Exam Accommodations in ADHD: The General Framework in Türkiye

"I have ADHD, can I get extra time in the exam?"

Most of the answers given to this question online are either too definite or too vague. The definite ones are usually wrong, because the rules change. The vague ones are of no use.

In this article I want to try a middle way: to explain how the system is set up, without passing judgment on which diagnosis will bring which accommodation. Because I cannot give that judgment, and neither can an article. Only the health board that issues the report and the current guide of the institution you apply to can say it.

This article is the last piece of the series how to study for exams with ADHD.

There are two separate channels

Most of the confusion comes from two different systems speaking with the same words.

The first channel: centralized exams. Exams such as YKS (the university entrance exam), KPSS (the public-service exam) and DGS (the vertical transfer exam) are run by ÖSYM, the Student Selection and Placement Center. Requests for accommodations here are submitted through ÖSYM's own application system, based on a health report.

The second channel: exams inside the university. Midterms, finals, arrangements within a course. Here the contact is not ÖSYM but the disability unit of the university you study at.

These two work independently of each other. Having benefited from an accommodation in a centralized exam does not automatically bring the same accommodation in your midterm at the university; the reverse is also true.

What the unit at the university does

The Regulation on Advisory and Coordination for Disabled Persons in Higher Education Institutions (Resmi Gazete, 14 August 2010, no. 27672) defines the duties of the disability units set up in universities.

Among these duties are determining students' needs in the areas of education, housing and social life, carrying out awareness work aimed at instructors, and ensuring the accessibility of the campus. The part related to exams is written directly: providing time, venue, materials and an accompanying reader for the exams of a disabled student.

So the place where a request for an exam accommodation inside the university goes is clear: the disability unit. At most universities this unit is called something like "Disabled Student Unit" or "Barrier-Free University Coordinatorship," and the application form can be reached from its website.

There is an important practical point here: going through the unit instead of talking to your instructor one by one. Talking to the instructor is useful too, but it depends on the person; a request that goes through the unit is entered into the record, and you do not have to explain it again in later terms. I wrote about the everyday side of this relationship in the article on ADHD at school and university.

The process in centralized exams

On the centralized exam side two things are decisive: the report you hold and the request you make at the time of application.

On the report side, for adults the report taken as the basis is the disability health board report for adults (ESKR), and for those under eighteen it is the special needs report for children (ÇÖZGER). The report is expected to be registered in the Ministry of Health system and to be valid on the date of application.

Which health conditions correspond to which exam practices is regulated by a separate regulation: the Regulation on Health Conditions Required for Exam Practices and Disability Quotas for Disabled Individuals (Resmi Gazete, 8 March 2022, no. 31772). This regulation has been amended over time and may continue to be.

On the request side, the process moves through the candidate application system. When you log in, the registered report, the disability group and the exam practices that can be carried out under the regulation are displayed. Requests for a reader, a marker and the like are submitted here.

I have to put a warning here. Who can benefit from which accommodation, how long the extra time will be and the application calendar are written separately in each exam's own guide and are updated term by term. For this reason I am not writing numbers or exact conditions here. Reading that year's guide for the exam you will take, and asking ÖSYM directly if needed, is more reliable than any account on the internet.

What I can say about ADHD in particular

The honest answer is this: I cannot make a general statement about which accommodation an ADHD diagnosis alone will bring.

The reason is this. The accommodation decision depends not on the name of the diagnosis but on the assessment in the report issued by the health board and on the equivalent the regulation provides for that report. Different reports can come out of the same diagnosis; with the same report there can be different practices in different exams.

So the most useful thing I can do is to show the way to ask the right question in the right place.

For the report: ask the doctor who made or follows your diagnosis how the disability health board report process works. You can also learn there in which hospitals the assessment can be done.

For a centralized exam: read the disabled candidates section of the current application guide of the exam you will take. Where you remain unsure, ask through ÖSYM's own communication channels and note the date you asked.

For university exams: write to your school's disability unit. Submit your request in writing and ask for the answer in writing.

