Why Test Accommodations? Are they Fair?

Timed, in-class, paper-and-pencil exams and quizzes present barriers to students with a variety of individual differences:

• The time pressure inherent in a test situation differentially impacts students who process information differently and use more time to understand what is being asked and formulate a response
• Paper-and-pencil, printed tests are often inaccessible to blind and low vision or students with reading/print disabilities
• The language or sentence structure used in multiple choice tests often poses difficulty for students whose first language is not English, such as deaf students whose primary language is American Sign Language
• The physical demands of writing an essay or marking a scantron can make such tests inaccessible to students with physical disabilities

Since the purpose of a test is to assess what a student has learned, an inaccessible instrument fails at its most basic goal. It can give the instructor an impression of the student that is completely inaccurate and compromise the instructor’s ability to grade the student and to assist her in her learning goals.

When instructors design student assessment tools that are accessible or offer students options for demonstrating their learning, there is no need to treat individual students differently. However, when tests are not available to all students, those who cannot demonstrating their learning due to a disability must be provide the opportunity to so. Accommodations may include extended time, use of assistive technology or a scribe/reader. Instructors can provide accommodations themselves within their classroom/academic department or can request that DRC administer their exams with accommodations.

Some instructors become concerned that allowing some students extended test time is not “fair”. However, the federal definition of “reasonable accommodations” clearly states that accommodations should not remove academic rigor or compromise essential academic standards. Additionally, empirical research studies on extended test time for students with learning disabilities have shown that:

• Students with learning disabilities make statistically significant gains in their test scores when provided with extended test time.
• Performance of students with learning disabilities under extended time mimics the performance of students without learning disabilities under standard time.
• Students without learning disabilities do not show statistically significant improvement in their test scores when provided with extended test time.

These results have been replicated numerous times and indicate that providing students with learning disabilities extended test time allows them the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned rather than providing them an advantage over students without disabilities. Since students without learning disabilities do not make significant improvement in their test scores when allowed extended time, we can conclude that these students’ relative test scores are not compromised by allowing learning disabled students extra time.