Are assessment accommodations cheating? A critical policy analysis

Abstract

Assessment accommodations are used globally in higher education systems to ensure that students with disabilities can participate fairly in assessment. Even though assessment accommodations are supposed to promote access, not success, they are commonly portrayed as potentially being cheating in that they provide certain students with unfair advantages. This may lead students to avoid applying for accommodations for fear of being labelled ‘cheaters’. Various security practices are often implemented within assessment accommodation processes to detect and prevent cheating and malingering. However, there remains a lack of theoretical understanding of the discursive interconnections between assessment accommodations and assessment security. In this study, we conduct a critical policy analysis to unpack how Canadian assessment accommodation policies have problematised assessment accommodations as a potential site for cheating. We show that Canadian universities use considerable resources to prevent cheating as accommodations are administered. In doing so, they portray students with disabilities as potential cheaters. We situate these policies in the wider societal context of the ‘fear of the disability con’, which perpetuates discrimination towards people with disabilities. We argue that assessment accommodation policies belong to the realm of assessment security rather than integrity and may thus fail to promote equity and inclusion.

Keywords:

• Assessment accommodations
• students with disabilities
• assessment security
• academic integrity
• discourse analysis

Introduction

Are assessment accommodations cheating?

At first, this question might seem provocative, or even outright discriminatory. As two scholars devoted to promoting equity in higher education, our immediate response to this question is, ‘of course not!’ We see assessment accommodations as equitable practices that ensure fair participation. Fairness indeed permeates higher education accommodation discourses at universities worldwide. For example, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in the United States aims to ‘level the playing field’ (Timmerman and Mulvihill 2015, 1610) for students with disabilities. Assessment accommodations can be situated in the wider context of disability adjustments, similar to other services available for persons with disabilities. Such adjustments are at the heart of disability rights and activism. In the context of assessment, accommodations increase the validity of assessment by reducing barriers of inaccessibility within the assessment situation (Dawson 2022). For example, separate testing rooms often enable students with learning disabilities to show their true skills in examinations. We therefore contend that assessment accommodations are not ‘cheating’ but necessary adjustments in higher education contexts where assessment design is generally inaccessible for students with disabilities.

However, in public discussions, ‘discourses of cheating’ overshadow the way assessment accommodations are talked about: accommodations are constantly portrayed as potentially being cheating (e.g. Trachtenberg, 2016). Higher education research itself has problematised the very idea of compensation in assessment. For example, Sharp and Earle (2000) questioned assessment compensations in higher education for constituting ‘a violation of the requirement that assessments should be valid tests of specified skills and knowledge’ (198). More recently, there has been a prominent line of research (see Nieminen 2023) that compares the test performance of students with and without disabilities to determine whether assessment accommodations provide an ‘unfair advantage’, as phrased by Vidal Rodeiro and Macinska (2022). Such views originate from the idea that assessment has the primary function of sorting and selecting, as assessment provides a gateway to limited resources such as ‘top jobs’ and ‘top degrees’. As such, assessment is seen as something that needs to be secured. This public discourse may in turn have effects on the lives of students with disabilities. Scholarly literature has repeatedly reported that students choose not to apply for assessment accommodations because they are afraid of being regarded as cheaters (e.g. Mullins and Preyde 2013; Pfeifer et al. 2021; Nieminen 2022b). In a study by Slaughter et al. (2022), one student described assessment accommodations as ‘a form of cheating or academic dishonesty’ (10). Likewise, some educators do not provide accommodations, even when they would be officially granted, if they consider accommodations a form of cheating (e.g. Brandt 2011; Stamp et al. 2014). A student in Abed and Shackelford’s (2020) study called this ‘humiliating’ (6). This is not only ethically questionable, but also, in many contexts, illegal. For example, in our own contexts of Finland, Hong Kong and Canada, reasonable adjustments are mandated in legislation.

In this study, we unpack the ways in which assessment accommodations are discussed as a potential site for cheating, that is, the discourses of cheating related to the administration of assessment accommodations. Although these discourses have underpinned higher education research and practice, no study has theorised the interconnections between how we currently understand ‘cheating’ (which is related to assessment security) and ‘assessment accommodations’ (which refers to disability rights) in higher education. We thus approach assessment accommodations from the viewpoints of assessment security, namely, the measures taken to detect and prevent cheating in assessment, and academic integrity, which instead focuses on promoting the values of ethical scholarship (Dawson, 2022). Overall, equity, diversity and inclusion have been neglected topics in assessment security and integrity research (Eaton 2022), with inadequate attention paid to the connections between assessment, accommodation and academic integrity (Gagné 2023). Thus, we connect these scholarly fields (Dawson 2022; Pagaling et al. 2022). We focus on the particular role of assessment policy in upholding, strengthening and shaping the discourses of cheating related to assessment accommodations. Through an analysis of Canadian university policies, we aim not only to understand this specific national context but also to provide conceptual tools for understanding other higher education contexts.

