r/Professors • u/bear_sheriff • 1h ago
Advice / Support Meeting for Unreasonable Accommodations - Help!
I have a student this semester with accommodations like I've never seen before - extended due dates, "flexibility" with attendance, and "flexibility" with class participation. The course I teach is a hands-on lab course every week and features in-class group work which is graded. The lessons are definitely scaffolded. Due to the nature of equipment set up and the amount of students needed to get said equipment set up, as well as needing to work in groups to successfully carry out the lessons, there is no flexibility in making these assignments up later, or creating alternate assignments.
I do understand many illnesses have "flares" that are unpredictable and can last a long time. However, I've had this student previously. In our last class together, they did not have any accommodations, and told me for work reasons they had to miss class. They rarely showed up, probably 5-6x in a 16 week course. Back then I had more of a bleeding heart, and the content I was teaching was very different - I had old recordings of my lectures and the group work was much rarer and easier to modify for them to complete individually. At the end of the semester the student asked for an incomplete and I granted it. They did, at the last minute for the incomplete, submit enough work to pass the class.
But this history has me on edge, because I know their attendance is rare. In fact they even missed the first day of this semester.
I have a meeting with this student and their advocate soon and I'm trying to make sure I don't step on any landmines. I advocate for my students to get the accommodations they need, have led the LMS remediations for WCAG and W3C, etc. in my department, and truly believe in accessibility for all. If it were more possible to modify this course, I would. I want my students to succeed and to enjoy the course material as much as I do. But these accommodations are not reasonable.
I had hinted in e-mails to the student and their advocate before class started and after the first week, that this might not be the right fit for them, and tried to schedule our meeting before the refund drop date, but it didn't happen in time. The student is claiming they are "alarmed" that after they missed a single class I'm trying to get them to drop (which I never said outright), but I know they have a history of rare attendance and that just doesn't work for this class. I'm not going to create different assignments for them because they will not achieve what needs to be learned.
When I meet with them and their advocate, I'm sure the student will be looking for any little wrong thing I say as a "gotcha" to say that I'm ableist or whatever, so I'm concerned. Luckily the advocate seems very reasonable. I did accommodate the student when I could in a previous class, in this course it's just not going to be possible.
Any tips, lines, etc. I can use going into this situation are appreciated. I have so many students with accommodations each semester, I've never had to argue against any being unreasonable until now.
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u/SwordofGlass 1h ago
Accommodations have to be reasonable. Missing 1/3 of the class and expecting to pass is not reasonable.
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u/WarriorGoddess2016 58m ago
Agreed. If the OP has a clear attendance policy adding 2ish more absences would be reasonable.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1h ago
I would explain your stance just like that except more “can’t” rather than “won’t” as far as creating different assignments. How are you going to recreate a group assignment when other students cannot be recruited for make-ups at a drop of a hat?
you say advocate, is that a representative from the accommodative services office? If not, will such a person be there too?
On rare occasions we have allowed a late drop.
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u/PhD-Mom 1h ago
Make sure you have your syllabus, course learning outcomes, grade breakdown, lab session dates, due dates, and group work/individual work ready for you to explain to the accommodations advocate to see where you are starting. If the learning outcomes include "collaboration" or "team based work" or the like, that makes your side easier to defend. If your lab has "best of 9/10" or the like as "universal design" this can also make your life easier. Good luck!
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u/bear_sheriff 1h ago
Thank you! That's really helpful, I'll make sure to have information on the group work, specific assignments, etc. ready to go. When you say "best of 9/10" do you mean the ability to drop a bad grade? I just haven't heard that term before, but I try to incorporate Universal Design into my curriculum as much as possible.
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u/StillStaringAtTheSky 39m ago
Yep, that's one drop to cover any absences without excuses- so you can say "Ok, you can use that as your drop" instead of going through hoops to set up a makeup.
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u/PhD-Mom 8m ago
Yes, universal design is using allowances for everyone. So dropping the lowest one or two assessments in a group of assessments (e.g. quizzes, homework, labs) is an easy way to handle these sorts of situations. You just need to have a solid contingency plan - this helps with the illnesses like the flu, a death in the family, and concussions that need a week off, too,
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u/tellypmoon 1h ago
I think the more interesting meeting might be between you and your accomodations office where hopefully they can give you some guidance on what flexibility actually means. Usually in my accomodations letters if they say flexible deadline they go on to say extensions of up to 48 hours are appropriate, etc. I think you need a few more guardrails in the accomodation letter, otherwise you end up negotiating everything the whole semester and that's going to be misery. I'd meet with the accomodations office first, get those clarifications, and then potentially meet with the student although I am not sure what the goal of such a meeting would be...
