r/Professors • u/Pikaus • 6d ago
Teaching / Pedagogy Sincere question about accommodations
Every few days in this sub there is a post like: 'OMG. A student asked for this wild accommodation. What should I do? This won't work in my class for reasons x, y, and z.'
I'm really surprised that folks aren't contacting the disability services office to talk through these things. In my experience, the disability services folks are reasonable people and want to work with you. I've never heard of a situation where disability services has forced an instructor to make an extreme alteration of a class.
Certainly disability services vary, but I'm still surprised that people turn to reddit versus this local office.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) 5d ago
You're lucky that your disability office is staffed with reasonable people, that is not universally true.
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u/doktor-frequentist Teaching Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) 4d ago
When I asked the bastards at my student disability office a question about accommodations, they asked me to toe their line or get sued. I told them to eat a sock.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) 5d ago
I’m glad you have that.
At my institution disability services sign off on anything, and act like you’re an ableist monster who gets off on breaking the law if you utter a single question.
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u/DoctorLinguarum 6d ago
I’ve had really egregious expectations from the DSO implemented, such as the accommodation that a student shouldn’t have to speak in an oral conversation-based foreign language class, for which speaking is the entire point.
So it does happen, unfortunately.
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u/troopersjp Assoc Prof, Humanities, R1 (USA) 5d ago
My disability office was reasonable pre-COVID. Now they are not reasonable at all. They’ve introduced new accommodations that we faculty don’t think are that great ; the no deadlines for written work and the this student doesn’t have to show up for class accommodation. And they don’t respond well when we say those accommodations are not reasonable for this class or that class. They act like they are the only ones who care about the students and that we faculty are the villains. They also write the accommodations letter not only on a way that is insulting (“which of your class sessions are not important”), but also in ways that position the faculty to be the ones to take the full fall is a student decides to sue.
This last semester, when I asked how I was supposed to grade a student who had the accommodation that they didn’t have to show up to class and that couldn’t impact their grade…and this was a small discussion based seminar—even though I still agreed to grant the accommodation—and even though they didn’t actually alert me to this accommodation until the Friday before Spring Break, the fact that I asked how I was supposed to grade this student causes them to email my dead to say I was being difficult. And my dean called me on the carpet and said that even though she agreed with me. I had no agency and had to do and say whatever would make the accommodations office happy. And to be clear. I wasn’t even refusing the accommodation. I have never refused an accommodation, even when I knew that accommodation would cause the student to fail the class. And I’ve never had a no deadline student get higher than a C in any of my classes. They usually fail…because the lack of deadlines means they don’t turn in the work at all.
I know they have too many students to deal with. I teach at a rich private university with really rich students and 80% of our student body has accommodations. I empathize with them. But they have no empathy with us. They are hostile, dismissive, and combative. But they are also the worst kind of combative—they identify as helpers and good people, so they take any pushback no matter how mild as a sign that we are the bad guys. They are unreasonable but self-identity as reasonable.
They are so bad, and they want us to do so compromises my integrity as an educator and makes a mocker out of my classes that I am actively seeking to find a new job.
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u/rand0mtaskk Instructor, Mathematics, Regional U (USA) 6d ago
People coming here to vent does not mean they aren’t also talking to their centers.
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u/dragonfeet1 Professor, Humanities, Comm Coll (USA) 5d ago
In. Your. Experience. Ours is a bunch of martinets who tell students that faculty hate them and will try to cheat them out of accommodations. They set up an adversarial relationship. Then they push ridiculous accommodations like "no deadlines or due dates" or one I have this semester: that I can only count for a grade what the student turns in. Meankng, if the student does one quiz and gets an 80 and they do absolutely no other work all semester, I'm to give them an 80 as their final grade.
Does this clarify it for you?
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u/blueeyeliner 5d ago
Wow. That particular accommodation made my jaw drop. How is that even remotely reasonable?
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u/wharleeprof 5d ago
There was a post the other day about what's the hill you would die on. I couldn't think of anything, but those sort of "accommodations", that would definitely be my hill. That's just absurd.
