Do you want us to do our best in exams?

Have you ever had to explain the logic behind altering testing conditions for people with disabilities? Often, when I’ve described how it works here at Mcgill, I’ve found that people ask a question that I get a little bit stumped with: ‘Well, wouldn’t that help everyone?’

While I’m quite quite aware that the accommodations are in place to level the field, so to speak, and to allow people who might not otherwise have as much access to education to complete exams and coursework, the question does lead to wondering whether or not the university, or any testing facility should strive to optimize the testing procedure and the spread of students. In some ways, it’s clearly obvious that if all students were in quiet, smaller classrooms with attentive invigilators, even isolated from the stress that peers in the same class doing last minute revision creates, they might do better than cramped in the loud gym, with hundreds of other students.

So should the school, if it were to magically receive a grant to facilitate hiring a greater number of invigilators and covering any additional costs of testing in the same kinds of conditions as students with accommodations, take the grant and use it that way? Do we strive to test for the best result, or do we want to create that gap between students with disabilities and those without to be able to tell ourselves that we’re accounting for an initial deficit somehow?