Education isn’t a race

Re: Extra time on exams tilts the playing field, Bruce Pardy, Aug 18 When is an exam like a race? When the professors setting the exam need to re- think their teaching approach.

I have taught hundreds of students at the University of Toronto. I am now a professor of Digital Medieval Studies; my disciplines of origin are Computer Science and Medieval Studies, both notorious for high workloads, high standards, demanding technical training, logical t hought, and e vi dencebased argumentation. Yes, we have deadlines. Yes, we have timed exams. But the priority is not to race to the finish line. The priority is to produce knowledgeable answers, or smart, insightful, beautifully written arguments, or robust, correct code.

This should be self- evident: In an exam, students are not rewarded for their speed. They are rewarded for the quality of their answers within a specific time frame. Or else take- home exams would not exist, and that student who finishes first and runs out the door would earn t he highest mark. The time limit is one feature of the exam — like the fact that students take exams in classrooms, at the same time as their peers; or like the fact that exams appear as written questions on paper, to be answered in writing in their turn. But the time limit is not an exam’s chief feature, and certainly not its raison d’être! We have a legal duty to modify the exam’s non- essential features in order to make the experience accessible. We modify the place of the exam for students using wheelchairs. We modify the physical form of the exam to accommodate students with vision impairment. Or we modify the time limit of the exam to accommodate a student with mental illness.

I want l earning i n my courses to be open to all students. If my courses are races, the prize is learning, which only gets better the more people have access to it.

Prof. Pardy’s claim that “students who claim extra time for mental disabilities … simply wish to increase their prospects for success at the expense of their peers” is a sweeping statement, unsupported by any research or evidence whatsoever, about a large, diverse group of people to whose motivations Prof. Pardy has no access. Prof. Alexandra Bolintineanu, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies, Centre for Medieval Studies and Woodsworth College, University of Toronto Mr. Pardy has expressed his thoughts about giving students extra time on exams. He finds it abhorrent.

But let’s do a gedanken, which is an Einstein thought experiment. Imagine Mr. Pardy was instructing a class with Stephen Hawking in it, in his present condition. Would Mr. Pardy give Stephen Hawking more time on an exam?

Education isn’t a race. It’s a process. For some accommodations must be provided for a process that meets each persons need equally. Don Cooper, Toronto