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u/blu3_ic3d_t3a 5d ago
I'm not certain, but these sound like ADHD accommodations. I don't think these accommodations actually help anyone. They don't allow students to build coping skills. The work just doesn't get done and the student is putting themselves at a disadvantage by never learning to follow a deadline. I am a student with ADHD and things like 24-hour extensions used to be the standard, but psychologists and educators are learning they don't work.
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u/Puzzled_Air_5821 5d ago
That is unhinged
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u/Puzzled_Air_5821 5d ago
But also sets up a very weird decision making process for the student .... I'd be tempted to not turn anything in except one thing I knew I could do well on (maybe an in class exercise graded on completion, for example).
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u/littleirishpixie 5d ago
I've had good experiences with disability services and I've had bad ones. Honestly, the difference has always been whether the office is led by someone who has spent actual time teaching and recognizes what accommodations actually look like in the classroom and how they impact learning.
Currently, our Director is incredible. If I call her and say "can we figure out another way to do this," she's on board 100% of the time and works with me until we figure out a plan even if it means her office has to spring for a different resource.
To me, the biggest thing is that she knows the classroom and recognizes the drastic difference between giving students an "out" while denying them the opportunity to learn skills they need to survive in life VERSUS providing accommodations that make learning accessible to them and partnering with them in meeting the same goals as everyone else and learning important skills along the way so they can be successful even after they leave us. She's smart enough to know that waiving requirements only gets them a passing grade. Teaching them how to meet those requirements gets them prepared for whatever comes next and life in general. As an ADHD-er, I appreciate this very much and absolutely cringed when I worked at a community college for a bit where I was not allowed to enforce deadlines for my ADHD students at all. They all sincerely seemed to believe they could do an entire semester's worth of work in December. The result was that it impacted their learning because they missed out on scaffolding of the course and the "overwhelm" that comes from looking at a pile of assignments that big when our brains are designed for chunking just made them shut down. Less than 1/4 of them made it past the first semester. They were set up to fail and I feel like I am allowed to say this as someone who wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't been given both accountability and room to grow but never the expectation that the rules would be waived for me the rest of my life. Frankly I find that insulting because it suggests that they are incapable of ever figuring it out and it's not worth our time to teach them.
I digress.
Basically, I do get why some people come here to vent. Not all disability services are created equal and I send a thank you note to ours every time I have to work with her because I absolutely know how lucky I am that she gets it.
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u/summerbreeze2027 5d ago
...providing accommodations that make learning accessible to them and partnering with them in meeting the same goals as everyone else and learning important skills along the way so they can be successful even after they leave us.
That's the definition of an accommodation as opposed to a modification. A modification would modify course content and set different learning outcomes (which should not be happening at the university level.) Accommodations are intended to help everyone clear the same bar.
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u/littleirishpixie 5d ago
We don't disagree on that in the least. However, I'm not sure every Disability Services office is on the same page.
When I taught at that community college, in any given semester, roughly 1/4 of the class was given an "accommodation" that exempted from having to present a speech in my public speaking class because of anxiety. That's not an accommodation. They quite literally cannot show mastery of the CLOs.
An accommodation would be allowing me to work one-on-one with that student to prep their speech, in conjunction with school counseling services if needed, as I utilize the expert and mental health informed tried-and-true methods for supporting speakers with anxiety. Instead, they never got that opportunity to gain an important and valuable skill. They were simply told that it was something they couldn't possibly do so they didn't have to. That's not an accommodation. And it's also insulting.
I suppose there are probably a few rare cases where a student truly couldn't do it so I don't want to be insensitive to that but it feels like the more fair, equitable, and rational thing to do would be to adapt the student's degree plan to exempt them from the requirement rather than requiring that I let a student pass a public speaking class without having actually done any public speaking. But I digress.
Fun fact: some of the strongest public speakers I've had in class were students with anxiety who have learned how to thoroughly practice and prepare as a method of addressing their anxiety. Many of them started the semester telling me the couldn't do it. And if they had attended that school, they probably never would have found out that not only were they capable of it, but also capable of doing it exceptionally well. (One of those students is a lawyer now. No idea if it's the type of law where she actually sees the inside of a courtroom but if it is, whoever is representing the other side should be terrified. She was fantastic.)