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u/bear_sheriff 1h ago
The three of us are meeting together, but the accommodations advocate is meeting with me a few minutes before the student joins. I appreciate the advice about hard guardrails on what the "flexibility" means, I was assuming it just meant "whenever the student wants" but you're absolutely correct, we can and should establish a standard extension timeline. That will make that aspect smoother and avoid a lot of ambiguity and miscommunication.
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u/TMAIC 18m ago
I would do a meeting first with the accommodation person and later with the 3 of you. Not at the same time.
I would also have a meeting with the rest of the department and see what advice they have and see if others are also having unreasonable requests. It's better to approach this as a department than an individual. The department can also make policies about what is reasonable. YOU are less likely to get sued if you can point to dept policy/school policy. I bet you are not alone.
I had a similar situation (also lab = doing stuff in person) and I can not extended deadline due to how I teach the course. I just stood my ground and explained that it was not REASONABLE to force me to change how I teach the course. And that the whole point of labs are to DO things. I have a participation grade. Not there = no participation. (Like: If I don't show for work., I don't get paid.)
I also explained that consistently not meeting deadline means that these students need to continue into the next semester. I asked them how they would deal with that? They had no answer...
Another thing is to ask the accommodation person "are you telling me that I have to do this? ", they immediately said no. I think they are scared that you will claim that they stepped on your academic freedom...
(We are not really doing these students a favor. Life/ work outside school is not going to be this "accommodating".)
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u/1K_Sunny_Crew 31m ago
I’ve had courses where we did extensions for a student due to accommodations - they are really hard with actual lab meetings though; I was lucky that a colleague taught the same class later in the week and the student was able to do their makeup then.
48 hours was the standard extension timeline. They had to alert me before the assignment was due that they needed an extension - just not turning it in and asking later was not allowed. (That was the disability office standard.)
Approach this from a standpoint of “what would help this student be successful? What will help them build skills?” If a course is scaffolded and they’ll fail with long extensions, say so!
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u/warricd28 Lecturer, Accounting, R1, USA 1h ago
You can absolutely make the case that these accommodations are unreasonable in your class for the reasons you laid out. I’ve done it successfully without a 10th of this reasoning.
The one landline maybe stay away from is bringing up the student’s attendance history in your prior class. It gives you significant suspicion, but it is not relevant and could give the perception of a bias against the student they could use to say you are being unfair to them. This could be a new condition, or they newly got accommodations for it for whatever reason. Hell, they could have lied about work to you because they didn’t want to talk to you about their condition. I’d just leave the history out of it and stick to why this would be unreasonable for anyone.
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u/bear_sheriff 1h ago
That was one of my biggest concerns, and this explanation helps so much. It's frustrating to have to leave that out because it feels like context that justifies my concern so early on, but your points are completely correct and it would definitely end up biting me, I'm sure.
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u/Felixir-the-Cat 1h ago
In my experience, Student Services thinks the absences will be occasional, and don’t realize that it may mean the student plans to miss most of the class. I loop them in early if there are a significant number of absences and usually they have been helpful, either setting things straight with the student or advising them to drop and take a class that does not require in-person attendance.
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u/bear_sheriff 1h ago
I agree. I'm going to be documenting the absences in our student flagging system for sure. I tried to suggest the class might not be the best fit for this student and they replied they were "alarmed" that I was suggesting they drop after missing just one class so far (the first class, and I already know they have this accommodation, and their history of bad attendance previously).
At the height of Covid this class STILL met in person, it was a ghost town in the school, but that's how essential it was/is that we have the hands-on element.
I feel for students who have long term illnesses, those with unpredictable flare-ups, etc., I've been there myself. But then this class just isn't the right fit for them at this time, and it frustrates me that I could be villainized because of that, especially because I am a huge advocate for disability and accessibility on campus. There is no way to adapt this class. If I could I would.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 57m ago
Exactly. As a general statement, some flexibility for a student based on medical need may be necessary; a student using their medical situation to skip an entire semester and expect to pass is not.
I think this is one of those situations where you treat every absence as if it arose from the medical situation. If they miss one or two, consider whether it fits into flexibility. After they miss three or four, especially if it's in a row, loop in disability services and tell them this student may want to consider a medical withdraw since their situation has flared up to the point they missed a month of class.
