Project 2 example

How can UT’s Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) Improve the Application

Process?

Sadie Student

At the University of Texas at Austin, Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) “ensures

students with disabilities have equal access to their academic experiences at the University of

Texas at Austin by determining eligibility and approving reasonable accommodations” (Services

for Students with Disabilities, “Welcome”). This is an important process, since so many students

apply for accommodations: 1,034 students registered in 2019-2020, with a total of 3,059 students

using accommodations in Spring 2020 (Services for Students with Disabilities, “SSD Data”). But

receiving accommodations can take two weeks or more, and the process is characterized as

“arduous,” “daunting,” and “lengthy” (Williams, “SSD”). Furthermore, accommodations can be

difficult to get: one UT student complains that it took two years for her to receive

accommodations for her Type I diabetes (Stephens). How can UT’s SSD improve the application

process so that students can more quickly and easily get the accommodations they need?

In this controversy, stakeholders include students, professors, and administrators. Students

need accommodations: as one professor at Boston University writes, “Students with disabilities

who lack the economic or social means to request accommodations (a process that involves

documentation and various evaluations) are doubly penalized: once with respect to their

classmates who do not have disabilities, and a second time with respect to their more privileged

disabled counterparts who secure accommodations” (Trachtenberg). Students with disabilities

tend to take longer to graduate and have a harder time adjusting to college (Knight et al.), so they

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need the help. But students sometimes don’t want to take advantage of SSD. For instance, one

study found that students avoided requesting accommodations for several reasons, including

wanting to avoid negative social reactions and especially negative reactions from professors

(Lyman et al.). Those negative reactions are real: one professor wrote an opinion column about

wanting to make sure that students with accommodations don’t get an undue advantage in exams

(Trachtenberg). Finally, administrators have to be able to provide access, but UT’s SSD has

struggled to provide appropriate outreach to students (Williams, “UT’s”).

For this paper, I looked at eight different sources. Four sources helped me to get in-depth,

individual perspectives on an issue, either from the student perspective (Stephens; Williams,

“SSD”; Williams, “UT’s”) or the professor perspective (Trachtenberg). Two sources helped me

to understand what a broad swath of the population feels or thinks about a topic (Knight et al.;

Lyman et al.). Two provided information about SSD at UT (Services for Students with

Disabilities “SSD Data”, “Welcome”). Together, they provided a larger picture of how SSD

handles accommodations and what stakeholders need from the process. In what follows, I

rhetorically analyze three viewpoint articles in detail.

In “SSD's accommodations process must be streamlined,” André Williams takes up student

experience, arguing that students need accommodations, but “exclusionary barriers prevent them

from receiving them in time,” and “the process of receiving them and implementing them in the

classroom can be difficult.” Williams supports this claim with testimony from a student who

received accommodations as well as a quote from SSD assistant director Emily Shryock.

Williams builds credibility (ethos) by interviewing people with different views and by describing

the SSD application process in detail, showing that he knows about the process. He also appeals

to our emotions (pathos) by emphasizing how hard it is for students to go through the process

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and how unfair it is for them to be disadvantaged until they can complete and process paperwork.

Williams repeats terms such as “exclusionary” and “lengthy” to emphasize his points, and makes

his readers feel just how unfair and unnecessarily complicated the process is. In terms of tone

and style, he uses a firm, serious tone to emphasize how important the topic is. The strength of

this article is that Williams provides three practical steps for improving accommodations.

However, Williams could have made a stronger case by quoting a wider array of people and by

citing informational sources.

