How Cheating Spreads at Law Schools

I've been diagnosed with a Sadomasochistic personality disorder, and therefore I receive extra time to complete the Spritzler Report each morning.

How Cheating Spreads at Law Schools

Noah Werksman asked why so many peers got extra time on tests. Pepperdine accused him of bullying.

By Jillian Lederman, WSJ

June 4, 2025

When Noah Werksman began his first final exam in law school, the classroom was half-empty. “There were 60, maybe 70 people in our cohort,” he says in an interview. “At least 30 students were missing.”

Mr. Werksman, 27, came to Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, Calif., in the summer of 2023. “It was what we call a racehorse exam,” he says of the final. “It’s pretty guaranteed you’re not going to finish, but you have to move as fast as possible and rack up as many points as you can.”

He learned later that the absent students weren’t running late. They would be completing the exam separately using extended time, a testing accommodation that the Americans With Disabilities Act requires schools to make available for students with conditions that impair “major life activities” such as learning, reading and concentrating. Such students usually receive 1½ times or twice the standard testing window—which in law school can mean up to four extra hours.

According to multiple Pepperdine students, more than a third of the school’s law students receive testing accommodations, the most common of which is extended time. They report that the school’s administration confirmed this statistic at a town hall last year and noted that it’s comparable to that of many other law schools. The school declined in a written statement to comment on the numbers and said that there are multiple reasons students may be absent from exam rooms. It acknowledged that it is “aware of public information indicating a substantial increase in disability accommodations in recent years in undergraduate programs, standardized testing, and law schools in California and across the country.”

Law schools don’t disclose their rates of accommodations, but a 2023 Oregon Law Review paper reports data on public law schools obtained through state public-records laws. As of 2021—before the post-Covid rise in disability accommodations—the accommodations rates were 21.3% at the University of California, Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco) and 25.5% at UC Irvine. Private law schools like Pepperdine aren’t subject to public-records laws.

The Law School Admissions Council reports that only 12% of first-year law students nationwide said they had a mental or physical disability in 2023, suggesting that many students who don’t need accommodations are using them to get a leg up. The California Bar Exam’s accommodations rate, by contrast, is around 7%.

Even if students have accommodations in law school, they need “additional documentation and testing” to get approval on the California Bar, according to Healthy Mind Sacramento Psychology Services. For students with ADHD, psychological disabilities or learning disabilities, psychologists or other qualified professionals must submit extended reports that include a review of medical records, interviews, and psychological and academic testing, among other details. ADHD or learning disabilities must be “longstanding since childhood” and “functionally impair” them during testing. Although most law schools conduct independent disability evaluations, they tend to defer to prior diagnoses and accommodations during undergraduate or even K-12 years.

Pepperdine law school stated that it isn’t “aware of evidence indicating any student has obtained disability accommodations under false pretenses” and would “vigorously investigate” any evidence that emerged. It also said it conducts an “independent process” that requires documentation from a medical provider and “strictly complies” with the ADA and other federal disability laws.

But students at the school told me it’s common knowledge that the accommodations system is easy to manipulate. “There were students who learned about the lenient standards after the first semester, and who saw how many of their classmates were receiving extra hours on exams,” Mr. Werksman says. “We didn’t see them again in our exam rooms, because they went ahead to get the same accommodations for themselves.”

That has consequences. Law students are assessed on a highly competitive curve. Not only do grades determine job prospects, but at many law schools students receive conditional scholarships that can be reduced or revoked if their grade point averages fall in the bottom 20%, or even the lower half, of the class. Pepperdine students say many of their classmates who ranked near the top of the class, made it onto the law review, and secured competitive jobs at major law firms received extended time on tests. The university denied that students with disabilities are disproportionately represented in these groups.

Mr. Werksman and a classmate decided in January 2024 to circulate a petition calling on the administration to examine its accommodations protocols. The petition noted that while accommodations are “appropriate to accommodate genuine disabilities,” the discrepancy between the rate at Pepperdine and that on the California Bar “creates a reasonable inference of rampant abuse.”

After sharing the petition in a group chat, Mr. Werksman received the following response from one of his classmates: “I will personally be filing a report to the law school . . . and they can investigate whether this constitutes constant bullying and harassment for students with accommodations.”

Six weeks later Mr. Werksman was summoned to a meeting with Pepperdine’s assistant dean of students: “He tells me that there are allegations against me that I’ve been bullying specially accommodated students, that I’ve been stalking and harassing them outside of their classrooms, that I’m creating a hostile environment for them on campus, and that if my behavior were to continue, the hammer would come down on me.”

Mr. Werksman says these charges were “patently false. I did not stalk people. I did not bully people. I wrote a petition. I exercised the First Amendment. And I walked around campus and I talked to people in public about this topic. If they wanted to sign it, great. If not, no problem.” Pepperdine declined to comment on the case, citing privacy concerns.

Mr. Werksman felt compelled to drop the petition. More than a year later, students say, the prevalence of accommodations persists—not only at Pepperdine but at schools across the country. Mr. Werksman’s experience demonstrates the immense difficulty of talking about accommodations abuse, let alone addressing it. Students face a perverse incentive structure that rewards those crafty enough to cheat, hurts those with true disabilities, and punishes those brave enough to speak out. Law schools, for their part, fear violating disability law or being perceived as discriminating against disabled students. The result is an erosion of standards. “There is a statistically significant negative correlation between the percentage of students in a school who receive accommodations and the school’s first-time bar passage rate,” the Oregon Law Review study found.

What can be done? One solution is for states to condition public funding on whether law schools align their standards with those of their respective bar exams. Another is for the federal government to require schools to disclose their rates of accommodations. “We’re letting ourselves down when it comes to our education system,” Mr. Werksman says. “The real world just doesn’t work this way.”

Ms, Lederman is a Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at the Journal.

Advertisement