To say that a student in a wheel chair needs a ramp to enter a building is easy to understand. Or that blind students need textbooks in Braille. Few would question either the need to accommodate such students’ disabilities, or that their disability doesn’t mean they can’t be smart students with successful futures ahead of them.

But when it comes to more amorphous disabilities, from ADHD to anxiety, both the needs and the accommodations become more fuzzy. Unsurprisingly, this has given rise to smart students from well-to-do families gaming the system to enjoy accommodations such as extra time on tests and distraction-free test environments. And you’ll never guess where these students end up going to college.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

This is not to say that students with ADHD, anxiety and depression don’t really suffer from these disabilities, or that these disabilities don’t really have a significant impact on their education. They do and they do. But figuring out which students are legit and which, with the assistance of their parents and the acquiescence of their schools, are gaming the system to get an unneeded and undeserved advantage has become nearly impossible since the definitions and diagnoses have been watered down to the point of near worthlessness.

Change was slow at first, in part because Supreme Court rulings narrowed the scope of the law. Professors I spoke with told me that, even in the early 2000s, they taught only a handful of students with disabilities. Then, in 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the law’s original intent. The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. It also included a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by a disability (“learning, reading, concentrating, thinking,” among others) and clarified that individuals were protected under the ADA even if their impairment didn’t severely restrict their daily life.

In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. “Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual’s history and experience with disability and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations,” AHEAD wrote.

The concern was that students who needed accommodations weren’t getting them, which meant that they were being denied the education and educational success to which they were entitled. In a way, it was the Blackstone’s Ratio of Disability, better that ten students without disabilities were accommodated than one student with a disability was denied. And students and their parents saw the crack in the system and drove their Maserati through it.

No one can say precisely how many students should qualify for accommodations. The higher prevalence at more selective institutions could reflect the fact that wealthy families and well-resourced schools are better positioned to get students with disabilities the help they need. Even with the lowered bar for a diagnosis, obtaining one can cost thousands of dollars. And as more students with disabilities get help in middle and high school, that could at least partially explain their enrollment at top colleges.

The shortest route to accommodations is a diagnosis, generally by a psychiatrist. Since much of the diagnosis is based on the student’s personal experience, as told by the student (and perhaps the student’s parents), it easy enough to fake or buy. And the accommodations here aren’t ramps or Braille.

Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.

Professors told me that the most common—and most contentious—accommodation is the granting of extra time on exams.

For students with learning disabilities, these accommodations are critical to their ability to perform on a level playing field with students without those disabilities. But to students who only suffer from disabilities on paper, these accommodations enable them to gain a significant advantage over their fellow students who aren’t being given accommodations. And when gaming the system puts some at an advantage over their peers, particularly when they’re from wealthy families with great expectations, others game the system as well to stay competitive.

But then there are students, and parents, who use feigned disabilities as a crutch to avoid normal pressures, such as time limits, or provide a convenient excuse for falling short of perfection.

Even if students aren’t consciously trying to gain an unfair edge, some seem to have convinced themselves that they need extra help. Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told me that the fastest-growing group of students who come to him seems to be those who have done their own research and believe that a disability is the source of their academic or emotional challenges. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” Lindstrom said. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.”

Lindstrom worries that the system encourages students to see themselves as less capable than they actually are. By attributing all of their difficulties to a disability, they are pathologizing normal challenges. “When it comes to a disorder like ADHD, we all have those symptoms sometimes,” Lindstrom told me. “But most of us aren’t impaired by them.”

The concept of accommodating educational disabilities was good and worthy, as no student should be denied an education because they suffer from a disability. But the gaming of accommodations, as well as the pathologizing  of normal challenges, has turned this ideal on its head. Worse yet, by allowing students to game accommodations, it undermines the students who actually suffer from significant disabilities and unlevels the playing field yet again. As so often happens, good intentions get taken too far and, given half a chance, will be gamed by those seeking any advantage they can get. It’s got to stop.