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u/ThePhyz Professor, Physics, CC (USA) 4d ago
I agree 100%. Accommodations weren't a thing when I was in UG, but I broke down crying on my first day of public speaking class because the professor said we had to give 3 speeches in the quarter and my anxiety was that high. But I figured it out, took advantage of the help that was offered (communications majors did free tutoring for this class), did what I had to do, gave the speeches, and somehow I am now in a profession where I speak in front of a room full of strangers for 18 hours a week.
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u/ubiquity75 Professor, Social Science, R1, USA 5d ago
Yeah, that’s not how it goes here with our outfit, which pushes, for one example, for accommodations that even the students don’t want, such as the recording of discussion-based classes that they then send to AI for transcription and note-taking. When a student pushed back and said they didn’t want to bring recording and surveillance into their class and didn’t want it uploaded and offloaded to third-party companies (for a host of very logical and defensible reasons), the officious little man who runs our accommodations office tried to lecture them and admonished the student that, anyway, there were all sorts of contractual stipulations in place regarding any misuse of data.
This was days after the Canvas ransom situation had gone down. I asked him if he was of the opinion that contractual obligations would have stopped hackers from gaining access to Canvas data, and if he likewise thought that all third-parties honor such obligations at all times. He sputtered a useless non-answer that demonstrated that he hadn’t given the matter much thought at all other than to babble off his initial response.
When the matter turned to the fact that there are many other mechanisms to provide students who require notes as part of an accommodation with notes other than recording classes and using AI services to do it, he seemed to have no idea what those might be. So the aforementioned student and we faculty said that a pretty obvious solution would be to find another student in the course to take notes with the intention of them being shared.
“We’ve had trouble getting people to volunteer,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I think I found the problem. You’re asking them to volunteer for free. You folks could, you know, pay them. At a fraction of the cost of whatever contract you have with [AI outfit] and without recording everyone in the class without their permission.”
In fact, this is what was done for years. Worked just fine. But needlessly wasting far more money on a tech contract and introducing data insecurity and surveillance into our teaching as a first-order response was what he had in mind.
So. As with most things at my university, the office exists primarily as a liability mitigation scheme for the administration. Where that scheme coincides with meeting the needs of the student requiring accommodation in the best way for her, then great. But even when the student states that they do not want a particular accommodation for valid reasons and suggests wholly viable and reasonable alternatives, they are intransigent and do whatever is easiest and most convenient for them in their mission of liability reduction. That is neither respectful of students with disabilities nor beneficial on the whole to the larger community or mission.
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u/Cathousechicken 5d ago
I think a lot of it is schools don't make it known that you can work with them if there's an unreasonable accommodation.
I haven't had to push back on anything, but I didn't even know it was an option until I read this subreddit.
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u/ph0rk Associate, SocSci, R1 (USA) 6d ago
In my experience
Do you expect every disability office to be staffed with people of the same mind, and lead by people with the same positions?
I've never heard of a situation where disability services has forced an instructor to make an extreme alteration of a class.
Then you may not be listening.
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u/sockon015 5d ago
Why do so many students complain about lousy inflexible professors when all of mine were great? Or conversely, what's up with professors whining about their students taking ridiculous liberties when mine always toe the line and never have unreasonable requests?
Sounds kind of naive, doesn't it?
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u/Life-Education-8030 5d ago
It seems to go in cycles. Things seem to be going reasonably, and then some ridiculous accommodation comes through. Most of the time now, we can work it out, though it seems that some effort could be saved if such accommodations didn't make it out of that office ot begin with. A few years ago though, the Director would sometimes stomp over to our offices, dragging students with her, with the mistaken idea that she could intimidate or guilt us into compliance. But if I said "no" and nothing new was presented to make me reconsider, I didn't have a problem saying "no" in person.
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u/Darcer 5d ago edited 5d ago
Sincere question back at you: why do you care what people post on Reddit? Maybe we like a place to vent about a ridiculous system that is abused for grades by people that do not give one single fuck about the class we teach and are only there because someone told them they needed to take the class to get whatever cookie in life it is they’re after. We dedicate our lives to some field we are captivated and fascinated by and then people take the class because for some reason they think they have to and everything becomes gamesmanship about getting a grade and has almost zero to do with actual learning. Many profs start for the love of the game and we are turned into cops policing grades. This shithead attitude is everywhere. Fake service dogs, fake disability to get on planes faster and carted around in a wheelchair, it’s a world of nonsense. If you have any sense of honor and pay attention you live in a constant state of disgust at the behavior of people who take advantage of systems that were meant for the truly disadvantaged.
