Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi All, my son should be going into his 3rd year at Uni but failed the year and is now having to go through a Special Cases Committee to try to get them to let him re-do his 2nd year. He chose not to disclose his Aspergers and so has received no support from the university which is what both he and I feel is the reason for his not passing his 2nd year exams. At school he had a SEN and then ECHP so received support and did well, but the lack of support at Uni has left him floundering on his own.
We have given the Uni a copy of his original diagnosis as well as his last ECHP from 2019, but they are saying he also needs to provide a professional option from a GP relating to his condition and how it has impacted him over the past year. Not sure how they will do that, he hasn't seen any medical professionals in the last year and his GP is where we live not 200 miles away where his uni is. He is trying to contact them virtually though.
It feels to me that his autism is being used against him over and over by the university who I would have thought really ought to have noticed his needs even if he didn't articulate them. As he is an adult, I'm not even able to easily advocate for him. Has anyone been through anything similar, and do you have any advice?
No but I know a bit about the law and discrimination in a university environment.
Universities tend to require a GPs sick note to take in to account special circumstances. It could be as easy as him going to his registered GP practice with his diagnosis and ECHP and get them to write an opinion of how it might have effected him. The GP is there to provide a medical opinion of how autism is effecting him as an adult not to prove that he was behaving in a certain way at a certain time. In reality there is a good chance that te GP will just list what in the diagnosis / ECHP still applies. It ticks a box the universities tend to insist on and it doesn't need to be a particular doctor.
You see I'm kind of surprised as to why aspergers would affect exam performance. I would have thought it would be more likely to effect group work / course work. It would depend on the course I guess. For an exam in a humanities subject I suppose if exam questions were worded vaguely that could be a real impediment. You need to be clear on exactly what aspect of his aspergers effected his performance. Difficulty understanding exam questions, difficulty in expressing his ideas clearly in writing? Perhaps issues with time management in his study?
In terms of discrimination law I am not a lawyer, you might want to speak to one. Take what I say with a pinch of salt. It's not generally illegal to give some one a bad mark because their disability caused them to fall short of the academic standard.
The equality act says
The application by a qualifications body of a competence standard to a disabled person is not disability discrimination unless it is discrimination by virtue of section 19.
Section 19 bans things like making rules up that are unreasonably unfair to disabled people, like having a running test you need to pass for a chemistry course. Clearly going to be hard for people in wheelchairs.
So the university might try to come at you with the argument that if his disability makes him fall short of the competency standard that's out of scope of the law. But the arrangements (reasonable adjustments) that could have been made to help him during and leading upto the exam are in scope of disability law as well as any decision to kick him out. I think the most relavent law is going to be section 15 of the equality act. If asspergers caused him to fail his exams then kicking him out for failing his exams is probably going to trigger subsection 1(a). Their justification the "legitimate aim" under section 1(b) would likely be that they have a duty to use the limited number of places on the course efficiently by excluding students who are unlikely to pass a resit year. The counter argument to that is probably that it isn't a waste of resources if he has a good chance of passing with appropriate reasonable adjustments (see sections 20-22).
If they decide to kick him out you can appeal to the OIA who can adjudicate the matter or you can sue the university under the equality act to force them to take him back (the court can in theory force them to do this with an injunction). There is a 6 month time limit to sue from the time they decide to kick him out (9 months if you go the the OIA first).
Peter said:You see I'm kind of surprised as to why aspergers would affect exam performance. I would have thought it would be more likely to effect group work / course work.
As an undiagnosed autist I found examinations to be paralyzingly anxiety producing, both in the run up to - affecting my ability to revise effectively - and on the day itself. Being in a large hall with hundreds of other stressed people was no help either, as I was subject to sensory overload from the lighting, hundreds of scratching pens and on specific occasions: a thunderstorm, someone sobbing behind me and one person having to be removed from the examination hall after having had some form of breakdown. I'm sure that had I been allowed to take exams in a small room, with only a few other people, I would have had better results.
Ah my sensitivities are mostly tactile / olfactory so that wouldn't have bothered me. I loved exams. I just worked through practice papers over and over till I had it down pat. I had a system and it worked. Sure exams are nerve wracking but that's for everyone I think. But I can see how noise, crowding, or light could be an issue in some venues. Because I had extra time for dyslexia from uni on my exams were largely in rooms with 20 - 30 students.
Oh I never bothered with guessing questions I just tried to learn everything. But doing 3 or more passed papers if I found anything I was week on I revised it hard.
I did fairly well in exams, in general, I would have done much worse under a system weighted towards continuous assessment. However, the huge anxiety that the thought of exams raised in me effectively prevented me even looking at past papers, or employing the sort of exam 'gamesmanship' of predicting likely questions.