By MARTY LEVINE
Requests for testing accommodations have grown exponentially in the last decade, and the offices offering them are hoping that the testing facilities can expand; that automation and other new processes can ease the growth spurt for the long term; and that faculty can handle some of the new requests,
Heads of the University Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Disability Resources and Services outlined the issue at the Feb. 23 meeting of the Senate’s Educational Policies committee.
Beginning with the 2012-13 academic year, the teaching center started evaluating student accommodation requests and administering the tests, then scanning and uploading the results for faculty to assess.
Today, nearly 85 percent of accommodations are for extra time, said Leigh Culley, head of the disability office. This takes up a lot of spots for many hours in the teaching center’s testing space on the ground floor of the Cathedral of Learning.
But there are more than 50 types of accommodations the teaching center offers — once they are approved for the individual students — from longer breaks and larger fonts to audio exams, scribes, text-to-speech conversion, and many more.
Back in the 2014-15 academic year, only 30 percent of the teaching center’s 5,800 testing offerings were accommodations based on disabilities — the rest were specialized testing for certain degrees. Last year, 92 percent of the center’s nearly 8,000 tests were based on accommodation requests for those with specialized needs, and it projects that it will be giving the vast majority of such exams to 14,000 students by 2025-26.
“Each year, we see a 25 percent to 30 percent growth in demand for accommodated testing,” said Erik Arroyo, the center’s director of academic support services. “As we get to the higher class sizes, a greater percentage of the classes are asking for accommodations,” added the center’s head, Michael Bridges.
Finals week — really the last two weeks of the term — “it’s kind of like our Super Bowl week,” Arroyo said, with “hundreds of students coming through on the hour.” The center gave 374 finals for fall 2014 and 1,615 in fall 2023 — a 331 percent increase.
While some course instructors could reserve a computer lab as an alternative site for an online exam, or a school may handle some of its own accommodations, students may prefer the testing center for its supportive atmosphere, Culley said. That is very challenging for the testing center, which has a main testing room with 42 seats and two private testing spaces.
“It’s not a very big space (but) we really have a dedicated team of what I will call gentle souls,” said Bridges, who can handle the extra, sometimes visible stress of some of the test takers. The center’s four dedicated test administrators often “double as counselors” for this “testing anxiety — you must work with considerable empathy, compassion,” Arroyo said.
In their presentation, however, the trio warned that the center is struggling with the sheer volume of students with accommodations, as the only site on campus for them to take classroom exams. And the center does not have enough space or staff to meet demand for any sharp increase in distraction-reduced and private testing rooms, particularly during finals.
In the short term, the center is having to use additional spaces in the Cathedral of Learning and automating certain processes, including check-in via scanning Pitt IDs and (they hope by next year) the ability to use QR codes and other new tech to scan in completed exams.
But Arroyo and Bridges said they hope faculty using the testing center will increasingly allow accommodated students to take exams at scattered times on exam day, rather than all at once. This may require faculty to offer alternative exams to different groups, they note.
In the long term, the center hopes to gain new permanent spaces, even new spaces where faculty can manage their own students’ accommodations — particularly the need for extra time.
Another helpful solution would be for faculty to design their courses so that some accommodations are built into the learning process — design principles that center officials can help faculty use.
For finals week in particular, they hope that individual departments could provide specific space for lengthier testing times overseen by their teaching assistants. The center also can assist faculty in designing tests that are alternative assessments to traditional pencil-on-paper methods.
“Faculty got very creative during the Flex@Pitt year” — the initial year of the pandemic, Arroyo noted. “Growing indefinitely is not the answer” for the testing center. “We welcome solutions, short and long term, from everybody.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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