Most students with learning disabilities and ADHD have psycho-ed evaluations, but they don’t have the right one. Evaluations need to show that your disabilities “substantially limit a major life activity” under the ADA. If your evaluation scores are in the average range or above, either you’re not disabled under the law or the evaluation is not serving you well. I can refer you to an evaluator who knows how to test high-achievers, like yourself.

High achievers often are not diagnosed until later in life. Testing boards, such as the ACT, SAT, LSAT, New York bar, CA bar, MCAT and NBME, often see late diagnoses as illegitimate. A term they use for that is an “eleventh hour” disability. The best way to combat that is to provide specific records proving that you had symptoms for years, even if you were only recently diagnosed. Most people don’t realize that they have, or can get, those records and I’ll show you how.

While it’s certainly advantageous to have a formal 504 or IEP accommodations plan in school, there’s no legal requirement to have one in order to qualify for accommodations on a standardized test. You need to explain how you were able to compensate without an accommodations plan.

Testing boards often look askance at applicants for accommodations whose only disability is ADHD because there’s no simple test for it, and its symptoms can often be confused with other disorders. Anxiety, depression and certain types of learning disabilities can also be difficult to document, but it can be done. Most applicants need a comprehensive psycho-educational evaluation which demonstrates the extent to which their ADHD or other disability limit the student academically.