Currently, 41 percent of exam accommodation requests at the University of Alberta involve some form of extra time and are related to mental health. In an opinion piece last August in the National Post, as well as in an academic article in the Education and Law Journal in 2016, Queen's University law professor Bruce Pardy argues that extra-time accommodations are not legitimate and should not be granted because they tilt the playing field against the best students. He compares tests and exams to sprint races, in which it would be absurd to allow extra time or give a head start to some competitors on the basis of disability. He identifies an important problem, but his solution is the wrong one. Extra time is not the only solution to accommodating mental illness in exams, but for reasons that are very different from those he quotes. In a very effective response published by the Huffington Post, Ontario Human Rights chief commissioner Renu Mandhane covers most of the essentials. Let me add an academic perspective.
In most assessments of student performance, including most tests and exams, the problem is not that some students are afforded extra time on the basis of disability. The problem is rather that, in many cases, students are put under artificial and unnecessary time limitations, thereby imposing barriers to participation on students who would otherwise fulfill the core competencies of a given field. That is the definition of illegitimate discrimination.
There certainly are fields and academic contexts in which making decisions under pressure and with limited time is a crucial attribute which must be tested. One can think of some aspects of nursing, for example. In most fields, speedy completion of a task is simply not a core competency that must be tested, and according to which students must be ranked.
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