A few words regarding our terminology. We refer to assessment ‘accommodations’ using the American term. Readers from other contexts may be more familiar with the term ‘adjustments’, which is used in British English. We use the term ‘persons with disabilities’ as this is the official legal nomenclature used by the Government of Canada (2019). The term ‘students with disabilities’ broadly includes persons with disabilities who are enrolled in a post-secondary institution, either full-time or part-time. In Canada, the term ‘equity-deserving groups’ is used to refer to populations who face discrimination and systemic barriers to participation and success. Persons with disabilities are included as an equity-deserving group.

Research objective

In this study, we seek to understand the discourses of cheating in assessment accommodation policy, that is, how assessment accommodations are problematised as a potential site of cheating. Our document analysis concerns assessment accommodation policies in 15 Canadian universities. Although assessment accommodations are commonly portrayed as ‘neutral’ and ‘apolitical’ (Nieminen 2022a, 2022b), they are solutions to accessibility barriers that assessment itself creates. We rely on Bacchi’s (2009, 2012) poststructural analysis methodology to understand the problematisations such solutions uphold. Through our discursive policy analysis, we show how assessment accommodation policies centre around preventing and mitigating academic misconduct, cheating and malingering. We discuss how these ideas perpetuate the way these practices are talked and thought about, and how they are administered. Finally, we speculate on the potential unintended consequences that the various security practices in assessment accommodations may hold for the lives of students with disabilities: how students might in turn be portrayed as potential cheaters. We discuss how the discourses of cheating link assessment accommodation policies with the wider societal ‘fear of the disability con’, and the ethical aspects of this in relation to assessment accommodation policy.

Setting the scene: assessment accommodations amidst the fear of the disability con

Assessment-specific disability accommodations are a subset of broader disability adjustments in higher education. What separates assessment accommodations from many other adjustments (e.g. the right to use accessible parking lots) is that they are directly linked to future prospects (e.g. jobs and degrees) that are, ultimately, limited resources. In the context of market-driven higher education, students are often interested in assessment and grades from the viewpoint of the future opportunities they provide (Lynch and Hennessy 2017). Students may see assessment in economic terms, trying to calculate and mitigate risks to achieve as highly as possible. In such a setting, assessment accommodations may indeed be seen as a potentially unfair advantage (Nieminen 2023), and perhaps more so than many other types of disability adjustments.

Assessment-specific accommodations are thus an example of wider disability accommodations in society. In an inaccessible world, ‘positive discrimination’ is needed to ensure that people with disabilities have access to limited societal resources. Because these resources are limited, they must be guarded and secured for certain people. Indeed, higher education institutions use significant resources to prevent cheating when students apply for assessment accommodations. In many countries, assessment accommodations are centrally governed by accessibility units or disability centres with professional staff; in others, the decision-making processes regarding accommodations are decentralised to faculties or departments. Yet, in most higher education contexts, students can only access assessment accommodations if they disclose their disabilities and provide medical evidence for them as well as ‘objective evidence of functional impairment’ (Harrison and Armstrong 2022, 367). The risks portrayed here are that some students may exaggerate their disability symptoms, and that some students may try to benefit from disability accommodations by malingering, that is, by faking their disabilities. While there is no systematic evidence of the scale of such academic misconduct with respect to assessment accommodations in Canada (Harrison and Armstrong 2022; Carmichael and Eaton 2023), such findings have been indicated elsewhere (Musso and Gouvier 2014), and there is no reason to believe Canadian students do not engage in similar malpractice. There is arguably, then, a need for certain security practices to ensure that assessment accommodations are only administered to those who are legally eligible for them.

However, such security practices, no matter how warranted, come with a price. Due to public discourse around disability adjustments and potential cheating, many have become suspicious of people with disabilities. When the question is repeatedly raised as to whether disability adjustments constitute cheating, the public might perceive these practices as such, whether or not this is the case. This is what Dorfman calls the ‘fear of the disability con’, which is ‘the moral panic that individuals fake disabilities to take advantage of rights, accommodations, or benefits’ (Dorfman 2019, 1053). As Dorfman (2019, 2020) reports, this fear has historically led to discrimination and even violence towards people with disabilities (Macfarlane 2021).

Often, the maladaptive actions of people with no disabilities lead to the fear of the disability con. An apt example of this is the ‘Varsity Blues scandal’ in the United States in which parents worked with third parties in an admissions fraud to secure places for their children at prestigious universities. As part of the fraud, many parents sought disability status for their children so they could be given accommodations in college examinations. As Blanck (2021) reports (see also Carmichael and Eaton 2023 for Canadian media discourses), the scandal had an unfortunate impact on disability communities:

Because a few bad actors (literally, including Felicity Huffman and husband William H. Macy) misused disability as an advantage for college admission, members of the disability community have been painted as academic scammers when requests for exam or other accommodations are made. (Blanck 2021, 16)

Outright discrimination towards students with disabilities due to accusations of cheating have been reported widely in higher education research, too (e.g. Nieminen 2022b; Pfeifer et al. 2021). In Canada, the fear of the disability con has reportedly led to students deciding not to disclose their disability or apply for adjustments for fear of discrimination (Ashcroft et al. 2008; Mullins and Preyde 2013; Aubrecht and La Monica 2017).

