[Nfb-science] qualifying exam accommodations

[Patrick Johnson]

    May I suggest looking at your question from a different perspective?  As 
I understood your e-mail the suspected reason for failing the qualifying 
exam was not being able to pick up non-verbal ques from your committee.

    Instead of altering the exam format why not create a means of picking up 
the non-verbal ques?  When I took my prelim, prospectus, and dissertation 
defense exams I had my committee chair serve as my eyes for non-verbal ques. 
She interuppted me when I became long winded, and pointed out when committee 
member X looked like he had a question.

    I still did all the work, and prepared for each exam in the same way as 
my peers, she simply pointed out the non-verbal ques.

Just a thought,

Patrick

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephanie Hirst" <sjhhirst at gmail.com>
To: "NFB Science and Engineering Division List" <nfb-science at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 2:56 PM
Subject: [Nfb-science] qualifying exam accommodations


Hello,

As a listserv of fellow blind/visually impaired scientists and
engineers, I was hoping some of hou may have some advice for me. I am
currently in the beginning of my third yar in the Vanderbilt
University Chemical and Physical Biology graduate program where I am
in the lab of Jens Meiler doing computational protein structure
prediction. My visual acuity is about 20/400 and is basically
non-correctable (I have oculocutaneous albinism). My glasses only
help somewhat, but even with them, I'm still legally blind.

Anyway, I recently took my qualifying exam, which one needs to pass in
order to be considered a qualified PhD candidate. While I, my peers,
my exam committee, and my mentor (PI) all agree that I'm actually
quite qualified to work for my doctoral degree, I did not pass my
exam. This was to the surprise and shock of everyone, including
myself, because I seemed to do very well in my mock exam beforehand.
I am quite knowledgeable about my proposed research and most of the
background, but the committee did not like the things I was proposing,
but that is beside the point of the email,.

Among other things, it was brought to my attention that the exam
format may be somewhat unfair for visually impaired students. It is a
90-minute oral exam, but you do now know beforehand what they are
going to ask. One can anticipate a little, but I anticipated wrong!
The format is basically like this:
Two weeks before the exam, you submit an NIH style proposal of your
thesis research that you want to do to your committee. They are
supposed to read this before the exam.
On the day of the exam, you have 5 minutes to present 3 powerpoint
slides describing what you want to do for your research.
After the 5 minutes, they ask you open-ended, somewhat
unpredictable questions for 90 minutes based on the proposal and the
background concerning your research. This is to test the student's
ability to defend their proposed research and to see if they hve
adequate background to do it.
The exam is pretty discussion-based, and there is a lot of give and
take. The committee members (there are 4) tend to feed off of each
other, and often new questions stem from questions asked previously.

One idea is that I had a hard time with this discussion-based format
because I cannot erad visual cues, such as facial expressions, hand
movements, signs of irritations or disappointment, etc. I also get no
positive feedback. I also memorized my power point slides because I
personally can't see them. In this case they were more for the
committee than myself, even though other students tell me they used
them to kind of jog their memory if they get stuck on a subject. For
me, it's just more morization and things to remember and worry about.

The person who proposed the idea that the exam format may have been a
problem for me as a visually impaired student has a masters in special
education. She says:

"Hi Steph, my thought was that when a sighted person goes to a
committee qualifying exam, they rely heavily on visual cues and body
language cues from the faces of the committee members. For example,
the sighted person can tell when they should provide more information
at a particular juncture, after noticing that two of the committee
members clearly require more information. They also know when to stop
talking about something, if the committee members are displaying
fidgeting or exchanging glances etc. The low-vision student may not
be able to benefit from those cues. So, it would be reasonable for
someone to sit with the student, and perhaps suggest "Dr. Y seems to
be looking for more information on that topic." or "The committee
appears to have heard enough on that slide and you can move on."  The
second thing is that from what I understand you do not read your
slides - so the slides are not useful to you but only serve as a
visual cue for the committee?  You memorize your slides and the places
to put your pointer?  Correct?  Well, I think that having a person
with you to help with those visual things would be helpful. The person
would have to be someone trained to work with low vision people."

So I was wondering if any of you have experience anything similar to
this and would have suggestions on how to handle this situation.  Do
you think it is fair to ask for accommodations to make the exam more
fair?  Or do you think the exam is already fair?  Remember that this
is no normal oral exam where they have a written test that they just
read the questions out to you.  These questions are extremely hard, if
not impossible, to predict, are very open ended, and are mostly based
on the discussion occurring around them in the room.  We had some
ideas on possible accommodations.  1) Instead of 90-minutes of open
ended questions, give a 45-minute presentation with a shorter period
of questioning, 2) meet one on one with each committee member for 20
minutes so they can ask questions, instead of having all four sit at
the end of a table and ask questions at the same time, 3) have the
same format as before but with a mediator (perhaps someone from DSS)
who can help provide more verbal cues that I don't get visually.  Do
you guys have any other ideas?  How do you handle such situations?  I
have spoken with the disability services people here, but this is
quite a unique case (not too many VI/blind people in chemistry PhD
programs here), and I think they know about as much as I do.

Of course I'm not trying to get out of taking the exam or cheat, and I
know I will need more practice.  I wonder if this is a valid thing
that will be important if future disabled students come along, though.
 Thoughts?

Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you,

Stephanie Hirst

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