alt Hacker NewsThe accommodation process shouldn't be easier. I had to provide documentation to an employer per ADA rules.
For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.
I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.
I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)
Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.
1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.
Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:
- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.
- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.
- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.
- Find out the position of the hour hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Tell myself the hour number.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Find out the position of the minute hand.
- Tell myself the start time.
- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.
- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.
- Both remembered.
- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.
- Hour and start time need to be remembered.
- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.
- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.
- Remember everything
- Two math operations.
Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.
- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.
I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.
I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.
Replies
If your brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person, what's the argument for why grades shouldn't reflect that?
Put another way, if my brain works at a slower rate than the genius in my class, is it then unfair if my grades don't match theirs?
In general these seem like reasonable differences to consider when hiring someone for a job.
just to go off of this, I'm not bipolar but I feel we need to also consider more severe mental disorders. For example I have multiple personality disorder
Hello, I also have multiple personality order aka dissociative identity disorder, where by multiple people live in the same body
Hello I'm a tiny babby
I am very sympathetic to your situation. It just seems that like either the time should matter or it shouldn't.
Let's take Alice and Bob, who are both in the same class.
Alice has clinical depression, but on this particular Tuesday, she is feeling ok. She knows the material well and works through the test answering all the questions. She is allowed 30 minutes of extra time, which is helpful as it allows her to work carefully and checking her work.
Bob doesn't have a disability, but he was just dumped by his long term girlfriend yesterday and as a result barely slept last night. Because of his acute depression (a natural emotion that happens to all people sometimes), Bob has trouble focusing during the exam and his mind regularly drifts to ruminate on his personal issues. He knows the material well, but just can't stay on the task at hand. He runs at out of time before even attempting all the problems.
Now, I can imagine two situations.
1. For this particular exam, there really isn't a need to evaluate whether the students can quickly recall and apply the material. In this situation, what reason is there to not also give Bob an extra 30 minutes, same as Alice?
2. For whatever reason, part of the evaluation criteria for this exam is that the test taker is able to quickly recall and apply the material. To achieve a high score, being able to recall all the material is insufficient, it must be done quickly. In this case, basically Alice and Bob took different tests that measured different things.