Currently, following Dorfman’s (2020) concept of deservingness, there is a shared understanding that students with certain psycho-medical conditions deserve accommodations. It is rare to provide assessment-specific accommodations to students from low socio-economic status or to students of colour, even though these are examples of marginalised student groups in higher education settings. There are some exceptions. For example, in Canada, religious background is a legally mandated reason to receive accommodations (e.g. ‘Students are not to be penalized if they cannot write examinations or be otherwise evaluated on their religious holy days where such activities conflict with their religious observances’: McGill University, Policy for the Accommodation of Religious Holy Days). By restricting accommodations to a small number of students, it is possible to control the gatekeeper function of assessment (e.g. by controlling test and grade distributions). While assessment accommodations at lower levels of education are commonly seen as personalised practices of care, this is not the case in higher education (Parsons et al. 2020), where assessment accommodations are supposed to ensure access, not success, as described by Harrison and Armstrong (2022). Even in many low-stakes cultures where grades have little impact on students’ futures, assessment accommodations are highly controlled (Nieminen 2022b). The issue is that even when students with disabilities use accommodations rightfully, others might perceive them as taking extra resources from institutions that are already short on them, or they might view these students as not deserving them. Thus, the idea of ‘deservingness’ warrants further critical investigation.

Context and methods

The Canadian context

Higher education in Canada is highly decentralised, with each province or territory having responsibility for its own education (Jones 2014). There is no national ministry of higher education, and as such, policy, accreditation and quality assurance are all managed at the provincial or territorial level (Jones 2014). In Canada, the term ‘post-secondary institution’ (PSI) refers to public or private universities, community colleges, polytechnics and other non-university institutions (Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials 2023). Individual PSIs’ policies and procedures follow the post-secondary learning act of their respective jurisdictions, but in general, institutions have high levels of autonomy over policies.

Canada has the highest rate of participation in post-secondary education among OECD countries, with 59% of adults aged 25 to 64 having completed tertiary education, as of 2019 (Statistics Canada, 2020). However, among persons with disabilities in Canada, only about 42% have received some post-secondary education (Furrie 2017). According to the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD), 6.2 million Canadians (22%) aged 15 and older have at least one disability, and within that population, 71% have two or more types of disabilities (Statistics Canada 2022). The CSD is based on a social model of disabilities and is positioned from the perspective that disability is the ‘result of the interaction between a person’s functional limitations and barriers in the environment, including social and physical barriers that make it harder to function day to day’ (Statistics Canada 2022, 1). Among students with disabilities in Canada, common types of academic accommodation needed include extended time to take tests and examinations (76.3%), the provision of a teacher’s aide or tutor (34.9%), and a modified course or curriculum (27.1%) (Furrie 2017).

Document search

In this study, we sought to identify all those policy documents and texts that addressed assessment accommodations in Canadian universities (e.g. documents, instructions, guidebooks and online forms) (Table 1). Our full data set is publicly archived on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/ztsmx/). We chose to collect a national dataset to illustrate broader Canadian discourses related to assessment accommodations. We followed Tamtik and Guenter (2019) by focusing on the U15 Canadian research universities, but we excluded Université Laval and Université de Montréal because their documents were in French. The document search was conducted in May 2023. We searched the website of each university, seeking information about how to apply for assessment accommodations. This way, we aimed to capture those key texts and documents that students would access in the course of seeking the same information. The final dataset consisted of approximately 600 pages of text.

Table 1. The document dataset.

University	Documents
University of Alberta	Discrimination, Harassment and Duty to Accommodate PolicyPolicy for Students with DisabilitiesWeb pages and forms
University of Calgary	Student Accommodation PolicyWeb pages and forms
Dalhousie University	Policy for the Scheduling of Courses/ExaminationsStudent Accommodation PolicyWeb pages and forms
University of Manitoba	Student Accessibility PolicyWeb pages and forms
McGill University	University Student Assessment PolicyPolicy Concerning the Rights of Students with DisabilitiesWeb pages and forms
McMaster University	Academic Accommodation of Students with DisabilitiesGuidelines for the Provision of Documentation for Students with DisabilitiesWeb pages and forms
University of Ottawa	Academic Regulation A-6Web pages and forms
Queen’s University	Academic Accommodations for Students with Disabilities PolicyQueen’s Student Accessibility Services (QSAS) Intake GuideWeb pages and forms
University of Saskatchewan	Duty to AccommodateWeb pages and forms
University of Toronto	Statement of Commitment Regarding Persons with DisabilitiesOffice of the Vice-Provost: Academic AccommodationsStudent Guide 2022–2023Web pages and forms
University of British Columbia	Accommodation for Students with DisabilitiesWeb pages and forms
University of Waterloo	Student Academic Accommodation GuidelinesWeb pages and forms
Western University	Policy on Academic Accommodation for Students with DisabilitiesWeb pages and forms

The following were the inclusion criteria for the documents:

• Focuses on assessment accommodations (excluding documents about other academic accommodations, such as accessible parking spaces) for students with disabilities (excluding documents about, for example, examination accommodations during religious days).