For timing: none of these processes is quick. Getting a report requires a chain of appointments, and the application has its own calendar. A process started two weeks before the exam usually does not make it in time.

Keep the papers in one place. Keep your report, your application printouts, your correspondence with the unit and the answers you received in a single folder. A physical file and a photo folder on your phone. In ADHD losing these documents is very common, and each loss means starting the process over. Also note the date of every correspondence; "whom did I speak to and when" is a question often asked at later stages.

Getting an accommodation does not solve everything

Suppose you got an accommodation. It is not realistic to expect it alone to change the result.

The study by Lovett and Leja looked at university students' reading comprehension performance under different time limits. Students with more ADHD symptoms and executive function problems benefited less from extra time; students' own estimates of their time needs also did not predict the benefit (Lovett & Leja, 2015).

It would be wrong to read this finding as "extra time is unnecessary." What I read in it is this: extra time, if you have no plan to use that time, becomes extra time for drifting. If you have extra time, you need to solve your practice exams with that longer time and divide the time into sections. I wrote about this in detail in the article on practice exams and time management.

The same holds for a separate room. Fewer stimuli can really help, but they alone do not make up for a gap in studying. In the glossary you can look at the entries for exam accommodation and reasonable accommodation.

Why is it hard for us to ask

Setting the technical process aside, I want to say one more thing, because in practice the biggest obstacle is often not bureaucracy.

For many people with ADHD, asking for an accommodation feels like "asking for a privilege." On top of that comes a habit left from the undiagnosed years: getting by, compensating, telling no one. For someone who has stood on their own for years, asking for help feels like admitting incompetence.

Reviews studying university students with ADHD show that these students report a lower grade point average and more academic difficulty than their peers (DuPaul et al., 2009). So the difficulty is real and measurable. An accommodation is a leveling tool that tries to compensate for this difficulty; it steals nothing from anyone.

There is also the decision about disclosure: whom you tell and how much you explain. Applying to the unit does not require explaining your diagnosis to all your instructors; in most cases the unit communicates how the exam will be held, not the details of the diagnosis. I wrote about the emotional side of this decision in the article on stigma.

How to write the request

The place where processes get stuck most is often not the application itself but how the request is written. Writing an email can be an obstacle in itself in ADHD; I wrote about this in the article on email and message paralysis.

A short skeleton makes writing that email easier.

Who you are. Your name, your department, your number. One sentence.

What you are asking for. Instead of "I would like to get information," a concrete request: which exam, which term, which arrangement. Vague requests bring vague answers.

The document you hold. Whether you have a report or not, or whether you are in the process of getting one. If you have it, its date.

When you need it. The exam date. This sentence shows the other side how urgent the process is.

A single question. End with a clear question that is easy to answer: "For this request, which documents do I need to submit and by what date?"

A five-point email gets a faster answer than a long, explanatory one. You may feel the need to tell your own story, and that is understandable; but an application email is not the place for it.

If no answer comes, you need to follow up, and this follow-up is the link that drops most often in ADHD. On the day you send it, put a reminder in the calendar: if there is no answer after a week, politely resend the same email. Trying to keep the follow-up in your head is the most common reason a process quietly dies.

Save every answer you get. Turn information given verbally into writing too: send a short email saying "In our meeting I understood this, is that right?" This is not distrust; it is the cheapest way of not having to remember, a few months later, who said what.

I wrote the application and document process for ÖSYM exams step by step in a separate article.

Preparation guides specific to exams are separate: YKS and LGS.

The limit of this article

Finally, there is something I have to say openly. I am not a lawyer, and what I have written here is not an interpretation of legislation.

What I described is the general skeleton of the system: which institution is the contact for what, and where you can direct your questions. For current conditions, ratios, document lists and calendars, the only valid sources are that year's guide for the exam you will take and your own institution's written answer. If something turns out differently from what you read online, what the institution has written is correct.

The only thing I ask of you is this: do not choose never to ask because you are unsure. Even if the answer to the question is "no," the twenty minutes spent asking cost less than four years of wondering.