Accommodating Learning Disabilities Can Bestow Unfair Advantages

Recently, one of us proctored a final examination for a class of 102 undergraduates at Cornell University.

Three of the students took the exam down the hall from the rest of the class: One of them required a private room, and the other two shared another room. Both extra rooms had their own proctors, who administered a special version of the test and answered the students’ questions about the definitions of words and the meaning of questions. The three students also had extra time to complete the exam, ranging from one and a half to two and a half times as long as for the rest of the class.

Many colleges and universities pressure faculty members to make such accommodations to help students who have been diagnosed with learning disabilities, and who are thus legally eligible for special treatment. In large, introductory lecture courses at Cornell, learning-disabled students make up at least 2 per cent of many classes -- that is, six or more students out of 300. The requirements place an unfair burden on professors and may penalize students who do not have special needs, or who have learning disabilities that haven’t been diagnosed.

Professors are often faced with developing and administering multiple versions of tests for students with various disabilities. While the majority of students in the class take one version in one room, those with special needs may require one or more separate rooms, in which the test can be read aloud, or in which a proctor can answer questions about terms used in the test. Some learning-disabled students may also be allowed to consult extra materials, such as class notes and reference works. Usually, faculty members must arrange on their own to have teaching assistants proctor those special versions. If a professor has no teaching assistants, or if they are unavailable, the professor must give the test to the students with special needs at a separate time and location. That can be difficult to arrange, especially when some students can take 250 per cent of the usual time to complete the exam -- five hours, if the rest of the class gets two hours.

How well do professors who are not expert on disabilities meet the needs of students who are disabled? And why do colleges and universities typically make meeting those needs the responsibility of faculty members?

The problem with such a responsibility is not just that it creates problems for professors. The requirements also raise several questions that we, as psychologists, believe too few educational institutions have addressed. How can disabilities be accurately and consistently defined and substantiated -- especially when, as is the case with many of them, the condition is not easily observed or measured, and is not well understood by experts? How can we insure fairness to all students, particularly those with meaningful disabilities, in an era that has seen a dramatic increase in the rate of certain disabilities, such as attention-deficit disorder, that resist precise definition? Misdiagnoses are increasingly common, a situation that leads students with relatively minor disabilities -- as well as those with pervasive cognitive deficits, who used to be known as slow learners -- to claim eligibility for everything from extra time on exams to special versions of tests.

We support efforts to help non-traditional students, including those with meaningful disabilities, function effectively at colleges and universities. But who diagnoses the disabilities?

At Cornell, students can submit a letter from a psychologist enumerating their special needs concerning instruction and testing. Faculty members receive memoranda at the beginning of each semester, informing them of the requirements of each special-needs student who has signed up for their classes. A memo might state that a student has been diagnosed with a learning disability and so is legally eligible for 150 per cent of the usual time allowed to complete exams, along with a small testing room without distractions of any kind.

The situation is similar at other colleges and universities, although the percentage of such students varies. Some institutions assign the responsibility for creating and proctoring special tests to staff members at the departmental level or in a central university office. However, on many campuses, as at Cornell, the individual faculty member is responsible.

We are convinced that some diagnoses of learning disability are incorrect. But even if a student is correctly diagnosed as learning disabled, is there a scientific basis for the specific list of accommodations requested, or is it simply a wish list made up by high-school counselors or private doctors hired by upper-middle-class parents?

For instance, no scientific evidence exists to justify a claim that a student with a learning disability requires one and a half times as long to finish exams, to compensate accurately and fairly for the disability. There is no empirically defensible reason to assert that 150 per cent, 200 per cent, 250 per cent, or any other per cent is the magical compensatory threshold. In fact, not all learning-disabled students require extra time for tests: They tend to process information differently from other students, but they are not necessarily slower.

Furthermore, learning disabilities are supposed to manifest themselves with certain kinds of subject matter, not to occur equally with all subjects. For example, one learning-disabled student’s linguistic processing may be slower than his or her I.Q. would suggest, or another student might have trouble with visual information. But students with learning disabilities should display pockets of talents that are not affected by the disability; otherwise, they have more-pervasive problems than are connoted by the term “learning disability.” It is easy to become skeptical when we hear of students diagnosed as learning disabled who require several extra hours to take tests in every subject, and who need distraction-free settings with private proctors who can give them extra help.

On the other hand, it does not follow that everyone who does require extra time to complete an exam is learning disabled. An individual’s slower processing speed could be due to other factors, such as anxiety about taking tests, obsessiveness, or even recurrent headaches or exhaustion.

