I mentioned the college senior who asked for more time because of ADHD, because I thought culturally ADHD is only talked about when you are young.
Besides having a healthcare background, this runs in my family so I know quite a bit about it. It was traditionally thought that you outgrew ADHD, but we now know that you don't. People often outgrow the hyperactivity part or at least become a lot less hyperactive so the most obvious signs of the disorder disappear. The distractive part of ADHD doesn't go away so adults who really do have untreated ADHD have a high tendency to be failures in life (for lack of a better term).
Stigmatizing them to just get over it doesn't do them any good and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't do YOU any good either because they might be driving the next taxi cab you get into or flying the next plane or conducting the next passenger rail you hop on. You might live a longer life if these people get the treatment they need.
Surely through years of school he would have found out how best to cope with it, no?
Yes, that's partially correct. If he made it that far, then he's probably actually extremely smart for having made it that far. However, coping with something doesn't mean that it goes away. You cannot just try harder and be a fundamentally different person tomorrow.
I would expect someone like him to work extra hard if being an engineer is what he wanted. In that case I would find it inspiring. But I didn't see it in that particular student.
He might have been working harder than you could have ever imagined... or you might be right. The guy may have been a lazy worthless **** who gives all other hard working people with disabilities a bad name, but you can't use this as an excuse to condemn people who ask for special considerations because of a disability as lazy cheaters.
The entrepreneurs who got bad grades in school is something completely different. Most of them just don't like what they are taking, so the grade system is only holding them back from their real passion. Fortunately in the US people have many different paths to success.
I'd say that's probably true of high school, but a lot less true for college coursework. Either way, what you just said is really not very different from the point I was trying to make... that some people suffer in instututionalized environments, but go on to thrive when they no longer have to follow rules and regimens imposed upon them and many people with psychological disorders have great difficulty with rules and regimens because those rules an regimens were not designed for people who work the way they do.
