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Originally Posted by fantASTic
Yes...but when does it end? High school students who struggle because of a learning disability may get accepted to colleges because of this law...but what about when they graduate after being coddled and 'accommodated'? Are jobs expected to also have lower expectations? Sorry, but in the real world, you are judged on what you accomplish...and I would NOT want to hire someone who had been conditioned to strive for the bare minimum, or even below that, like many, many people with learning disabilities are.
I realize this is a law, and it's illegal for universities to discriminate. I just don't agree with it in conjunction with learning disabilities. Students who need that much special accommodation that they receive both special privileges (such as extra testing time) and STILL cannot maintain a 2.5 are in serious risk of not making it in the real world...without the stresses of a sorority added on.
I realize this sounds harsh. However...I've seen this attitude of "I have a learning disability, so I deserve an A without doing any work" in a lot of people, which is why I feel this way.
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I feel what you're saying to a large degree, but I believe there are some cases in the working world where people receive accommodations.
Now, I'm thinking about this based on my experience as a college instructor and the different kinds of accommodations I had to grant (well, actually, I didn't grant them per se- the appropriate UT office did and just told me what I needed to do and often administered the accommodations itself).
For example, probably the most common situation I got was a student who needed additional time for taking a test. Now, how many times in the working world, REALLY, do you take a 1-hour timed test? I don't think a project with a deadline is comparable to this at all. Furthermore some students got to take their test in a special quiet room because frankly, when you have 80-300 people in a classroom taking a test, people are going to finish early, rustle around, scrape chairs, that kind of thing. Again, not a huge problem in the working world.
Also, a lot of my students who needed accommodation were blind and got special translation services into Braille and to take their exams on special computers at the appropriate UT office, etc. Some students who had other physical disabilities which impaired their ability to write and got a similar type of accommodation. I know that employers are also required to make these sorts of accommodations in at least some cases...
I say all this never having had a student with a DOCUMENTED learning or physical disability who was a problem student or who would have struck me to have below a 2.5. The students who have their disability documented and know what accommodations they need are usually go-getters and very good students. The students who were NOT go-getters were those who would come to me claiming that they had a disability but have no official documentation on it and would not be working with the UT office that oversees these matters. I would refer them to the office because you don't get accommodations unless you can show documentation. I had the sense that these students were trying to trick me into giving them unneeded accommodations and were just lazy people who were making excuses and blaming their own poor performance on disabilities they may or may not have had. Case in point: these students often had extremely poor attendance, which was not the case for students with documented disabilities.
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