I think Bostonian is correct to point out that there are tricky issues involved in accommodating disabilities while maintaining the usefulness of the qualification to third parties such as employers, but it is also something we routinely do. In the UK, we are bound by the Equalities Act 2000. It's all pretty sane. (I am not sure, though I did look it up at some point, which parts of what follows are actually specified in the law and which are just what we see as good legally safe practice, though.) The general principle is that we must make reasonable adjustments for disabilities. "Reasonable" naturally depends on context - e.g., it's reasonable to expect a university to make classes wheelchair accessible, even at considerable inconvenience and expense, because we can take it, but it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a startup tutoring company whose offices were up four flights of stairs to do the same. Where assessment is concerned, we must do whatever may be required for the student to demonstrate that they have met the learning objectives of the course. We don't have to pass someone who can't meet the LOs, and we are allowed to set prerequisites for entrance to the course provided we have good reason to do so. E.g. if "be able to spell all of the most common 10,000 words of English" were a learning objective of the course, then it would be fine to penalise a dyslexic person for spelling errors in exams, but otherwise, it isn't. Where I am, one result is that people write LOs more carefully and tightly than they used to, because the less vague they are, the easier it is to deal with this kind of thing fairly. [ETA E.g. some of the LOs on courses I've taught start "Explain..." and so, I think, if I had a student with disorder of written expression who could do this orally but not in written form, I would have to assess that student specially. Had I written "Explain in writing..." I would not have to accommodate. Incidentally a feature of the UK system compared with the US one is less on-the-fly autonomy for individual professors: these LOs go through a committee a year in advance.]
The thing we can't do is create more time, and this is the thing I've found hardest in dealing with students with disabilities. In this system, you can't just take fewer courses per year and take longer to graduate; there is a fixed annual courseload. If someone has a disability such that it's possible for them to meet all the learning objectives of all the courses but at the cost of significantly more effort than nondisabled students, it's very easy for that person to sink, and very hard to help them. (People can and do repeat years, but if they can't do a year's courseload in a year, they can't pass.) In those situations it really does end up depending on the organisation and motivation of the student. Students who aren't exceptionally organised and motivated can and do fail.
ETA One thing I have wondered about is this. Currently, if a student has a disability that is accommodated, nothing about this appears on the student's transcript or certificate. So it is quite possible that a potential employer might, for example, have some knowledge about the amount of writing involved in one of our degrees, and deduce from the fact that a student has a degree from us that they must be able to write well. If the student had an accommodated disability, that might not be correct, and there is no obligation on the student to declare the disability to the employer. I tend to think this is OK, and best seen as just another reason to get those LOs correct and public. I do think of this every time I read criticism of universities for "turning out students who can't write a decent paragraph" though! (In practice, there is a class of things I'll comment on in student work but not penalise, and many writing problems are among them.)
Last edited by ColinsMum; 07/15/12 03:52 PM.
