Content Notice

I have tried to use plausible cases to consider some of the practical issues, and this has meant that I have touched on some topics which might resonate with your own experiences: dyslexia, sickness, broken arms, depression, bereavement, mania, sexual assault, migraines, trans-exclusionary speech, and food poisoning.

Note

This is a critical blog, but it is not intended to be critical of any particular University. In my view, the issues I’ve tried to discuss are seen in most Universities across the world. I think this is because the issues are a very general consequence of a quasi-legalistic approach to disability accommodation procedures. It is this general conception of how someone applies for accommodations which I want to examine in this blog, rather than targeting any particular University.

Introduction

I’ve thought a lot this year about inclusivity. I wanted to set out in writing some of the things I’ve considered about one specific sub-issue in this vein: how students navigate the admin of assessments when they are applying for something ‘extra’ to the default.

I’m thinking principally about two types of administration. Anticipatory admin (like a student with dyslexia applying for extra time in exams) and retrospective admin (like a student applying for mitigation after attempting an exam while they were sick).

My thoughts have come together around three themes: process, evidence, and performance. After describing these, I will develop a criticism of what’s happening at the moment and try to resolve it by appeal to concrete examples of Universal Design in assessment.

Process

Administrative interactions are typically online, relate to specific prescribed processes, are embodied in particular forms (pro formas), and can sometimes have poorly-defined timescales and outcomes. It is normally solitary, but sometimes collaborative (“can you help me fill this form out?”). 

The individual circumstances of a student are sometimes a really central dimension of completing administrative processes for accommodations. It is hard to write a form when you have broken your arm or are too depressed to get out of bed. 

And there are important category judgements when process is such an important structure of administration. Is it reasonable to seek mitigation for the way your zero-hours shifts interrupted your revision? What about a bad breakup? For significant-but-not-debilitating depression? For a cancelled train meaning you couldn’t get to your lab session? For a bad period? The eligibility threshold is hard for Universities to communicate when individual circumstances are so profoundly diverse. Sometimes there are also several formal processes which are similarly-named and easy to confuse. What happens if a student applies to the wrong one?

There are also some processes which establish gatekeepers (a form which needs a signature from your supervisor, or an application which must be submitted by the campus GP). Such mechanisms might in principle connect the student with support networks, but they can also act as a barrier to starting the process.

Evidence

Administration relates in complex ways to the idea of evidence. It sometimes seems difficult for a student to work out what kinds of evidence are persuasive and unpersuasive. For medical issues the professional judgement of a doctor will likely be given serious weight, but there can be significant practical and socioeconomic barriers to securing evidence like this. Again, the condition itself can be a barrier to getting the evidence: depression often makes it really hard to go and see the doctor. Some conditions can also take a very long time to secure evidence for; if the waiting list for an ADHD diagnosis is 3 years then it may be impossible to secure before someone graduates from a BSc.

For non-medical issues the question of evidence becomes more difficult still. The moments which shatter our lives are sensitive and devastating in ways which affect the very communities who might otherwise provide evidence. Perhaps it’s possible to get a copy of a death certificate for a close relative, but would you be able to get that piece of paper from the grieving parents of a friend who died? (Would you want to?)

Performance

Woven through the process and evidence dimensions of administration, there is a substantial element of performance in many of these tasks. Students are intensely aware of how they are perceived, because the ultimate aim is to convince someone. Performance is something constructed within narrative, and the narratives are constrained by the procedure and standards of evidence of whatever process is being followed. 

This is important, because it is common for any given claim to be justified on several grounds. Perhaps in an application for mitigation you can evidence one thing (you have an in-date prescription for some migraine medication) but not another (you are distressed by the national news coverage of a trans-exclusionary speaker hosted by a student society on the day of one of your finals papers, for example). What do you do? Should you mention the effect of feeling isolated from your academic community when senior academics and the pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) have argued loudly for the value of free speech in letters to a national newspaper? What are your odds of getting mitigations on grounds which directly conflict with the political views of the person responsible for the University’s education strategy? It would be easy to believe that a performance which sticks to the migraine medication stands a better chance of succeeding.

Finally it is also difficult to perform radically-personal monologues in the blue-white light of the text box, especially when they are about internal mental states. How do you tell someone about the way your best friend’s death has ripped you to pieces? How do you explain that the mania of bipolar disorder makes you so optimistic that you think the examiner will just understand what you’re saying if you write very-brief answers? How do you convey that remembering a sexual assault can overwhelm any scope for demonstrating the academic knowledge and skills you have worked so hard to master? These are complex ideas which demand proper expression. The cursor blinks as you draft and delete, draft and delete.

Outcome

I think these three aspects - process, evidence, and performance - capture a fair amount of what administrative procedures are about. Yet the final outcome of most administrative procedures is a binary yes/no. The timescales involved mean that sometimes there is no opportunity to challenge negative decisions before necessarily-inflexible dates like the day of an exam. This further escalates the stakes of this kind of administration for students.

