Picture this. A second-year law student with ADHD, predicted to achieve a first, sits down to a three-hour closed-book examination. She knows the material. She has spent weeks colour-coding case law, recording herself reciting statutes, building elaborate revision maps. But the moment the invigilator says: “Begin”, the conditions of the exam itself become the obstacle. The clock, the silence, the ban on movement, the demand to retrieve and organise large volumes of doctrine entirely from memory are all profoundly at odds with how her brain works.
This is not an isolated story. ADHD affects an estimated 2 to 4 per cent of adults, with a broader range of up to 8 per cent cited in student populations as diagnosis rates improve. Law schools, by virtue of their demanding and highly structured assessment traditions, are particularly hostile terrain for this group.
The design problem hiding in plain sight
Traditional law examinations (timed, closed-book, essay or problem-question format, sat in silence) were designed for a neurotypical brain operating at peak performance under pressure. They test several things simultaneously: recall of legal doctrine, the ability to construct argument under time constraint and the discipline to sustain focus across several hours. For students without ADHD, these conditions are challenging. For students with ADHD, they are structurally disabling.
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The core difficulties are well evidenced. Working-memory deficits mean that students with ADHD struggle to hold multiple threads of argument in mind while developing them in writing. Time blindness, which is a neurological phenomenon rather than poor time management, means a student may spend 45 minutes on a question worth 15 marks without awareness of having done so. Emotional dysregulation under pressure can trigger freeze responses. And hyperfocus, one of ADHD’s double-edged traits, can mean brilliant work on half the paper with the remainder left untouched.
Extra time and separate rooms, the standard reasonable adjustments under the UK’s Equality Act 2010, address some of this. But they do not address the deeper design flaw: that the exam itself, regardless of duration, selects for a cognitive style that students with ADHD systematically lack, while screening out cognitive strengths they possess. As researchers and practitioners in this space have noted, ADHD is associated with divergent thinking, creative problem-solving and high engagement under conditions of genuine interest. Unfortunately, none of these qualities are rewarded in a traditional law exam.
This matters beyond individual fairness. Law is a profession that increasingly demands exactly the skills students with ADHD can offer: the ability to synthesise novel information quickly, think laterally across complex problems, and sustain intensive focus on cases they find engaging. We risk filtering out talented future lawyers at the assessment stage.
What a redesigned assessment might look like
The goal in redesigning assessment is not to lower standards. It is to create exams that test what we say they test – namely, legal reasoning, analysis and communication.
Several changes are worth considering. Open-book and take-home assessments do not make legal knowledge irrelevant; they make memorisation irrelevant. Students still need to identify the correct legal framework, apply it accurately and argue coherently. A student with ADHD can do all of this, and may in fact do it better than neurotypical students when the artifice of memory-retrieval is removed from the equation. Many professional legal environments are, of course, open book by nature. So, the exam would become a better proxy for real practice.
Problem-based or portfolio assessment over a sustained period also plays to ADHD-related strengths. Coursework completed across weeks allows a student to work in shorter intensive bursts, self-regulate around their optimal focus windows, and produce work that reflects analytical ability rather than performance under acute stress. Portfolio assessments encourage students to collect work over time in ways that showcase their progress and potential far more authentically than a single sitting, as colleagues at Nazarbayev University have argued.
Oral assessments are underused in law schools and deserve reconsideration. Many students with ADHD communicate fluently and persuasively when allowed to speak rather than write under time pressure. Mooting, client-interview simulations and viva-style assessments all test legal reasoning in forms that may be more equitable, while also reflecting the realities of legal practice more honestly.
Structured choice within examinations is another relatively low-cost change. Allowing students to attempt questions in any order, or offering a broader choice of questions, gives students with ADHD more control over how they manage their time and attention without compromising the rigour of the assessment.
Starting the conversation
The universal design for learning (UDL) framework developed by the Centre for Applied Special Technology (Cast) offers a more ambitious starting point than individual adjustments: the principle that well-designed assessments should work for the widest range of learners from the outset. UDL’s three core principles, which cover multiple means of engagement, representation and action and expression, translate directly into assessment design choices that law schools could adopt without sacrificing academic standards.
The Equality Act 2010 requires institutions to make reasonable adjustments, but “reasonable” has too often been interpreted narrowly. As the neurodiversity literature in higher education increasingly shows, a commitment to inclusion that goes beyond bolt-on accommodations requires institutions to examine the assessments themselves.
Law schools have a professional obligation to produce graduates who can practise with excellence and integrity. They also have a duty of inclusion. These are not in tension. An assessment system that fails to surface the abilities of a significant minority of students is a flawed system, and we have both the evidence and the tools to redesign it.
Malak Benslama-Dabdoub is a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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