• Written in English (excluding documents in French).

• Publicly available (excluding documents in online portals).

• Focuses on university-wide policies (excluding rules and regulations for different campuses).

Depicting the analytical process

Our methodological approach was Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR). The WPR method builds on the poststructural research paradigm, and on the work of Foucault in particular. The WPR method does not aim to summarise policy documents or pinpoint existing gaps between policy and practice, but to highlight how policies represent and construct the problems they purport to address (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). It provides the analytical tools to hypothesise how such constructions of ‘problems’ are manifested in lived social realities, rather than remaining as abstractions within the realm of policy. As such, using the WPR method, we understood policy in discursive terms as something that shapes the world around us, rather than as something that represents it. Importantly, it does not address the meaning or intention of the policy-maker, but focuses on the discourses as present in the texts themselves. Thus, the WPR approach allowed us to understand how well-meaning policies may have unintended consequences for students with disabilities.

The WPR approach is grounded in Foucault’s project of ‘thinking problematically’. This way of thinking analyses not only what the correct response to a certain problem would be, but ‘how and why certain things (behavior, phenomena, processes) become a problem’ (Foucault 1985, 115). In Bacchi’s (2012) words, ‘policy proposals rely on problematizations which can be opened up and studied to gain access to the “implicit system in which we find ourselves”’ (p. 5). The main focus of WPR is on problematisations, which capture the particular social, historical and political practices of problem-making in policy. Through an analysis of such problematisations, WPR aims to historicise and question the taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘problems’ and the ‘solutions’ that policy aims to provide. In doing so, WPR also unpacks how certain people come to be framed as ‘problematic’. The WPR approach widens Foucault’s genealogical project by providing the analyst with tangible step-by-step guidelines to uncover problematisations.

The WPR approach consists of seven questions that analysts need to ask about policy documents, of which we focused on the four most apt (Table 2). In order to grasp the rather large dataset, we first coded the documents using descriptive coding. This led us to have 332 analysis units that often consisted of a paragraph or two. We asked the four WPR questions about this set of analysis units.

Table 2. The WPR approach to policy analysis in our context of assessment accommodations.

	Relevance to our study
Question 1: What’s the problem represented to be in a specific policy or policies?	We investigate how potential cheating is presented as a problem with respect to students with disabilities.
Question 2: What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions (conceptual logics) underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?	We analyse the discursive logics that enable this problem representation to occur. We analyse the deep-seated conceptualisations of both assessment and disability.
Question 4: What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be conceptualised differently?	We discuss how cheating is presented as a major issue to be prevented and mitigated, whereas discrimination or the inaccessibility of assessment is not. A critical silence is located in discussing the assessment from the viewpoint of assessment integrity.
Question 5: What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?	We focus on subjectification: how students with disabilities are portrayed as potential cheaters.

Findings

WPR1) cheating as a problem

Potential cheating was represented as the main problem throughout our document dataset. Indeed, cheating was considered to present such a profound risk in the assessment accommodation processes that significant amounts of resources were allocated for mitigating this risk. We identified three avenues for potential cheating.

Problem representation 1: students with disabilities may lower academic standards

Assessment accommodations were represented as a potential threat to academic standards. Almost all of the universities explicitly stated that they were committed to academic excellence, which is why accommodations could not lower scholarly standards. The documents repeatedly mentioned that students with disabilities were required to meet the same standards as other students, which denoted that there were reasons to suspect this was not always the case. Accommodations were problematised as something potentially antithetical to academic excellence:

The University of Alberta has a tradition of encouraging academically qualified persons with disabilities to seek admission to its programs. It has also demonstrated its commitment to provide support services to students with disabilities to enable them to fully access University facilities and successfully complete its programs. In assisting students with disabilities, the University’s criteria for academic excellence will not be compromised. (University of Alberta, Policy for Students with Disabilities)

To tackle such a threat, the policies called for rigorous assessment accommodation practices, each step of which was to be validated by a professional. It was made clear that assessment accommodations were secure: they did not provide an unfair advantage, but rather, they levelled the playing field. For example, the University of Alberta included a section with the title ‘Academic integrity and accommodations’ on their introductory web page for students seeking accommodations. The potential ‘unfair advantage’ caused by accommodations was mentioned often. This was seen in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about assessment accommodations by the University of Calgary:

FAQ Question 16: How would an instructor know if an accommodation provides adequate assistance versus creating an unfair advantage?

