Should universities give extra time or related accommodations for students with mental illnesses?

Question

Based on this question: Is it unethical to accept extra time on exams when I still do well?

To my knowledge, I don't think my university or home department has a policy on extended time exams or a "disability office". In my entire stay in the university, I have heard of only three people with mental illnesses. Two graduated. One is still in the university, but I have not yet asked her. It seems like she is entitled to have extra time on exams or homework or something that evens the playing field.

Are there any legitimate reasons a university may have for not allowing extra time or something for mentally ill students, assuming of course that the student can prove mental illness? It seems that they ought to give extra time or something to be fair to students.

Relevant links: this comment, this answer, this answer.

Answer 1

In answering this question, I think that it is important to consider the distinction between mental illness and learning disabilities. While there is a spectrum of different and complex effects, for the purposes of making policies it may be useful to consider these two "prototypical" classes of challenge:

• Many specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia or speech impairment, have a rather focused affect on perception and action, rather than more generally impairing cognition. In many cases, relatively simple interventions (such as giving a dyslexic student more time) can have a big impact on educational success by mitigating the impact of the disability. I think of this as little different than the intervention of glasses in mitigating the impact of my poor eyesight.
• Mental illness such as depression or bipolar disorder, on the other hand, is much more subtle and difficult to deal with, since it strikes at "core" aspects of an individual such as motivation, interpretation of the world, and outlook on life. Even when an intervention is plausible, the ethical boundaries are much less clear, particularly given the difficulty in balancing the need for consent against the likely harms from a possibly distorted mental state.

For an educational institution, then, the approaches to supporting students with mental illness and specific learning disabilities are likely to want to be very different, and the type of support that is needed is likely to be different for different types of challenges. Giving a dyslexic student more time on an exam makes a lot of sense; it's like letting a student who is hard of hearing sit up in the front of the lecture hall. Giving a highly depressed individual extra time on an exam is not likely to be a meaningful intervention; letting them take time off without penalty and return in another semester with a clean slate is more likely to be effective.

A good institution should then try to figure out the needs of each student, and how far they can reasonably go to satisfy them given the institution's resource constraints.

Answer 2

Are there any legitimate reasons a university may have for NOT providing needed accommodations for students with documented mental illness?

Legitimate reasons, no, absolutely not.

Should universities give extra time or related accommodations for students with mental illnesses?

Yes, absolutely.

A student with a handicapping condition should look at lists of possible accommodations, and do plenty of experimenting, to find out what's helpful. The university has a moral obligation, and in many places, a legal obligation, to provide needed accommodations. Not to do so constitutes discrimination. In the United States, a refusal to provide needed accommodations is a violation of the student's civil rights. An educational institution that refuses, risks losing all federal funding.

The nature of the handicapping condition is only relevant to the choice of accommodations, not to the initial decision of whether to provide accommodations.

Here is one list of possible accommodations -- there are a number of them on the web. Reading them is a great way to brainstorm what might fit best for a particular handicapping condition and for a particular student.

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I will provide one small example. My son sometimes, but not always, writes and erases each letter, or word, or sentence, sometimes multiple times for each such unit. At first, this symptom occurred only with handwritten work, but then it crept into typewritten work as well. The solution: a scribe. He dictates, the teacher types; she reads it back and shows it to him, and he can edit the text himself, or dictate edits. This accommodation is very helpful for him.

Answer 3

In the US, a student with a disability (learning or otherwise) has the right to accommodations under Federal Law (Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973). In most cases when a hidden disability such as a learning disability is diagnosed, a plan, typically referred to as a 504 Plan, is developed with the school for what accommodations are to made. This can mean someone in class to take notes for the student, extra time for assignments and exams. A good discussion of how the ADA applies to post-secondary education is here

The point is that the ADA doesn't differentiate between learning and physical disabilities and that providing appropriate accommodations for either isn't something the schools "should" do, it's something they are required to do.

Section 504 defines a disability as "individuals with disabilities are defined as persons with a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities" The HHS Factsheet for Section 504 (pdf warning) specifically includes mental illness as a disability.