What recourse do I have if the disability office grants unreasonable accommodations to a student?

Question

I've talked to several colleagues who have expressed frustration at the amount of and kind of accommodations that some students receive. I know the Approved Position is "the disability office knows what's best so you can't question them". But what if it seems legitimately unfair to the other students in my class?

There are some students who several colleagues and I believe are abusing the system. Not doing work for months in every class every semester, then requesting "accommodations" at the end of the semester that amount to significantly less work than the average student. Also they have the benefit of solutions being posted, etc.

I know our position is not the Approved one. But if I honestly think a student is abusing the system and getting away with significantly less work than the average student, do I have any recourse?

Answer 1

In the US, disability accommodations do not need to be applied retroactively by law. Many institutions state explicitly in their policies that retroactive accommodations are not required. I did not find any example where retroactive accommodations were considered part of policy. Some examples:

UW–Madison:

Students should not expect accommodations to be retroactively applied to course assessments or materials for which due dates have passed.
[...]
Faculty are not required to retroactively implement accommodations for course assessments or materials for which due dates have passed.

University of Montana:

Students with disabilities are responsible for requesting accommodations in a timely manner. The University is not required to provide retroactive accommodations.

The University of Iowa:

Accommodations are not retroactive.

University of Miami:

Accommodations will not be granted retroactively.

Loyola University:

In general, professors do not have to provide accommodations prior to the delivery of the accommodation letter from the student.

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Of course, you're required to follow not only the law on these things or the policies of other institutions, but rather the policies of your institution. I would check to see whether your institution has a posted policy on application of retroactive accommodations, and if it's not clear, ask to have a conversation about it with your disability office.

I do think in some cases it may be appropriate to consider some retroactive accommodation, just like it's appropriate to consider offering flexibility for students for various other reasons besides disability. I'd consider especially the timeliness and where the students are in their studies. For example, if students are in their first semester of university education they may be having their first experiences with not being able to perform well without accommodations, or may be experiencing stronger symptoms coinciding with the new university environment. However, your depiction:

Not doing work for months in every class every semester, then requesting "accommodations" at the end of the semester that amount to significantly less work than the average student

doesn't immediately suggest this is the case. I think if you want to make an argument to your disability office that you should not be expected to make retroactive accommodations, you could use the policies from other institutions in your argument. I would not make these arguments directly to your students or implement a unilateral policy against retroactive accommodations, though: your quarrel is not with the students but with your institution's administration of accommodations.

Answer 2

The "Accessibility Resource Center" where I work explicitly invites instructors to contact them if the suggested accommodations do not work. Not all my requests to them have been dealt with in a way that keeps me happy, but many were. Policies were altered in some cases, while in other cases ad hoc adjustments were made.

It takes time to have these discussions, so one must choose one's battles. I find "the disability office knows what's best so you can't question them" to be a caricature, but it could be accurate where you are. Of course, I can tell tales where our office was inflexible. I am sure such tales are told about me. This site is full of tales of woe. It is not always that way.

Answer 3

I'm going to guess this is the USA. The delicate aroma of the ADA wafts over this question.

The ADA is quite controversial. There are a wide variety of complaints, both from the POV of it going too far and not going far enough. You can easily find them on Google, and it's quite a bit outside this SE's topic to discuss it.

However, I would suggest you want to tread carefully here. People get excited about the ADA and anything connected to it. Pretty much regardless of your position you will find that there are people upset with you over it.

So, before you dive into this fight, gather yourself a bit and scope out what the results might be. See how "those who went before" have fared. See if they produced changes you thought were good. A little searching for news articles on the subject in your local university and city might be instructive.

There may not be a solution within your university. The administration may be hamstrung by laws and entrenched policies, both at the state and federal level. And the personnel involved in enforcing those policies in the university are likely to be quite intractable, even quite hostile to people who resist.

You may be faced with a choice of putting up with it, moving to a different political situation (probably a different state at least), or finding a political solution (new leadership at least within your university, maybe as far as the state level). None of those is attractive, I admit.