Answer: The goal of accommodating those with a disability is to level the playing field in light of the disability and not to create an unfair advantage. A student should still be able to meet the core requirements of a course. Typically an accommodation may alter the format or method of demonstrating that they meet the requirements but should not lessen the requirement or standard. A student will need to show that they can meet the fundamental requirements of a course with the accommodation in place. The accommodation should not give the student a lower academic standard or lessen their obligation to show that they have learned the material. (University of Calgary, Student Accommodation Policy)

Problem representation 2: students may fake their disabilities

The policies aimed to ensure that students would not malinger by faking their disabilities. All universities had strict policies for surveilling the application process before students could access accommodations. Students interested in accommodations were required to disclose their disability to the administrative body (often a disability centre). After this, the applicant needed to provide proper documentation of their disability. These documents were carefully surveilled: they needed to conform specifically to the university policies and forms. They needed to be verified by a health professional. Sometimes, the professional’s membership in a certain medical association was required. A mere diagnosis was not enough. Instead, the documents needed to outline the student’s functional limitations. As a representative example, we present the documentation required by the University of British Columbia (UBC):

Students must ensure that documentation acceptable to the Centre is obtained from medical doctors, registered psychologists or other health professionals who are appropriately certified and/or licensed to practice their professions and have specific training, expertise, and experience in the diagnosis of the particular Disability for which Accommodation is being requested. The Centre will provide reasonable assistance to Students to obtain such documentation. UBC is not required to provide or assume the costs of diagnostic services. Students should submit documentation outlining the nature of the Disability, along with a detailed explanation of the functional impact of the Disability. A diagnosis alone is not sufficient to support a request for an Accommodation. Documentation must be current. For Students who have a stable condition, usually no more than 3 years must have elapsed between the time of the assessment and the date of the initial request for Accommodation. (University of British Columbia, Accommodation for Students with Disabilities)

Problem representation 3: students with disabilities may cheat during adjusted examinations

The policies aimed to ensure that students with disabilities would not cheat during accommodated assessment situations. Various policies were implemented to ensure cheating did not occur during accommodated examinations. For example, students’ belongings were carefully checked as they started their adjusted examination (e.g. ‘Pencil cases are allowed if they are clear’, University of Calgary, YouTube video regarding the Exam Centre for students with disabilities; ‘Please note that SAS Exam Centre staff will need to inspect any food or drink items you wish to bring into the room’, University of Manitoba, Instructions for Scheduling an exam on the SAS Portal). Supervised washroom protocols were used to prevent cheating during adjusted examinations. Invigilators or video surveillance were used in adjusted examinations at most universities:

Cheating includes, but is not limited to, use of unauthorized aids, copying from another student’s work or allowing another student to copy from them, submitting another person’s work as their own, and/or fabrication of data. If an AAS Proctor has reasonable grounds to believe that a violation of academic regulations has occurred, they will immediately collect all evidence and give it to the Exam Coordinator and explain to the alleged offender that the status of his/her exam paper is in question. The Exam Coordinator will record the details of the incident, making note of the time and details and will inform the course instructor of the circumstances and turn over all of the available evidence to him/her. This report will be forwarded to the Associate Dean. (University of Waterloo, Web page)

Assessment accommodations themselves were also surveilled to prevent cheating. For example, the readers (‘Refrain from assisting the student in any way by suggesting when to move on, using tone of voice to suggest answers, or repeating text without being instructed to do so’) and scribes (‘Must not assist the student in any way [i.e. suggesting answers, offering strategies or clues, indicating correct or incorrect answers, or instructing the student to redo or review any part of their answer or exam]’) of students with disabilities would be surveilled, as these examples from the web page of Queen’s University show. The following two examples show how breaks and mnemonic sheets were standardised and surveilled to ensure that students did not cheat:

Stop-time breaks will be recorded and the end time will be adjusted accordingly. (Dalhousie University, Web page)

A memory/mnemonic sheet is a tool that assists students who have memory and recall issues; these issues may exist on their own or be the result of prescribed medication or a related disability… Once the sheet meets the instructor’s approval, it should be signed by the instructor, and then attached to the exam (or otherwise sent to AES by the instructor). (University of Saskatchewan, Web page)

WPR2) the deep-seated conceptual underpinnings of cheating as a ‘problem’

What kinds of discursive logic might have led to such a problem representation? Here, we unpack two such deep-seated assumptions: the assumptions that assessment should be objective, comparative and competitive in nature, and that disabilities are purely medicalised conditions.

Assessment = marks and exams?

We borrow this subtitle from Moriña et al. (2014, 52) who pondered whether the inclusivity of assessment is only examined from the viewpoint of marks and examinations. This seemed to be the case in our dataset al.l of the universities’ discussions of assessment accommodations focused on examinations; other types of assessment – such as self and peer-assessment, portfolios, and group projects – were very rarely mentioned. Altogether, these policies focused on summative instead of formative assessment. To provide an example, the University of British Columbia referred to ‘testing accommodations’ instead of ‘assessment accommodations’ (Accommodation for Students with Disabilities). Another example of the test-driven approach to accommodations is the web page of the Accommodated Testing Services at the University of Toronto, which administers quizzes, term tests and examinations, with 25,700 accommodated examinations being administered in the 2021–2022 academic year. Some disability verification forms only included information about examination accommodations, leaving any other types of assessment accommodations undiscussed (e.g. the Access and Equity Services medical questionnaire of the University of Saskatchewan). The assessment accommodation lists of the universities predominantly looked like this:

Exams

• Alternate space for exams

• Ergonomic chair for exams

• Extended exam time such as: 25% 50% 75% 100% (maximum)

• Maximum one final exam per day

• Use of a computer for exams

(Disability Assessment Form, University of Manitoba)

In these documents, assessment was conceptualised as something ideally objective, comparative and competitive. Policies did not discuss assessment as a way of promoting student learning, but purely as a way of certifying students’ skills and abilities. Within such a conceptualisation, broad ideas of assessment security and integrity were truncated to refer only to exam security. This underlying conceptualisation of assessment viewed cheating as a logical threat: when assessment was understood as a natural part of the competitive university environment, it was assumed that a considerable amount of cheating occurred.