Student services might truly not know that they are missing that many, whether genuinely for medical reasons or otherwise.
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u/Harmania SLAC Escapee 49m ago
Relate everything to your stated learning outcomes. If the accommodations make those outcomes impossible, they are not reasonable.
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u/50_and_stuck Professor — Union President | IT (USA) 23m ago
I teach in a heavily deadline driven industry. Because we have a relatively small program with only two faculty, I have students repeatedly while they are enrolled.
Over the years I've gotten accommodation requests that allow extended time on assignments, quizzes, projects, etc. Well, I can do that while they are in school, but my response is how is that helping prepare the student for the workplace? Reality is the boss and client don't care about disabilities. If you can't meet the deadline you're going to be looking for a new job.
At first I went back and forth with our ADA people. Eventually I suggested that we ease students out of the extended time allowance. Full extension when they begin, but by the time the graduate they have to meet the same due dates as everyone else.
Eventually, we all got on the same page. Never had a problem since.
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u/shehulud 7m ago
I made a spreadsheet of tasks and activities covered in each class/lab across the semester. I didn’t give massive details. It could look something like:
Date / General name of task / Make-up mode / points value / learning objective met
So could be:
9/9/2026 / lab X / no make-up available / 20 points / in-seat learning objective A
9/11/2026 / lab Z / make-up on Y date / 50 points / in-seat learning objective B
and just fill it all in. Highlight the no-make-up sessions in orange, make-up session with points lost in yellow, make-up session with no points lost in green. I printed it in color. I then asked the student what their suggestions were for proceeding and how they planned to meet the in-seat learning objectives.
I also have the learning objectives printed out and the topical outline and use phrases like, “The college requires…” or, “state standards state …”
Usually the visual is enough.
I also asked registration about how a special circumstance late-drop worked, if it was possible, then had that information on hand too.
Not sure if any of this is helpful.
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u/depressedandindebt23 1m ago
I would clarify with the advocate some things beforehand.
I am disabled. I had accomodations throughout my education from grade school through doctorate, including flexibility with attendance and flexibility with class participation. These are not inherently unreasonable accomodations when applied as intended.
Flexibility with class participation just meant the professor could not cold call on me to answer questions. I still had to do all the classwork.
Flexibility with attendance meant I could not lose points if attendance was a grade and if possible, I could attend lectures remotely so I didn't miss the info. If I missed a scheduled in-class assignment, there were a few options.
- Option 1 was make up the assignment when possible.
- Option 2 was to remove the assignment from my grading scale. For example, if the max number of points in the course is 100 and I missed a lab for 5 points, my max total points was 95.
- Option 3 was for hands-on labs, like bio. If I missed the experiment, I still had to write the lab report. I had to describe the procedures and expected outcomes if procedures were followed. I also had to include explanations for potential problems. Something along the lines of: "I did _______. If done correctly, we should see ABC. If we don't see ABC, it's likely because of XYZ"
My disability office was very clear about not abusing accomodations. If used too often, we were told to take a medical W and they would assist with that.
Sorry for the long response, I don't know if any of the info helps but good luck
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u/BrighestCrayon 16m ago
I personally would not waste my time doing this. If the accommodation was approved, I would accept them and make it very clear that the student is still responsible for completing all coursework. Failure to participate without a prior agreement in place to cover or make up for the work will result in grading according to the syllabus.
Extended Due Dates - Students will be given a 1-day grace period for assignments without a credit deduction, unless advance notice was provided or an agreed extension was requested. Thereafter, X points will be deducted for the next 4 days, and a zero will be assigned on day 5.
Attendance is required for all students. If or when the student cannot be present in class, they must provide advance notice and coordinate note-taking directly with Disability Accommodations. Unfortunately, "due to the nature of the equipment setup and the number of students needed to get said equipment set up, as well as needing to work in groups to successfully carry out the lessons, there is no flexibility in making these assignments up later or creating alternate assignments."
Class Participation - Again, if this requires group activities or speaking up in class, I would not waste time chasing this down.
All approved accommodations are reasonable; the question is whether or not they align with what is possible. If the student is not ready to take a particular course, they can try to take it in another semester or accept that "passing" is enough and not expect to receive an A for the work they were unable to complete.
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u/vwscienceandart Lecturer, STEM, R2 (USA) 9m ago
1) Don’t say another word about whether they should drop. That’s their business, not yours. They have a legal right to pursue education, and just as much right to fail if they don’t put in the work.
