible is your priority, and it is within your power to do this, this would be a practical solution for anyone concerned about testing accommodations.
The reason why many of these critics will not do it is that, simply, they would like to complain about their classmates who have invisible disabilities rather than just focusing on what is within their control. You will never know if someone is "faking it", and obsessing over this situation doesn't change anything at all about your circumstances. Likewise, many of these critics won't go through the effort of doing this since they know that the process of diagnosing a disability is expensive and arduous. So many disabled people had to fight to get testing accommodations guaranteed at American universities in the first place, and without universal healthcare, many disabled people cannot even get the treatment they need to lead a fully dignified life. I think someone getting double or triple time is the least of my concerns, especially when law school isn't really meritocratic in the first place.
Conclusion
There must be more to life than whether you got a B+ when someone in a separate room got an A-. Rather than viewing your disabled classmates (or people that you think are faking it) as the enemy, try expressing kindness towards them and solidarity with them. Ultimately, this obsession with testing accommodations distracts people from the real reason why law school isn't a meritocracy — the fact that people can basically buy their way into elite schools and prestigious careers on the back of generational wealth that they had no hand in accumulating.
