We need to draw a distinction between the anxiety we all feel when faced with a stressful situation, and the pathological diagnosis of exam anxiety, just as som

We need to draw a distinction between the anxiety we all feel when faced with a stressful situation, and the pathological diagnosis of exam anxiety, just as some of us are "obsessive" but do not suffer from clinical OCD, or get "depressed" but do not suffer from clinical depression. Equating the milder "everyone gets this" form with the clinical version is a real disservice to the people with an actual disability. Speaking as a college professor, I see that in practice the key distinction is that the students with the actual disability both A) get a doctor's note and B) tell me long in advance of requesting any specific accommodations. And much of the time they don't even dip very heavily into their accommodations---they may be allotted double time on an exam, for instance, but on an exam where the best un-disabled students finish in 35 minutes, the double-time students (who often are very good students) take the full period or slightly longer, rather than the full 100 minutes they're allotted. I'm not going to try to diagnose the UM student here, but I will note that it is somewhat suspicious that the "exam anxiety" claim didn't come up until after he or she had failed for the second time.