Disability = stable medical categories?

As assessment was understood as a competitive exercise, it was seen to be of utmost importance that the smallest possible number of students could access assessment accommodations. Here, we follow Bacchi’s (2009) idea of categorisations as the centre of policy-making: ‘they function to give particular meanings to problem representations’ (p. 9). Students with disabilities were indeed proposed as a social category through which students could access accommodations. In doing so, a presumption was made that this was indeed a meaningful, coherent category for a certain subgroup of students. The underlying assumption here was that students could and should be categorised based on their (dis)abilities in relation to assessment.

In our dataset, disabilities were predominantly and almost completely framed through the medical model of disability, which presents disability as a medical state of being, or solely as a personal tragedy that needs to be cured and accommodated (see Saltes 2013; Dolmage 2017). The social category of ‘students with disabilities’ was seen as separate from ‘students without disabilities’. This was seen in the explicit definitions of which students were eligible for assessment accommodations. Medical terms and language characterised such statements:

Disability means (a) any degree of physical disability, infirmity, malformation or disfigurement that is caused by bodily injury, birth defect or illness and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, includes diabetes mellitus, epilepsy, a brain injury, any degree of paralysis, amputation, lack of physical co-ordination, blindness or visual impediment, deafness or hearing impediment, muteness or speech impediment, or physical reliance on a guide dog or other animal or on a wheelchair or other remedial appliance or device, (b) a condition of mental impairment or a developmental disability, (c) a learning disability, or a dysfunction in one or more of the processes involved in understanding or using symbols or spoken language, (d) a mental disorder, or (e) an injury or disability for which benefits were claimed or received under the insurance plan established under the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, 1997 [a provincial legislation particular to Ontario]. Disabilities that fall within this Policy may be permanent or temporary. Limitations caused by disabilities may be constant or may be more sporadic in nature. (Western University, Policy on Academic Accommodation for Students with Disabilities)

In some documents, it was recognised that the nature of disabilities may not be stable throughout one’s life: ‘Student Accessibility and Achievement works with students who have documented disabilities, mental health conditions, chronic health conditions, or other impairments. These may be temporary, permanent, or episodic’ (McGill University, Web page). Even then, the required forms and documents largely asked students to provide evidence of relatively stable medical conditions.

Borrowing the term from Dorfman (2020), we propose that the medicalised category of ‘students with disabilities’ was conceptualised as deserving of assessment accommodations. This denotes a specific socio-historical understanding of medicalised disabilities as a ‘worthy’ condition to access assessment accommodations (see Nieminen, 2023a). This was seen in how assessment accommodations themselves were framed as ‘objective’ medical practices, and not as educational or compassionate ones:

Appropriate Academic Accommodation results in equitable opportunity to attain the same level of performance; or, to enjoy the same level of benefits and privileges experienced by others; or, if it is proposed or adopted for the purpose of achieving equitable opportunity, and meets the individual’s disability-related needs. Accommodation is not a courtesy or a favour, neither is it a lowering of standards. (McMaster University, Academic Accommodation of Students with Disabilities)

The University is under no obligation to offer a Reasonable Accommodation (or any accommodation for that matter) on compassionate or other grounds. (University of Manitoba, Accessibility Policy)

WPR4) What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? The critical silences regarding academic integrity and inclusive assessment

From the viewpoint of cheating, the most notable silence in our document dataset was with regard to academic integrity, with its fundamental values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility (Fishman 2014, 7). The assessment of students with disabilities operated largely within the sphere of assessment security, aiming to reduce and mitigate potential cheating rather than to ‘trust’ students.

Overall, there were multiple calls to ‘foster and protect a respectful work, study and living environment that is free of discrimination and harassment’, as the Discrimination Harassment and Duty to Accommodate Policy of the University of Alberta put it. A similar call was made by the University of Ottawa:

The University is committed to providing students with disabilities academic accommodations to allow them an equitable opportunity to fully access and participate in the learning environment with dignity, autonomy and without impediment, while preserving academic freedom, academic integrity, and academic standards. (University of Ottawa, Web page)

Yet, when it came to assessment in particular, such pleas were rarer. This is connected with our earlier observation that assessment was mostly portrayed as a competitive process of sorting by ability. Indeed, there was a silence regarding assessment as a tool for lifelong learning, rather than purely for certification.

