At the start of the pandemic giving everyone extra time was tolerated by my administration. Sadly it is not acceptable anymore, since LD students don't get any true help relative to their peers.
Re: Streamlining overrides (extra time) for students with learning disabilities
by Cris Fuhrman -
Number of replies: 4
In reply to Cris Fuhrman
Re: Streamlining overrides (extra time) for students with learning disabilities
by Rick Jerz -
Interesting, Cris. I teach at a U.S. university and I have always thought that it is the instructor, not administrators, who design course exams, content and time allocations. Why is it unacceptable to give regular students more time?
In reply to Rick Jerz
Re: Streamlining overrides (extra time) for students with learning disabilities
by Cris Fuhrman -
I believe the official policy for LD accommodation for extra time (eg 33% more) is relative to the time given to other students. I'm in Québec and as far as I know this kind of accommodation is standard for diagnosed disabilities, even in secondary schools. My university recently broke the 10k student threshold, so it is positioning itself to accommodate.
It's different than before (say, 10 years ago) where a student with an LD would show me his medical diagnosis for ADHD or dyslexia and make demands (sometimes reasonable, sometimes not) for what I should or shouldn't do with respect to grading. Once, after getting a graded report back, a student insisted I was not allowed to remove points for spelling, because he had dyslexia and it took him too long to use a spell check tool (!). I pushed back when he went to the administration to complain and now there's a policy about it. In another case, I had a blind student in my programming course and was unsure what was reasonable. The administration had no clue either, but there's now a protocol in place.
It's much better now that a part of the administration handles the accommodations.
It's different than before (say, 10 years ago) where a student with an LD would show me his medical diagnosis for ADHD or dyslexia and make demands (sometimes reasonable, sometimes not) for what I should or shouldn't do with respect to grading. Once, after getting a graded report back, a student insisted I was not allowed to remove points for spelling, because he had dyslexia and it took him too long to use a spell check tool (!). I pushed back when he went to the administration to complain and now there's a policy about it. In another case, I had a blind student in my programming course and was unsure what was reasonable. The administration had no clue either, but there's now a protocol in place.
It's much better now that a part of the administration handles the accommodations.
In reply to Cris Fuhrman
Re: Streamlining overrides (extra time) for students with learning disabilities
by Rick Jerz -
Yes, I understand, but none of it makes any sense. This is all pandering to the student.
So really, let's say that you design an exam to take 1 hour, and you decide to give not only LD students two hours, but everyone else two hours. Then, your administration says, "Nope, you need to give LD student 3 hours." So you give them 3 hours, and everyone else the same. As you can see, this goes on and on until you decide that there is no time limit. What would your administration then say? That you can't give unlimited time to everyone because there is no way to make LD students feel like they are getting something extra?
My real point is that all kinds of things can pop up for all kinds of students. Why not simply solve the problems by giving all students 50% (or whatever) more time, to accommodate every situation? And why not allow the instructor to design the length of an exam, that is reasonable based upon the content.
As you somewhat point out, more and more students are coming up with reasons for needing something extra. What happens if every student in the course has a condition that requires 50% more time? It might get to this someday? It might appear to some that the appropriate accommodation is "Every student must get an A, or 100%, on every exam. If they are not getting an A, it's because of some condition that has to be accommodated." And, this makes life easy. If every student gets an "A", why give an exam?
So really, let's say that you design an exam to take 1 hour, and you decide to give not only LD students two hours, but everyone else two hours. Then, your administration says, "Nope, you need to give LD student 3 hours." So you give them 3 hours, and everyone else the same. As you can see, this goes on and on until you decide that there is no time limit. What would your administration then say? That you can't give unlimited time to everyone because there is no way to make LD students feel like they are getting something extra?
My real point is that all kinds of things can pop up for all kinds of students. Why not simply solve the problems by giving all students 50% (or whatever) more time, to accommodate every situation? And why not allow the instructor to design the length of an exam, that is reasonable based upon the content.
As you somewhat point out, more and more students are coming up with reasons for needing something extra. What happens if every student in the course has a condition that requires 50% more time? It might get to this someday? It might appear to some that the appropriate accommodation is "Every student must get an A, or 100%, on every exam. If they are not getting an A, it's because of some condition that has to be accommodated." And, this makes life easy. If every student gets an "A", why give an exam?
In reply to Cris Fuhrman
Re: Streamlining overrides (extra time) for students with learning disabilities
by Tim Hunt -
From what you say, my feeling is that the best solution to your case is a custom plugin:
- There would be screens where Administrators could set which policies apply to which students (e.g. Student X always gets 33% extra time.) (If I was building this, I would either store this info in custom user profile fields, or create a new DB table for it.)
- Then, the plugin would ensure those policies are automatically applied throughout Moodle (this could either be a Scheduled task, or an event listener ... actually now I think about it, and event listener ... so that every time a quiz (or other activity) is edited, or any time a user is enrolled in a course, it looks to see if any setting overrides need to be created or updated, and does that.)
I am not sure if your institution has the resources to develop a new plugin, but this one seems relatively doable, particularly if you start with a few simple cases (+33% time for some students). It could always be made more sophisticated later.