The national group administering the Medical School Admission Test must change its policies to give learning-disabled students reasonable accommodations under California law, an Alameda County Superior Court judge has ruled.

Such accommodations might include more time or different rooms in which to take the test, or special devices, aids or equipment, Judge Ronald Sabraw ruled Tuesday. The Association of American Medical Colleges will have 60 days after the final judgment to give Sabraw a written plan for revising its policies for special-accommodation requests.

Berkeley-based Disability Rights Advocates, which helped represent the class-action lawsuit's plaintiffs, said the decision could have a ripple effect on many standardized testing companies' administration of exams in California.

AAMC spokespeople couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.

Brendan Pierce of Oakland, Andres Turner of Granada Hills and Anne Cashmore and David Lebovitz of San Francisco, joined by the International Dyslexia Association and the National Disabled Students Union, sued in July 2004. They claimed the AAMC sets the bar for accommodations too high, denying them the same equalizers they had in high school and college, even on other standardized tests.

Pierce, a University of California, Berkeley graduate, said the AAMC denied his request for time-and-a-half and a private or semi-private room for the eight-hour MCAT.

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Diagnosed as a child with dyslexia and attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder, he said all his schools, including Cal, granted similar accommodations, but the AAMC took his academic achievements to mean he doesn't really need them.

The Washington, D.C.-based AAMC had claimed it's exempt from state laws because the MCAT is administered nationally. It argued it adheres to the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, and applying California's far broader definition of "disability" to California MCAT examinees is unfair to those taking the test under normal conditions, to people seeking accommodations in other states, and to medical schools relying on the MCAT's uniformity.

"I am thrilled with the court's decision," Pierce said in a news release. "Hopefully, the suspicion that I faced when I applied for accommodations on the MCAT will go away and people with learning disabilities will now be able to take the MCAT and other national tests on a level playing field with their non-disabled peers."

Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@angnewspapers.com or 208-6428.