What are Law School Accommodations?

 

Law school accommodations can vary depending on the student and their diagnosis. Typically law school accommodations are tools designed to equal the playing field for students with either physical or learning disabilities.

 

When most students think of accommodations they think of extra time on exams. Typically test taking accommodations include an additionally time and a half on exams. When a student has accommodations there exams are also administered differently. Most times their exams are administered in a private room while the bulk of students without accommodations take exams as a large group in a lecture hall. Upon the diagnosing doctor’s request additional accommodations may be provided such as time for breaks.

 

While extra exam time is one sort of law school accommodation, there are others. For instance, aside from extra time on law school exams accommodations may also provide additional time to complete other assignments. In law school, such an accommodation may apply to the legal research or writing course. This course is often one of the most difficult courses in the first year of law school because of the exhausting amount of time that is required to complete given assignments.

 

Another form of accommodation afforded law school students is note taking or recording of lectures. Depending on a students’ diagnosis this accommodation can help a student to better organize, synthesize and comprehend content covered in class. The benefit of this sort of accommodation is that students’ with learning disabilities that relate to poor executive functioning can absorb classroom content more fluidly without the burden of live note taking. Being able to review notes composed by a student with stronger executive functioning skills can improve the performance of a law school student with accommodations.

 

The types of law school accommodations vary. Its important to think critically about the sort of accommodations that best fit your diagnosis and your learning style. However, in my experience choosing the wrong accommodation can hurt a students GPA as much as not having accommodations at all. While your doctor can help you discover this you should also speak with someone who specializes in law school performance as it relates to learning disabilities.

 

​