Another related silence was connected to the understanding of disability as something social, cultural, political and historical, following the social model of disability. As disabilities were predominantly conceptualised as individualistic, cognitive phenomena, the communal and social aspects of inclusion were left undiscussed. Many universities claimed that this position was taken due to national or state-wide policies that mostly recognised disabilities through the medical model:

This Policy acknowledges, upholds, and aligns itself with the medical definition of disability to be in accordance with the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s definition of disability… It is our institutional aspiration to work towards a campus community that adopts the social definition of disability by responding with the creation of universal design for instruction in accessible classrooms and the need for on-going consultation with people with lived experience with disability to guide the design of buildings and instructional resources. (McMaster University, Academic Accommodation of Students with Disabilities)

There was a critical silence regarding inclusive assessment that would be, by design, accessible for all students. The policies did not, for example, address how the exclusion caused by assessment and assessment accommodations themselves could be challenged. Instead, the most social approaches beyond medicalised accommodations considered accessible tests. For example, Queen’s University promoted ‘Universal Design for Exams’ (cf. Universal Design for Assessment) on its web page: ‘Extra time on a quiz, test, or exam is determined from the base time of the exam, not on the extended time provided by an instructor to everyone in the course, also known as universal extra time’.

WPR5) The potential subjectivity effects of this problem representation

As our study only focused on documentary data, we could not, of course, explore the direct effects of this problem representation on the lives of students with disabilities. Even so, we discuss in this section the potential social effects that the discourses of cheating may have on subject positioning (following Bacchi, 2009). Based on our analysis, we suggest that assessment accommodations function as dividing practices that divide students into two social categories of students with/out disabilities. As Nieminen (2022a) notes, in doing so, assessment accommodations construct and strengthen these categories by making them real through various expert practices (e.g. psychological diagnoses and decisions regarding accommodations). The divided categories of students with/out disabilities are portrayed through different discourses when it comes to potential cheating. To access assessment accommodations, students with disabilities are required to operate through the subject position of a ‘potential cheater’ by taking part in multiple practices of assessment security. Although all students are subjected to certain practices of assessment security, students with disabilities are put under extra surveillance and suspicion. This is done whether or not these students choose to engage in academic misconduct.

The discourses of cheating that underlie assessment accommodations may position students with disabilities as risky individuals who pose threats to assessment security, and thus to other students with no disabilities (see Nieminen et al. 2023; Nieminen 2023; Saltes 2013). In other words, the discourses of cheating uphold the fear of the disability con (Dorfman 2019, 2020), which may, in turn, have an effect on the lived experiences of students with disabilities. These discourses have social consequences for students who are already marginalised and stigmatised in higher education settings. Although our study only focuses on policy, previous research has unpacked student experiences of being seen as potential cheaters. The following voices of Erin and Cassidy, two students with disabilities involved in two previous studies, showcase the real consequences of subjectifying students with disabilities as potential cheaters:

Erin believes that some of her peers perceive that she has it easier due to her accommodations… She mentioned that she believes that some of her peers do not understand why she still needs accommodations at the college level, and she supposes that they are thinking things like, ‘oh, she’s leaving to take her test; she must be, you know, getting the answers or something’. (Timmerman and Mulvihill 2015, 1618)

For Cassidy, a professor outright refused her request for accommodation despite her efforts to advocate: ‘It was just in my Sociology class where I was really having to fight for it. Because all the profs are so worried about us cheating… I didn’t choose to have a reading disability, right. So it made it a little bit harder’. (Goegan, Le, and Daniels 2023, 171)

All hawk, no dove: assessment accommodations belong to the paradigm of assessment security, not integrity

In this study, we analysed Canadian assessment accommodation policies for students with disabilities from the viewpoint of cheating. Assessment accommodations are commonly framed through the discourse of cheating in assessment policies, practices and public debates (Trachtenberg 2016; Nieminen, 2023). By using Bacchi’s WPR method, we brought conceptual depth to the understanding of how proposed solutions for preventing cheating with respect to assessment accommodations problematise these accommodations. In doing so, they also problematise students with disabilities as potential cheaters. This identifies the ‘problem’ to be addressed, then, not as the inaccessibility of assessment, nor the exclusion this might result in, but the potential cheating of students.

Our analysis shows that in Canadian higher education, the assessment accommodation institution is grounded firmly in the paradigm of assessment security rather than academic integrity. This is seen in how the idea of preventing academic misconduct is intertwined with all parts of the accommodation process, starting from the suspicion towards lowering standards and ending with the surveillance of the application process, as well as the final use of accommodations. The policies are critically silent about academic integrity and its core values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility (Fishman 2014; Dawson 2020; Eaton 2022). These findings reflect the overall landscape of Canadian assessment integrity policies, which have traditionally focused on policing, investigating and sanctioning academic misconduct (Stoesz and Eaton 2022, 1542). They also represent a global tendency in higher education policies to make students with disabilities responsible for their own inclusion/exclusion (Dolmage, 2017). This may happen when, instead of shifting attention and resources to tackling the systemically inaccessible examination-driven assessment systems themselves, focus is kept on individualised accommodations with their embedded surveillance systems (Reed and Curtis 2012; Nieminen 2022a; Gagné 2023).

