Rights and Responsibilities
Student Rights and Responsibilities Case Study: Seth’s Story
Reflections of a Faculty Member—Seth has a documented learning disability and is now in his first semester in College. He is a student in my Psychology 101 class. Seth receives the following accommodations:
- extended time for tests
- taking tests in a setting that is less distracting than a classroom
The Course Requirements
Quizzes are given every week. The quiz average accounts for 30% of the student’s grade after the two lowest quiz grades are dropped. The midterm and final exams are each worth another 10% of the course grades. All quizzes and exams are graded via “Scantron”— multiple choice, true-false, and matching. The other 50% of the grade comes from a service-learning project, brief reflection papers, in-class activities, and a final project worth 10% of the grade.
Thus, I believe that I provide many different ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter, and by dropping two quiz scores I account for the fact that anyone can have a bad day. Seth’s challenge is that we have a quiz every week and that the quiz time accounts for only about half of the class period.
Seth does not want to be labeled in college. He does not want to have to be absent for one of the three class periods every week so that he can take the quiz at the Student Disability Office, nor does he want to miss the other material presented on quiz days. All students in the class already have the syllabus with the semester schedule of quizzes and tests, the rubric of points for the final course grade, and so on. I don’t want to be unfair to the other students in the class.
What should I do?
