In this study we used 70 students to test the difference between the way male and female students understand and explain their disabilities. Since our test pool does not contain any known members with actual disabilities, we created a placebo pool. The way we assessed how the students characterized their disabilities is by using the Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire (AASQ). We did this by gathering the explanatory style scores of 38 persons with a placebo disability (PWPD) and 32 persons not placebolly disabled (PNPD).