Answer 4

Faculty in my department have successfully pushed back against unreasonable accommodation requests (USA, college in a large urban university).

As others note, this depends on a rather deep matrix of interrelated institutional factors:

• State law
• National law
• Institutional policies
• Possible union contract language
• Position of accessibility services
• Position of the academic department
• Specific staff in all of these roles

In our case, we have a very experienced, capable, and proactive department chairperson who is willing and able to defend us against unreasonable requests.

One of the things that our accessibility office somewhat took advantage of is the capacity of new or adjunct instructors to receive their demands and not know if it's truly a management requirement, or whether reasonability is a thing they might even need to consider. Once our chair finds out and takes up the case, the proposed accommodations sometimes evaporate without an argument. (E.g., if it would obviously violate our union-contracted workload numbers.)

So the first step is not to try to deal with this in your own silo. Have a conversation with your department chair or other mentor about what your department's policies, practices, and experiences currently are. Given that so many local factors can be at play, that chat will likely be more informative than anything we can say here.

Answer 5

In Sweden, teachers are by law allowed to conduct examinations in the way they see fit for their subject (with some limitations regarding needing to follow the approved syllabus, etc.). A consequence is that any accommodations are always up to the teacher, the disabilities office or exam administration can only make recommendations (or, in the case of exam administration, refuse to administer your exam, which would mean you are on your own conducting the exam). So yes, in Sweden you are definitely free to disagree with certain accommodations.

However: note that being legally permitted to do so does not mean freedom of the consequences. If you decide, on a blanket basis, that you don't do accommodations anymore, expect massive pushback from affected students, student unions, and potentially program managers and your own managers. This may have severe implications for your student evaluations and evaluations you need for promotion.

Answer 6

As others have pointed out, the result may be determined by the laws of your country, and there will be little you can do about that.

However, you have written, "...'accommodations' at the end of the semester that amount to significantly less work than the average student..." That means the students are getting significantly less learning, presuming that work is assigned to students for pedagogical reasons.

That seems like something that should concern a body such as a faculty senate. Such a body probably has more influence than one or two individual faculty members.

Answer 7

Simply put, this is beyond your pay grade. The university has mechanisms in place to assure compliance to their regulatory environment, and you can't really ignore them, and asking them to reevaluate the resulting decisions is likely fruitless.

You can, however, seek the help of the office coordinating such things when the accommodations aren't reasonably providable by you on your own. Also, if the suggested accommodation, for whatever reason, just doesn't work for your situation, to get them appropriately modified or waived. For example, if for some reason the accommodation is that the student gets to take an exam in a quiet room with one proctor, but your examination is oral in front of a board of 4 examiners, you obviously can't follow that direction. In that case, you would contact the office, explain your planned accommodation, so that they may "improve" it, or at least document the variation.

Yes, there are PLENTY of issues about fairness. For example, the evaluations for some of the things people seek accommodations for can be very pricey, and might well be out of reach for some students who could really use the accommodations.

Answer 8

Further to earlier answers: depending on what learning outcomes you're trying to assess, it might be possible for you to choose an assessment mode (for all students) that's accessible to students with (the most common) disabilities in the first place, so that no accommodations will be required. If you approach the Disability Office on the basis that that's something you'd like to attempt and you need advice on how to achieve it, I'd expect them to be only too happy to co-operate. Even if it turns out that it's not possible to choose a fully-inclusive mode of assessment for your particular set of learning outcomes, you've then established friendly relations with the Disability Office, which may make future interactions about the details of accommodations more fruitful.

Answer 9

You're definitely free to disagree with them, but I recommend against making changes to the recommended accomodations without clearing it with the disability office first as they've already ran the recommendations though the legal compliance process. Having an official sign-off can save you a lot of headache later.

