Disability-Related Academic Accommodations: Exam Accommodations

In honor of the approaching end-of-the-year exams, I'm going to talk about exam accommodations at the higher education (community college/college/university) level.

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My 27-plus years of experience administering academic accommodations in post-secondary (aka higher education) settings make me confident in sharing the legally supportable [ideal] policy scenarios at this educational level.

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Ideological Underpinning of Exam Accommodations

Like other types of accommodations, the purpose is to “level the playing field” between the students with disabilities, which impact their exam-taking experience, and the students who do not have disabilities that impact test-taking.

The idea is not to give the disabled student an advantage but a level playing field. It is also not intended to guarantee a high grade. Equal access to the material and the ability to perform at one’s best—that is the idea.

Exam Accommodations — Process to Set Up

The process for determining appropriate exam accommodations is the same for other types of accommodations:

1. Student needs to meet with a professional at their school’s office that serves students with disabilities

2. The office will likely have professional documentation of disability requirements—this will vary by institution.

3. The student will discuss what (if any) accommodations they have received in the past (especially about how they received those accommodations at their most recent school).

4. The disability services professional will also review the student’s documentation to determine what (if any) other accommodations might be appropriate based on the current functional impact of their disability(ies).

5. Depending on the process employed by the school, the disability professional will memorialize what accommodations the student is approved for so that the student’s instructors can be informed as early in the quarter or semester as possible.

   1. A student who has a “static” or stable disability shouldn’t have to go through the evaluation process over and over again. There should be a procedure whereby a student can indicate, “I am requesting the same accommodations I had before—my disability hasn’t changed.”

   2. If a student’s accommodations need to be modified for any reason, they should contact their disability professional to discuss a revision.

An essential principle of disability-related accommodations is that the law intends for the determination and implementation of accommodations to be a continuing conversation. A person might have changes to the functional impact of their disability(ies); the format of an exam might require a change in a student’s typical accommodations to keep the situation fair for the student and for the class as a whole.

Types of Exam Accommodations

It is important to note that none of the lists I make on the topic of accommodations, including exam accommodations, should be considered all-inclusive. I will list the most used and some idiosyncratic accommodations that I know I have okayed. However, each student’s situation and functional limitations need to be analyzed individually. It is possible that a specific student in a particular class might need an accommodation that hasn’t been previously required at that institution; a new accommodation may or may not be appropriate, but “we’ve never done that before” is not a good reason to say “no.”

Determining exam accommodations is one area in which the staff of the disability services office may come into conflict with the faculty, if the faculty don’t like the accommodations the office has approved, a negotiation might have to happen. Suppose the student has a “hidden” or “invisible” disability (a learning disability or a chronic health condition are just two examples). In that case, the office is not permitted to disclose the student’s disability without the student's written permission. One tactic I used was listing hypothetical disabilities for which a given accommodation might be appropriate.

Time-Related Accommodations

There are various combinations of additional time for an exam, time designated for a break or breaks, and how long the breaks need to be.

Some schools have testing centers where the exam accommodations are implemented; other schools, like my former employer, have no testing center, so the faculty and their TAs must implement exam accommodations.

Similarly, some schools have proctors for exams, and some schools operate on an Honor Code, which the student signs at the beginning of the exam, which indicates that they will not cheat. I was in a latter-type scenario, where students would receive their exams, and a TA would return and get the exam when their time was up. Alternatively, depending on the exam format, the student might be responsible for emailing their exam to a professor or a TA by a specific time.

• Extended time

  • Primarily because of the desire to standardize the amounts of time available, most students receive either “time and a half” (an extra half-hour for every hour of exam time) or “double-time” (double the amount of exam time). If a given student also needed to take breaks, I would discuss with them whether they felt they needed more time for the breaks or if the increase in base time was adequate. Their answer would depend in significant part on the nature of their disability. Important: if a student were using exam accommodations for the first time, I would remind them repeatedly that if the accommodations we agreed upon were inadequate, they could come back, and we would try another set of accommodations until we got it “right.”

Because the disability services office got tremendous administrative and faculty pressure to make the accommodations as simple as possible, we decided to incorporate the extended time on the exam plus the amount of break time to arrive at the total extra time approved.

Setting-Related Accommodations

Most exams are administered in a big room with a lot of students. Most exam accommodations don’t work—or have the effect of “outing” the students with accommodations if they sit in the same room as everyone else (are they supposed to start early? Stay late? It is just messy.

So putting all of the students with time and a half together somewhere, ditto double-time students, can make sense.

• Private exam room: This can be for myriad reasons:

  • A student needs a scribe and must dictate their exam answers to someone who will write them down. This would disturb other test-takers so that this student would need a private exam room. (They would also get extended time because it just takes longer to complete an exam in this way.)

  • A student may be accustomed to using voice-to-text software to write their exams; this can be for a student with a physical disability or possibly a learning disability. They would also get extended time unless they felt they didn’t need it.

  • Some students have complicated chronic illness-related needs. They may need to have food with them and/or medication. They may need to be able to walk around or lie down on the floor.

  • A student might have a mental health disability, which becomes exacerbated by being in a large exam room with other students.

• Distraction-reduced exam room:

  • For students with ADHD (for example) who would do better in a smaller room with a much lower density of other students.

  • Students who need to type their exam can be given a “scrubbed laptop,” so they can’t connect to the internet.

I want to remind everyone here that the implementation of exam accommodations can change dramatically if 1) the school has a testing center and/or 2) the school uses human or electronic (webcams) proctors.

Welcome to The Weeds

I have tried to make this both conceptual and get into the weeds about how this works. It seems pretty dry, but I don’t want to start editorializing until you’ve gotten the “facts.”

What many people and most other college administrators don't understand is that a majority of this work, if you're redoing it right, is in the weeds. You can and should have processes and procedures, but you can't have blanket rules for “students with cerebral palsy,” for example. The letter and intent of the law are that disability-related accommodations will be individualized determinations.

It is, I think, both an art and a science.