A different viewpoint in this controversy is from the perspective of an instructor. In “Extra

Time on an Exam: Suitable Accommodation or Legal Cheating?” Professor Ari Trachtenberg

complains that too many of his students receive extra time for exams as accommodations. He

worries that these accommodations disadvantage other students, are given independent of

context, are not based on objective data, and fail to prepare students for high-pressure situations

such as interviews. He supports these claims with anecdotes and paraphrases a letter he received

from the College Board. He builds authority (ethos) by referring to his experiences as a professor

and by demanding research evidence. He appeals to emotions (pathos) by using terms such as

“re-victimize,” “penalized,” and “unfairly disadvantaging,” emphasizing issues of fairness for his

readers. In terms of tone and style, Trachtenberg uses a serious tone, like he is making an

argument to a jury. However, Trachtenberg could have made a stronger argument by using many

more sources. He also undermines his own authority when he says: “though I have extensively

discussed my concerns with officials at my university who handle disability issues, they have

strongly disagreed with my arguments.” He doesn’t discuss why they disagreed, what problems

they found with his arguments, or how he has adjusted his arguments as a result.

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 In addition to student experiences getting accommodations and faculty complaints about

them, there is also the perspective of students who qualify for but do not use accommodations. In

“What Keeps Students with Disabilities from Using Accommodations in Postsecondary

Education? A Qualitative Review,” Michael Lyman and his coauthors present the results of their

interviews with 16 students with disabilities who had registered for disability student services but

had not used their accommodations. Based on this study, they claim that these students didn’t use

their accommodations because of “a desire for self-sufficiency, a desire to avoid negative social

reactions, insufficient knowledge, and the quality and usefulness of disability student services

and accommodations” as well as “negative experiences with professors and fear of future

ramifications” (p.123). They support their claims with extensive quotes from the interviews. The

authors build authority (ethos) by telling us their data collection and analysis methods in detail as

well as by discussing the limitations of the study. Although they do not use emotional language

themselves, they appeal to emotions (pathos) through quotes in which their interviewees express

their fears. For example, one student expressed fears about others treating her differently because

of her vision impairment: “I don’t want everyone to know me as the legally blind girl . . . And I

really don’t want people to feel sorrow for me because there is no need to feel sorry for me as far

as I am concerned” (128). The authors use a formal style that emphasizes the rigor of the study.

They could have improved this argument by addressing some of the limitations they list at the

end.

By analyzing these texts, I was able to get a better understanding of the SSD application

process and how different stakeholders see it, both at UT and at other universities. Based on

these perspectives, I understand how stakeholders such as students, professors, and SSD

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administrators have different needs, and how the process is not currently meeting all of those

needs.

Works Cited

Knight, William, Roger D. Wessel, and Larry Markle. "Persistence to graduation for

students with disabilities: Implications for performance-based outcomes." Journal of

College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, vol. 19, no. 4, 2018, pp. 362-

380.

Lyman, Michael, et al. "What Keeps Students with Disabilities from Using

Accommodations in Postsecondary Education? A Qualitative Review." Journal of

Postsecondary Education and Disability, vol. 29, no. 2, 2016, pp. 123-140.

Services for Students with Disabilities. “SSD Data.” 2020,

https://diversity.utexas.edu/disability/ssd-statistics/

Services for Students with Disabilities. “Welcome to Services for Students with

Disabilities!” 2013. 2020, https://diversity.utexas.edu/disability/2013/03/welcome/.

Stephens, Ally. “Two years without accommodations: My struggle for access.” The Daily

Texan. 2019, Oct 20, https://thedailytexan.com/2019/10/20/two-years-without-

accommodations-my-struggle-for-access.

Trachtenberg, A. “Extra Time on an Exam: Suitable Accommodation or Legal Cheating?”

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016, Sep 18, https://www-chronicle-

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 com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/article/extra-time-on-an-exam-suitable-accommodation-or-

legal-cheating/

Williams, André. “SSD’s accommodations process must be streamlined.” The Daily Texan,

2020, April 1, https://thedailytexan.com/2020/04/01/ssds-accommodations-process-

must-be-streamlined.

Williams, André. “UT must be proactive in outreach for disability accommodations.” The

Daily Texan. 2020, Mar 9, https://thedailytexan.com/2020/03/09/ut-must-be-proactive-

in-outreach-for-disability-accommodations.