5The hard call
Week five. The office offers interim extended time on the midterm, pending an assessment, and says that the format of the readings is an academic matter for the instructor.
- Accommodated Exams and Assessment Logistics — what extended time changes and what it does not; what the research on it shows; and what happens if something goes wrong during the exam itself.
- Eliminating Construct-Irrelevant Barriers in Assessment — the validity principle: a mark should reflect what a person can do, not the obstacles in the way of showing it. This is the argument for extended time, in the office’s own language.
- Essential Requirements and the Limits of Flexibility — read again, for the readings: a seminar requires close reading, not reading from a scanned image.
- Working with Accommodation Offices and Access Advisors — what the office decides, what the instructor decides, and what falls between them. The readings fell between them.
- Peer Mentorship as Access Infrastructure — the middle ground between a learner and an office. A learner who has asked an instructor for usable readings before knows how the conversation goes.
Avery accepts the extended time, and asks one question about it: how was the amount decided? A pan-Canadian study found the common allowance of one and a half times usually set at intake from policy or custom rather than from anything about the person (source 10), and the research on extended time supports individual decisions over standing formulas (source 11). If the answer is “that is what we give,” Avery returns to the account from the first stop and asks whether the amount reflects it. The accommodation changes the conditions of the exam, not what it measures; a time limit that is not part of what an assessment measures is construct-irrelevant variance, and removing it is what validity requires (sources 12, 13).
The readings are a different kind of request, and Avery makes it to the instructor directly, the same week. It is not an accommodation request and Avery does not describe anything personal in it: three of the readings are scanned images that software cannot read, and Avery asks whether text versions can be posted. The instructor may not know which files are images. If the instructor cannot supply text versions, the office’s alternate-format service can produce them, and that is an accommodation the office does decide. Either way, the readings arrive in a form Avery can use before the midterm.
Where practice disagreesWhether a learner should approach an instructor at all while a request is open with the office. Some advise waiting for the letter so that everything comes through one channel. This path holds that a request for usable readings is the course’s own business, owed to everyone, and that waiting would make a design failure into Avery’s accommodation. If any answer is no, it has to have a reason, and the reason has to be that the change would alter what the course measures or impose undue hardship. The institution carries the burden of showing that (source 2); the learner does not carry the burden of disproving it. Effort can choose between two accommodations that both work; it cannot defeat the only one that does, short of undue hardship (source 6). Avery asks for the reason in writing, and goes to the sixth stop.