Not doing work for months in every class every semester, then requesting "accommodations" at the end of the semester

If I'm reading you right, the student has done this in more than one semester. That really changes a lot of things and should make your case easier. The student already knew they had a qualified disability - as evidenced by filing accommodation paperwork the previous semester - and then willfully delayed the paperwork for the next semester until it gave them the maximum benefit. The disability office should be able to confirm this by looking through their records to see when paperwork was filed in past semesters. Filing paperwork late in the semester makes sense when someone is first diagnosed with a disability but if they've filed for accomodations in the past, filing paperwork extremely late should have raised some eyebrows at the disability office.

I would definitely approach them from an attitude of "I see a pattern that I think might be abuse of the system, what should I do?" That's more likely to get a positive response than arguing that the accommodations are excessive (set up the interaction as you and the office working together, not you arguing against the office). For best results, have documentation of the specific advantages that the student gets that aren't explicitly part of the accommodation and that wouldn't happen if paperwork was filed when it was supposed to be (like solutions being posted already). Those sorts of details are not always taken into consideration since the disability office doesn't know the details of your course, plus their processes probably assume that all the paperwork is done at the beginning of the semester. At a minimum, they should take the particulars of your course into account and adjust the accomodations so that they give the student what they need without giving them an unfair advantage.

Answer 10

As other people have mentioned, assuming you are in the US, there is no such thing as accommodations before the date you are informed of the disability. Students are required to provide the information from the office on the campus to the professor, and it is up to them to make the choice about when and to take the consequences.

However, I'm also concerned about something else you said. Accommodations never should reduce the expectations for students. They cannot excuse a student from doing the work. What they are supposed to do is to is make it possible for students to do the work. Most common is extended time on tests. Sometimes they have a note taker. Or they need to have adaptive software, like a screen reader for blind students, or an ASL interpreter for a deaf student.

Not doing work for months in every class every semester, then requesting "accommodations" at the end of the semester that amount to significantly less work than the average student.

If you have a group of faculty who think that a student has done this repeatedly, then I think that you should speak with whoever runs that department (in a respectful way) in a face-to-face meeting, maybe with your chair. Also, you might want to document the whole thing if it is really the same student over multiple semesters or in multiple classes. This will let you get clarification about these issues. But it also lets that person know that they need to meet with the student in question. (Even if it is multiple students, I would handle each one differently.)

I was going to suggest next steps, but it really depends on what happens.

If you don't already include an "Accommodations" section in your syllabus, you should add one that explains the procedures and spells out your expectations about notification.

Now, if the issue is that you are not providing documents or interfaces that don't use accessible javascript or don't have alt text on your images, that is very different; you should do those things by default or work with the disabilities office to achieve them, as hard as it may be sometimes.

Answer 11

Being proactive is better than complaining in hindsight.

In our department, disagreements like this are largely avoided because we have had a general discussion with the disability office on what kinds of accommodations are reasonable from our perspective, ie taking account aspects like impact on the workload of the academics and the meaningfulness of the assessment. As a consequence, the disability office has a standard list of accommodations, and is usual able to meet the individual needs of a student by selecting something from the list. Occasionally, additional conversation might be needed, but this is rare.

Don't discuss individual cases.

Nothing good can come from questioning the appropriateness of measures taken for a concrete student. We would usually not know the precise diagnosis (and we probably shouldn't), and even if we knew, we probably lack the expertise to draw appropriate conclusions from it. So rather than discussing individual cases, it seems much more prudent to have a conversation regarding what are and what are not potential accommodations to offer in general.

Answer 12

If you are a student, then I'd guess you have no "standing" to complain unless you can show that you are, somehow, disadvantaged personally by this. If your grade suffers because another's grade is advanced then the marking system itself is at fault. This is my objection to "grading on the curve", in fact. In that case, you can complain to the prof that, no matter the accommodation to another, you shouldn't be made to suffer for it.

If you are a professor, then I suggest that you and similar minded faculty request a meeting with the disability officer(s) to discuss the situation and the application of the laws.

I'd guess that such a meeting is unlikely to result in much of any change in policy, but you might learn more about the intricacies of the policy and why it is needed. If nothing else, that might ease your discomfort.

But also note, if you are a prof, that the student position, as stated above, needs to be considered in your grading scheme. You can discuss that, also, with the disability office.