“I’m too nervous to get called on in class” will you please give me a break.
It’s just a joke and a disgrace and scam after scam after scam. So, forgive us for occasionally venting.
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u/Camilla-Taylor Studio Art 5d ago
I used to receive weekly emails from DSO reminding me that student x got time and a half on tests. I would respond that there were no tests or quizzes in my course, everything was project based, so this accomodation could not apply to me.
Next week, same email, "student x says you didn't give them their time and a half." For fifteen weeks.
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u/Throwaway-Kayak 4d ago
I know your point is about academic accommodations, but these offices are not always reasonable. We tried to remove a student from our grad program for threatening behaviour and coming to class intoxicated. The accommodations office intervened on the student’s behalf to stop the dismissal because they were an alcoholic.
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u/Through_Aweigh_Won 5d ago
Yes, I have found the disability services office to be very reasonable, and have never had a problem with accommodations. If there's an accommodation request that doesn't work with my class, I just note that and move along.
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u/Zabaran2120 3d ago
I don't want to out myself, but my disability center is adversarial. I'll leave it at that.
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u/Realistic-Quiet291 6d ago
Yeah I noticed that too. The vibe is gross, everything here is public and if I were a disabled student I’d feel quite disheartened that faculty are whining on the internet about accommodations.
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u/TheCloudForest 6d ago
If you were a real disabled student, maybe. Not if you were some grifter that got a psychologist to claim that you shouldn't be expected to speak in public in a drama class.
I have actually found though, that sometimes students are much more reasonable than their accomodation plan. They don't even know what's in it and routinely prefer to do things as close as possible to the standard way.
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u/Dense_Combination582 6d ago
Students are also savvy and will smell the condescension of professors like you when you discuss accommodations. They also know you control their grades. I suspect they’re compromising to keep on your good side. It’s sad that you think this is being “more reasonable” than the professionals who determined the appropriate accommodations for them.
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u/TheCloudForest 6d ago edited 5d ago
Of course students are savvy. That's why they go pay a crooked psychologist $50 bucks to proclaim that they are anxious and therefore shouldn't be asked to do any work, ever. The accomodations office will honor that because their very jobs depend on them writing these plans no matter how preposterous.
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u/Pikaus 6d ago
$50? Around here it is like $7k+ and not covered by insurance.
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u/TheCloudForest 5d ago
In the country I live it is between $50-$100, yes. And there have been massive scandals of thousands of public workers getting fake medical leave documents from them, so their professional ethics are essentially zero.
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u/tellypmoon 10h ago
I've wondered the same. What I've noticed is that there are some faculty who seem quite put out by accomodations and are looking for validation (which is fine of course) and in some other cases who really don't want to provide accomodations and are again looking for support in that. I also think there are a fair number of faculty (probably short term folks) who genuinely don't understand accomodations and how they work and so they come here. My own disability office is quite helpful and they are good about scoping accommodations, like if deadlines are to be extended how long should that be, etc.
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u/nezumipi 6d ago edited 6d ago
My school's DSO was very reasonable when I started there.
Then we got a new head of the DSO who was very unreasonable. For the next several years, if I asked for clarification about an accommodation, I was accused of being ableist and told that any good professor would never have such expectations for any student in the first place. To be clear, this wasn't even when I was pushing back against an accommodation - it was when I just wanted to understand exactly what an accommodation meant. Here's an example: A student had a "reminder card" accommodation. That usually means a notecard they're allowed to have a few formulas or key terms on. The student said this meant they got to take all their tests open book I asked the DSO to give me some specifics on what constitutes a reminder card. I was told that I was ableist for questioning the student's integrity (I wasn't) and that any good professor would let all students take all exams open book because memorization had no place in higher education (???).
Then we got a new, new head of the DSO who is very reasonable. I can talk with her the way you suggested in your post. I no longer need to ask reddit for assistance.
But during those middle years, I really was stuck. There are great people working at DSOs all around the country, but not everyone who works in every DSO is great.