Our study should not be read as being ‘anti-assessment security’. Higher education institutions have an ethical responsibility to ensure assessment is conducted in a professional manner. Even though empirical evidence on cheating and malingering with respect to assessment accommodations is scarce in the Canadian context and beyond (Musso and Gouvier 2014; Carmichael and Eaton 2022), there is no reason to believe this kind of academic misconduct does not occur at all in Canadian universities. At the same time, we must not close our eyes to the social consequences of framing assessment accommodations as a potential site for cheating. At the very least, we should understand what these unintended consequences are and how they operate in the lives of students with disabilities.

Nonetheless, it is also possible to take a more critical lens towards assessment security as directed to assessment accommodations. Assessment accommodations can be understood as part of wider surveillance practices directed towards people with disabilities. Disabled and ‘abnormal’ bodies and minds have been historically surveilled, normalised and suspected (Saltes 2013; Dolmage, 2017; Dorfman 2020). People with disabilities need to constantly prove they are truly disabled – that they deserve accommodations – out of fear of the potential negative attitudes and actions of people with no disabilities (Dorfman 2019). This societal context also underlies assessment accommodation policies, no matter how warm-hearted or warranted these policies and the intentions of the policy-makers are. We have discussed how security-instilled assessment accommodation policies may subjectify students with disabilities not only as ‘the Other’ and ‘the abnormal’ but as people who are risky (Nieminen 2023; Nieminen et al. 2023). Given that we already know that students might choose not to disclose their disabilities in higher education for fear of being labelled cheaters (Aubrecht and La Monica 2017; Pfeifer et al. 2021), and that the fear of the disability con has reportedly led to outright discrimination and violence (Dorfman 2020), there is an urgent need to consider the ethics of portraying assessment accommodations as a potential site for cheating. It may be that even well-meaning policies and practices end up marginalising their users as ‘potential cheaters’ within exclusionary societies and institutions.

What might be the practical recommendations of our study? While our study has only focused on the Canadian context, we suggest that these findings may resonate in other higher education contexts that rely on individualised accommodation systems over inclusive assessment design approaches, and that rely on measures to detect and prevent cheating during assessment accommodation processes. However, the WPR method does not aim to criticise current policies nor to provide better alternatives. Our use of this method has simply aimed to understand the problematisations in assessment accommodation policies by situating these policies in the wider context of the fear of the disability con (Dorfman 2019, 2020). This is only one potential way of interpreting these policies.

Nonetheless, we want to discuss some possible future directions for assessment accommodation policy and practice. The literature on academic integrity provides insights into how assessment accommodations can be developed from the viewpoint of trust and care, rather than from the viewpoint of security and surveillance (e.g. Eaton 2022). It has been argued that disability accommodations should be made accessible to all students, without documentation (Macfarlane 2021). This is one potential way of reducing injustice and discrimination in some contexts, and particularly in those with a low-stakes assessment culture; yet the potential risks of such approaches need to be understood as well. Where assessment security needs to be ensured, we must pay attention to the inherent risks and their costs (Dawson 2020). Partnering with students with disabilities may provide a way to understand and develop the security of assessment accommodations by following the ‘nothing about us without us’ motto that has guided disability activism. Overall, we call for critical, socio-political lenses in further dialogues regarding assessment accommodation and security; this would widen the current medicalised discourses regarding accommodations in higher education (Nieminen, 2023). Only in this way can we understand the unintended ableism and injustice related to assessment accommodations and the ‘discourses of cheating’ within (Nieminen 2022a; Gagné 2023).

Conclusion

Are assessment accommodations cheating? Our study has shown that the answer to this question given by the Canadian higher education policies is ‘maybe’ or ‘they might be, if multiple security systems are not put in place’. Our main argument is, however, that it is not the answer that matters the most. What matters the most is that we have to ask the question in the first place. By repeating the question of whether assessment accommodations are cheating in public discourses, these accommodations are repeatedly portrayed as a potential site for cheating. We have shown that in Canadian assessment accommodation policies, assessment accommodations and academic misconduct are discursively connected to each other. The policies constantly discuss disability inclusion in assessment in relation to potential cheating, malingering and unfairness. We have positioned these policies within the wider societal fear of the disability con, by noting that across history, people with disabilities have needed to prove that they are disabled to access disability adjustments, and in so doing, have exposed themselves to various security measures. Moreover, people with disabilities have needed to suffer the consequences of people with no disabilities trying to benefit from disability adjustments. With this global context in mind, we welcome further critical dialogue in higher education communities regarding the ethics of portraying assessment accommodation as a potential site for cheating. Further, we call for institutional equity, diversity and inclusion strategies and policies to include advocacy for academic integrity to promote equitable learning. Otherwise, those accommodations that are meant to help disadvantaged students to succeed might further contribute to their exclusion (Nieminen, 2022a).

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Beatriz Moya for assisting with data storage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).