Reply to Wall Street Journal on rampant growth in percentage of college students with “disabilities”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a professor and a lot of what is going on is related to liability issues.

It used to be that a student would go to a professor and describe a situation and ask for an extension, etc.  but now we are actually asked not to make those sorts of judgment calls, and frankly I wouldn't feel comfortable making them.

[b]I'm not a doctor and I have no idea if your depression is debilitating enough for you to be given an extension, and it's not in my job description to make that call.

Therefore, I"m going to tell you that it has to be documented through disability services preferably before you start the course, etc.  I don't want to be accused of favoritism or bias or anything else, so everything has to be a whole lot more legalistic than it used to be.

This is the nature of the litigious society that we live in.  [/b]

But I do think there may also be an element of the student as consumer, I'm paying 60K so I want a boutique experience, etc.  My daughter has some anxiety issues and I had no problem asking her psychologist for a note so that we could request a single rather than a room mate for her freshman year.  Maybe 20 years ago people didn't do that, but today at that price, I want to give her every ability to succeed.

That said, there did seem to be a fairly large amount of upper middle class girls who gamed the system and got diagnosed with stress or depression so that they could have a cat -- at least at my son's big southern university.[/quote]

This. There is a concept in higher education called Arbitrary and Capricious Grading. Policies around this issue are designed to ensure that every student is 1) graded for the same work on the same basis, including the application of all classroom policies, and 2) a professor does not show favoritism or retaliate against a student he or she doesn't like.

All the grades in a course could be called into question if a single student can prove arbitrary and capricious grading.

The basis of this is a series of lawsuits in the 80s and 90s, many of them against the University of California system that alleged unfair practices in higher education. What came out of these lawsuits was a determination that professors cannot, in fact, run a course exactly as they wish, but must have clearly expressed the requirements for the course, must grade consistently, and that the syllabus is actually a contract, and cannot be changed without reasonable notice (that is, if your Syllabus says your course will cover something, it must cover it, and if the Syllabus says the late policy is X, that policy must be followed for all students, etc., etc.). A lot of professors who never wrote very comprehensive syllabi (or sort of assigned things as the course progressed) hated these new rules. It also led to things like rubric-based grading.[/quote]

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