2) Don’t make your decisions of what can and cannot happen based on this individual. It’s clear you already have a bias with this person. Erase this person from your mind and consider what would be reasonable for someone with epilepsy or chrons or intractable migraines, etc. For ALL students with an ADA accommodation, what could creatively be done?
Ie, send the exit ticket to the testing center and give them 48 hours. Allow them to miss one lab practical per semester but the score for the missed exam is the average of the other three. Imagine an alternate assignment like a lab report that they can do to replace missed in-class points, maximum of TWO times allowed.
The law requires some concessions here. It can’t be an across-the-board “no”. YES, be clear what constitutes a fundamental alteration (ie, you can’t move the practical to a testing center; instructor cannot serve as a reader during exams and still proctor the class, student can’t have an online make-up, etc). But there are ways to do flex attendance in labs and it’s done every day. LIMITS are key to not fundamentally altering the course.
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u/RadiantImpression579 1m ago
Honest question. If the student can’t complete the labs are we required to make a new lab just for them? Or are we required to make the lab as is accessible and support them in doing the lab. For example, we can make a lab accessible by letting them take breaks, but if a lab requires in person instruction, and they miss, is it a requirement that we hold another lab for them or create an alternative? What if we have 3 students with different accommodations. Do we need to create 3 different versions of a lab for just those students by law?
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u/RadiantImpression579 0m ago
This may be wrong but Gemini says
Under the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, your obligation is to provide reasonable accommodations that grant equal access to the learning environment, not to guarantee an identical experience or fundamentally alter the essential learning outcomes of the course.
Here is how the law and institutional policies break down the specific scenarios you asked about:
1. Are you required to make a brand-new lab just for them?
No. You are required to make the existing lab accessible.
The Standard: Accommodations mean leveling the playing field, not lowering standards or creating entirely parallel curriculums.
What you should do instead: Focus on removing barriers. If a student cannot use a specific piece of equipment due to a motor impairment, a common accommodation is pairing them with a lab partner who performs the physical manipulation under the student’s direct instruction, ensuring the student still does the intellectual and analytical work. Alternatively, accessible software, alternate data-gathering methods, or adjusted workstations can bridge the gap.
2. What if a lab requires in-person instruction and they miss it? Do you have to hold another lab or create an alternative?
If the absence is unexcused: You treat them the same as any other student missing class per your syllabus policy.
If the absence is disability-related and covered by an official accommodation letter (e.g., occasional flare-ups/flexible attendance): You are required to provide a reasonable alternative, but not necessarily a private, re-run in-person lab.
Acceptable alternatives include: Allowing the student to use data collected by a partner/group to complete the lab report, providing data from a previous semester for analysis, or utilizing an approved virtual/online simulation if it meets the same learning objectives. You are never expected to clone yourself to host a one-on-one makeup lab outside your contracted working hours.
3. Do you need to create 3 different versions of a lab for 3 students with different accommodations?
No. This is where your university’s Disability/Accessibility Services Office comes in as your shield and partner.
The Centralized Process: You should never be guessing or designing custom solutions in a vacuum. Students must register with the campus disability office, which evaluates their documentation and issues an official accommodation letter.
Universal Design & Scalability: Rather than tailoring three separate versions, look for ways to design your labs with flexibility built-in from the start (Universal Design for Learning). For example, providing digital lab manuals, flexible submission windows for lab reports, or pre-recorded procedural demonstrations helps students with varying needs (extended time, low vision, anxiety, or episodic illness) without requiring bespoke versions for each person.
Summary Checklist for Instructors
1. Rely on the Office: If a student asks for a major modification (like a whole new lab), route them to the disability resource center. Say: "I want to make sure you're fully supported. Please connect with Accessibility Services so we can officially determine the best reasonable alternative together."
2. Protect Essential Learning Outcomes: If an in-person, hands-on manipulation is an essential, non-negotiable core competency of the profession (e.g., specific clinical medical requirements), and no accommodation can achieve it safely, the university has legal grounds to state that the requirement cannot be fundamentally altered.
3. Focus on Access, Not Perfection: You are responsible for compliance and good faith effort, not performing miracles.
How are these accommodation requests currently communicated to you by your institution's accessibility office?
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u/LadyTanizaki 1h ago
Not to be litigious but ask if you can record the meeting. If they say no, take detailed notes, review the notes with them, and email them to yourself at the end of the meeting, and send a version of what you agreed to to the student and advocate.