I think there is something very distinctive about how the outcomes of administrative processes combine crossing-the-tees detail with substantive judgement: an application for extra time in exams might be rejected because of the way the form was filled out or because the reasons given were judged insufficient or because the evidence is thought to be weak.

Criticism

The structure of administrative burdens is that they fall on those who do not conform. The ‘by-exception’ basis of these kinds of processes serves to hassle you if you require something more than what most people need. So there is a fundamental injustice in making disabled students apply for adjustments: this kind of procedure is uninclusive, even if it is the only way students can access equitable treatment. This is typically justified by appeal to the idea that without a rigorous process, students would game the system.

Theory can help us consider the positioning of this justification. There is a distinction of outlook sometimes described in the management literature as Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X starts from a set of negative assumptions about students: they are out to game the system and will try to exploit any administrative opportunity which might serve to boost their performance. Theory Y starts with positive assumptions about students: they are acting in good faith and will generally only make use of administrative mitigation when necessary. Arguably, many pieces of administration are based around Theory X. There is probably some merit to this - it seems likely that some students are acting in bad faith, or that they would if the system were very lax. At the same time, a Theory X view probably significantly penalises some students who behave in a Theory Y way.

But there are real drawbacks to this approach, too. The high Theory X threshold has administrative costs not only for students, but also for staff (and therefore for institutions). This has become extremely obvious in the last few years: the pandemic contributed to an increased number of administrative applications, and the growing openness of society around disability is being expressed as a growing proportion of the student population disclosing disabilities. A recent WonkHE article describes guidance for the baseline ratio of disability support staff to disabled students of 1:200 in 1999 and sitting at 1:750 in some institutions today. With the best will in the world (and I am confident that disability support colleagues are doing everything they can), these numbers are a barrier to students accessing the support we wish them to have.

When there are such strategic weaknesses to a Theory X approach, it’s worth thinking seriously about whether a different approach could serve all parties better.

Universal Design

The exciting policy response is to develop Universal Design solutions. In broad terms, this means designing assessments which include everyone from the outset (rather than including them later by giving them extra time etc). At the point of creating assessments, is it possible to better accommodate the diverse experiences of more students? Are there ways of assessing rigorously which let everyone participate more equitably? 

It seems like there might be. Coursework in general, for example, is something with timeframes long enough to be sympathetic to more experiences than a timed exam can be. A limited number of self-certifications (you state that you had food poisoning and no-one asks you for evidence) might massively reduce administrative burden for mitigation around little-and-often assessment like weekly lab practicals. A choice of assessment formats or some kind of “Best of X” model builds in some breathing room for students while also expecting high standards of everyone (see Morrell’s lovely work on cohering this idea into a framework of formative feedback, too).

The big Universal Design barrier for lots of Chemistry degrees is the heavy reliance on exams as a way of testing Problem Solving outcomes. Solving a quantum mechanics problem on the rotational energy levels of an oblate top within half an hour might be the thing an educator wants someone to be able to do, and an exam is a good way to test this. Universal accommodations for this kind of assessment are quite hard to imagine (though ad hoc accommodations like extra time are perhaps capable of being extended universally so that everyone gets an extra 30min). 

And yet we know that this exam-worthy conception of Problem Solving is weak in important ways because it changes the type of problem scientists are trained to tackle. It is a good format for presenting unseen-and-familiar problems with well-understood solutions, but poor at the problems which better-resemble the challenges practising chemists set themselves to solving. A different type of assessment might let us explore how to solve climate change or how to optimise a tonne-scale synthesis: problems which are vague and difficult and important. Being alive to the possibility of asking ambitious questions is part of the attraction of taking Universal Design really seriously.

Would a Universal Design assessment diet be gamed by students? I’m sure some of them would, somehow. I confess that I would be fairly relaxed about a student gaming their way to solving climate change! But even in the case of more prosaic gamesmanship, would this be so catastrophic that we should instead exclude those students who become included by new ways of assessing? There are substantial costs to continuing with the status quo, too, which should weigh heavy in the scales as we judge what we lose by pursuing our current approach.

Conclusion

We demand a lot of work from students who want to access equitable treatment (to which they are typically entitled by law). I worry that the act of applying for accommodations or mitigations can sometimes serve as a significant extra barrier to the academic success of these students. The extra burden is shouldered by the very students who should be supported by this administrative process.

If the reason for such stringent procedures is the risk of students gaming the system, then I believe the system needs to change. Traditional processes have been caught between the immovable object of academic traditionalism and the unstoppable force of the 2010 Equality Act. They’re squeezed right now, but if they don’t morph then they will be crushed.

Universal Design is the strategy which seems to best honour both academic rigour and equitable outcomes. It’s not watering down standards to set your students harder problems! Instead it is an incredible chance to make our education much, much better. I think we’d be fools not to take it.