Two exceptionalities that cancel each other out on paper
Therese Cumming, Jennifer Jolly, Geraldine Townend and Sarah Fleming, at UNSW and the Education University of Hong Kong, have published an exploratory study in Education Sciences on twice-exceptional university students — a population the Directory hasn’t covered before, so the term itself is worth establishing properly.
Twice-exceptional — 2e — describes people who are simultaneously gifted and neurodivergent: high intellectual aptitude co-occurring with autism, ADHD, AuDHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, or dyscalculia. The foundational operational definition, from Reis and colleagues, ends on the sentence that explains everything downstream: their gifts may mask their disabilities, and their disabilities may mask their gifts. The mechanism is mutual concealment. The giftedness compensates the divergence into invisibility — the dyslexic child whose intelligence brute-forces reading well enough to miss the diagnostic threshold. The divergence drags the giftedness down into apparent averageness — the profoundly able student whose executive difficulties produce mediocre marks. Two exceptionalities, each generating a claim to support, sum on paper to an unremarkable student who qualifies for nothing.
Nobody even agrees how many such students exist, and the disagreement is itself the finding: prevalence estimates run from 0.14% of students at the sceptical end to 2–7% at the other — a range spanning two orders of magnitude, which tells you the identification apparatus cannot see the population it is estimating. A category defined by mutual masking will always be undercounted by systems that detect one exceptionality at a time, because the average of a peak and a trough is a flat line. The 2e student is the purest case of the detection-failure thread this corpus keeps tracing: not hard to find because the signs are subtle, but because the signs point in opposite directions and cancel out.
A decade between the first diagnosis and the second
The study surveyed students at a large research-intensive Australian university; 75 self-identified as 2e, and twelve completed the full open-ended survey that fed the thematic analysis. Small, self-selected, one institution — the authors flag all of it, and the attrition from 83 starters to 12 completers is itself worth noticing in a study of executive-function-affected students facing a seven-question open-ended survey. What the twelve describe, though, is remarkably consistent, and it begins with time.
The identification stories are stories of lag. Participants were typically identified as gifted first, with the neurodivergence recognised years — in some cases more than a decade — later. One participant, Haru, spent ages eight to thirteen shuttling between special education classes and extension English simultaneously — the system literally routing the two halves of one mind to opposite ends of the corridor — and received ADHD and autism diagnoses at thirty. Others described being tested repeatedly through childhood with no conclusive result, the compensation confounding every instrument. That is the masking mechanism operating exactly as the definition predicts: each exceptionality supplying the noise that obscures the other’s signal.
The cost of the lag is written across the achievement data, and it is the study’s saddest finding. Asked whether they saw themselves as achievers, eight of the twelve said no — non-achievers or underachievers, failing to live up to known potential. These are students at a leading research-intensive university, most of them postgraduates, describing an “intangible barrier between myself and my goals,” “struggling to keep my head above water,” and a lack of confidence built from “decades of failing at school.” The objective record says exceptional; the self-concept says failure. That gap is what two decades of unexplained struggle installs — the same sediment mechanism yesterday’s piece watched form in the clinic, here observed at the far end, in people whose giftedness made the verdict crueller: you of all people have no excuse.
Support built for a student who is neither of the two they are
When support finally arrives, it fits badly, and the study is specific about why. University supports were described as generic and deficit-focused — a standard menu of accommodations designed for a generic disabled undergraduate, addressing neither the giftedness nor the interaction between the two exceptionalities. The signature accommodation is extended time, and the wider literature the authors cite shows how unexamined it is: one study found extra time recommended in 88% of clinical reports, with half specifying neither an amount nor a rationale — a default gesture rather than a designed support, and for students whose difficulty is time management rather than time quantity, often a useless one.
The postgraduates in the sample added a dimension the literature barely touches: everything is built for undergraduates. A doctoral student, Jerry, described compulsory EdD coursework as tedious repetition of what he already knew and did — a gifted researcher forced through remedial-pace content because the structure has no mechanism for demonstrated mastery, while the disability services have nothing for research-degree realities at all. His requested support was structural: let students accelerate, let them skip what they can prove they know, and train staff so 2e students are recognised as a population that exists.
Underneath the specific complaints sits the deeper design flaw: the support system is built on a deficit model that cannot represent a person who is simultaneously above and below the norm it measures against. Deficit-based support asks “what is wrong and how do we remediate it toward average?” — a question that insults the giftedness. Gifted provision asks “what is exceptional and how do we extend it?” — a question that ignores the divergence. The 2e student needs both questions asked at once, about the same mind, and instead gets bounced between offices that each own half of them. The strengths-based reframe of twice-exceptionality that the authors call for is not soft language; it is the only model with room for the whole person.
What the students themselves say actually works
Ask the twelve what helps, and the answer is instructive: mostly things they built themselves, plus the cheap flexible parts of the formal system. The self-built layer is elaborate — colour-coded calendars, alarm architectures, body doubling, deliberate rest, systems developed by trial and error and rebuilt each time a course’s structure broke them, as Haru describes. And notably, technology: text readers, project management software, and AI — Claude and ChatGPT are named — used for organisation, verbal processing and checking work against assessment criteria. These students have been running their own accommodation service for years, which is what “reliance on internal coping strategies” means when translated out of academic prose.
From the formal system, what earned praise was almost embarrassingly simple: lecture recordings (one participant listens sped-up, revisiting rather than tuning out), clear assessment guidelines, more than one lecturer per course, approachable staff, and deadline flexibility. Not one participant asked for the difficult or expensive thing. They asked for the environment to be slightly less rigid and considerably more legible — and, repeatedly, for the university to recognise that twice-exceptionality exists, through staff training and processes that can hold both halves at once.
The through-line from identification to support is recognition, and its absence at every stage is the single failure the study documents in three forms: unrecognised in childhood because the exceptionalities cancelled out; unsupported at university because the system models students as either deficient or exceptional but not both; and unconvinced of their own record because two decades of the first two failures taught them the problem was them. Haru’s line deserves the close, because it shows what survives anyway: what keeps them pushing is “achieving a certain level of legitimacy and belonging within an institution that would have historically not allowed me within its walls.” The ability was never in question. The institution’s ability to see it was.
Citations
Cumming, T. M., Jolly, J. L., Townend, G. & Fleming, S. (2026) — Twice-Exceptional University Students: Perceptions of Effective Support — Education Sciences
Reis, S. M., Baum, S. M. & Burke, E. (2014) — An operational definition of twice-exceptional learners: Implications and applications — Gifted Child Quarterly
Butcher, L. & Lane, S. (2025) — Neurodivergent (Autism and ADHD) student experiences of access and inclusion in higher education — Higher Education
McDowall, A. & Kiseleva, M. (2024) — A rapid review of supports for neurodivergent students in higher education — Neurodiversity
