Many times throughout my teaching career, I have gotten formal university requests for accommodations of student disabilities. Some requests I would grant to just about any student without a second thought: a hearing interpreter, a distraction-free environment, or temporary audio recordings of lectures. Other requests were unconventional but seemed harmless, such as a student’s request to print exams on blue paper or double-spaced. (I agreed to those requests.) However, the most common requests I receive are for extra time on exams — typically requesting 50 percent more time than that given to other students in the course. It is these last requests that have most taxed my thoughts.
When I receive a formal letter from the university stating that a student needs a particular kind of accommodation, my options seem stark and grim: Either accept the university’s assessment of accommodation with the support and blessing of the legal department, or challenge the accommodation and risk single-handedly defending my legal interpretation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
For either choice, the average faculty member has neither means nor training to evaluate the student’s disability — the former because disabilities typically include privileged medical information that the professor has no business knowing, and the latter because faculty members get precious little training in the accommodation of disabilities. The simple choice is thus to rely on one’s institution, perhaps unfairly disadvantaging both students who have disabilities and those who do not. Indeed, though I have extensively discussed my concerns with officials at my university who handle disability issues, they have strongly disagreed with my arguments.
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My second concern about time-based accommodation is that these requests appear to be independent of context. No one has ever asked me what kind of course I am teaching, what kinds of tasks are required on exams, or what type of material I am covering before making such a request. In many of my courses, for example (I teach computer engineering), a significant amount of exam time may be spent running computer programs, whose computations are not affected by any disability that I know.
Finally, I have yet to find any objective basis for the amount of extra time that is provided. Colleagues in various fields have told me they know of no guidelines to support a specific amount of extra time, and there seems to be little peer-reviewed literature. The extra time provided often appears to be based on the recommendation of an evaluating physician, who is not familiar with how I teach my course, and on commonly accepted standards.
Indeed, in some cases, these commonly accepted standards are similar to the position of the College Board, which administers a variety of national standardized tests, such as the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams. Each year the College Board provides students who have documented disabilities with a variety of accommodations, such as time and a half (or more) on exams, or permission to use a four-function calculator for math sections that do not permit use of a calculator. Approximately 85 percent of all accommodation requests are approved, according to a letter the College Board sent me in response to written queries I sent in June. It seems to me that some of these accommodations can significantly affect performance on exams that are often tightly time-constrained.
In response to my queries, the College Board provided no research evidence for the connection between accommodation and disability. Instead, it assured me that “all requests are reviewed by experts in appropriate fields” and “reviewed annually by a national panel of experts.” The response further said that the College Board would not provide a comparison of accommodated versus non-accommodated students, and that both sets of students are scored on the same scale.
In effect, both the College Board and any colleges that may have similar policies appear to be providing an advantage to some students on rigorously controlled tests without a rigorous foundation for the accommodation. The advantage may be sufficient to offset some disabilities, but it also may not. In either event, there is significant potential for collateral damage from this underresearched policy.
Proper accommodation requires accurate, quantifiable research on the relationship between disabilities and performance.
Students with disabilities who lack the economic or social means to request accommodations (a process that involves documentation and various evaluations) are doubly penalized: once with respect to their classmates who do not have disabilities, and a second time with respect to their more privileged disabled counterparts who secure accommodations. Students without disabilities, on the other hand, are potentially disadvantaged by these accommodations in a manner that is not rigorously and objectively analyzed or understood. It is inappropriate to give an objective test with a clearly delineated grading policy if some students get uncalibrated bonuses.
Ultimately, I believe that time extensions re-victimize some of my students with disabilities by setting them up for failure on high-pressure tech interviews and subsequent jobs that do not, and cannot, honor time extensions for deadline-driven work. Subjectively determined extensions may also hurt some students’ self-esteem, since they know that they utilized an adjustment of the playing field to attain their successes.
Proper accommodation of students with disabilities requires accurate, quantifiable research on the relationship between disabilities and performance and on the long-term benefits of various accommodations. Accommodations must be specific to circumstances and transparently published for specific disabilities, just like grading rubrics and curves. It may be convenient for both the college and the student to indiscriminately agree to simple accommodations, such as time extension, for a whole host of disabilities in prima facie compliance with the ADA. However, this dilutes the integrity of the academic process without providing a definable benefit to our students.
Ari Trachtenberg is professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University.
