Disability, Compensation and Assessment in Higher Education

Abstract

In recent years there has been a convergence of two trends in higher education: a focus on the role of intended learning outcomes and their assessment in the management of academic standards, and a concern with equality of opportunity and the removal of barriers to full participation in higher education by students with disabilities. This paper argues that the ways in which policies have been developed by universities to address the latter have tended to undermine the intentions behind the former. It is concluded that there is no legitimate role for compensation in the assessment of disabled students, but rather attention should be focused on the exclusion of extraneous and, in terms of the intended learning outcomes in question, unjustified elements within assessment tasks.