At what point should requiring extra time to finish tests warrant classifying a student as a slow learner rather than as learning disabled? When the student needs three times as long as most students? Three and a half times? Ten times? And what about students with what were once referred to as “pervasive cognitive processing deficits,” now called mild retardation? Many of them might be able to attend universities such as Cornell if they were given the kind of support that some special-needs students receive. The fact is that most students would do better on tests if they had extra time and private testing rooms.

And what about students with undiagnosed but legitimate special needs, whose parents could not afford professional evaluations, or whose high schools did not have programs to diagnose their disabilities? We suspect that the rate of diagnosed learning disabilities is higher among the offspring of wealthy families, because they have the resources and knowledge to use the system to their advantage. Unfortunately, statistics are difficult to collect and analyze. For example, some universities do not count as disabled those students who receive special treatment during only part of their undergraduate careers.

We do not, in theory, oppose untimed tests and the practice of giving students ample time to demonstrate their knowledge. But with some tasks, giving everyone unlimited time simply means that everyone’s accuracy rate rises. One of us gives students an exam in which they assume the role of an expert witness in a trial who is asked to respond to material presented in court. The exam forces students to think on their feet, drawing on knowledge they gained through reading and lectures. Hence, giving learning-disabled students 250 per cent of the time that other students have for the same exam risks treating the latter group unfairly.

Imagine how much students could improve their performance on that exam if they could take it a second time, as one learning-disabled student claimed he was entitled to do because it took him longer to comprehend the material. Imagine how many students would do better if they could take the exam in a private room with no distractions.

Meeting students’ special needs also means that faculty members must occasionally shortchange other students. No longer can a professor station teaching assistants around an auditorium during an exam, to observe students, discourage cheating, and clarify questions. Typically, if two teaching assistants are assigned to a lecture class of 100 students, both are needed to proctor the special versions of exams required for students diagnosed as learning disabled. Some professors believe that they cannot give exams to regular students that require two hours to complete -- even if that format is the best way to test their knowledge of the material -- because that would mean having to find extra rooms that are available for a five-hour version of the exam for special-needs students -- a task that is almost impossible to accomplish during hectic exam weeks. The professors would also have to persuade busy teaching assistants, who have to take exams themselves, to set aside five straight hours to proctor the special exams.

Colleges and universities should take more responsibility for meeting the teaching and testing needs of students with learning disabilities, and for doing so fairly and in a manner that does not compromise the education of other students. As a first step, institutions should put into effect policies that are more rigorous and defensible to evaluate students’ special needs. On many campuses today, administrators with no special training in how to assess learning disabilities decide what accommodations to grant students. Admissions officers, with the help of experts in various types of disabilities, should develop standards that are scientifically justifiable and based on data for evaluating diagnoses and granting special accommodations. Of course, the standards then need to be implemented fairly.

Colleges and universities also should give faculty members more support in adapting teaching and testing methods to students with special needs. They should assign staff members, perhaps from student-services offices, to locate extra testing rooms and proctor exams, which would include answering students’ questions and replaying videos for those who are unable to process the contents after one screening. Some institutions already provide such resources, usually at the departmental level. But most do not.

A medical analogy comes to mind: If a university admits a student who is blind or paralyzed, it implicitly assumes the responsibility of meeting the student’s special teaching and testing needs. For example, the university’s central administration is responsible for providing exam readers or wheelchair ramps. Imagine the reaction (and the shoddy workmanship) if faculty members were expected to build ramps to each of their classrooms. Yet when it comes to students diagnosed with learning disabilities, many institutions expect faculty members to adapt teaching and testing plans on their own.

Fairness dictates that whenever an institution of higher education admits a student with special needs, it should do so with the understanding that it will provide the necessary support services -- whether those are wheelchair ramps, exam readers, extra proctors, private testing rooms, or staff members trained in determining which accommodations are scientifically justifiable for which disabilities.

Our colleagues tell us that we are not alone in our concern about the fair and consistent identification of students requiring special accommodations. Institutions no longer admit students with known disabilities only if those conditions are measurable, quantifiable, and have little effect on cognitive ability and academic potential -- an obvious example is a student who uses a wheelchair. Now, colleges and universities also admit students whose needs raise doubts about their ability to succeed in academe.

In the laudable quest for fairness and equal opportunity, we have given special advantages to some students. But we must not continue to shortchange other students, some of whom may also have legitimate special needs.

Wendy M. Williams is an associate professor, and Stephen J. Ceci a professor, of human development at Cornell University. They are the authors of Escaping the Advice Trap (Andrews McMeel, 1998).

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