@Hanna …“Having your name on this kind of lawsuit is bad news for her future employability…”
Yes! I was about to say the same thing. If a future employer googles her it will be evident she had a tough time passing some classes.
Not everyone is suited for every job. It’s a fact of life. I do not have the qualities needed to be a brain surgeon. I’ve accepted it, moved on and majored in something more suited to me in college.
I think you should be allowed to study something even if you are totally unfit to practise the normal job for people with training. For example, a nursing graduate may not ever work as a nurse, but could be in a medical records office.
“Wow - I see a lot of judgy comments here”
-This event absolutely needs to be judged. Do you want to be in operating room with the nurse who all of a sudden having an anxiety attack? OR is much much more stressful environment than most people ever experience in their entire life. Do you want this nurse to take care of you when you are on a brink of passing away at night and not many MDs are aroung and say all of them are absolutely devoted at the moment to care for other critically ill? Does anybody even think how hugely stressful a nurse job? How depression prone person with anxieties that prevent them from having a passing grade on exam can be put in a position to care for sick which is much more stressful than any exams in a world. Why we do not think about patients as potential victims here? Can one be a dentist if person has a condition that causes hands to tremble? Do you want to be treated by such dentist? The priorities here are clear and the patients under care of anybody, disabled or not or whatever condition of this caregiver may be, the patient is a priority and caregiver should be able to take care of the patient under ANY circumstances.
This is NOT applicable to a future medical proffessional: “…accommodation to take exams in an alternate environment due to anxiety.” They absolutely have to have a cool head under any pressure or they do not belong in the most stressful profession in a world.
While I can understand the argument that anxiety could manifest differently while taking a test and doing a job, I do thing that working in the medical field can be like one long test. I would question how someone who needs such extensive accommodations, including being able to call her prof during exams could be suitable for this career.
My SIL is a RN and she has high anxiety. She has luckily been placed in positions that don’t involve stressful life or death situations. I wouldn’t want her involved with direct patient care.
^^That’s kind of the point. It’s a big field, and there’s room for many people. But what we’ve been seeing here is a categorical rejection of people for a job based on a medical diagnosis. ADA says an institution will provide reasonable accommodations that will grant everyone equal access. This is very different from accommodations provided to high school students which can modify curriculum to guarantee success.
At the end of the program, the nurse candidate has to demonstrate she has the same level of knowledge as her non-disabled peers (so what if it took her longer on a paper test to show that – not a whole lot of paper tests on the hospital floor and, like mom2collegekids’s SIL, she may never work on a hospital floor). And she has to demonstrate that she can perform the duties of the nurse. That’s why programs have so many clinicals and a preceptorship and an expectation of work in health care during college. If she can’t, she does not pass the program, but the rejection is based on actual performance NOT any diagnosis the student may or may not have.
And I realize this is slippery slope, but suppose we were talking about ADD instead of anxiety? Would you all be saying “Nurses can’t have ADD! They might get distracted and not do their jobs.” Or maybe we replace nursing with another profession. I saw the suicidal pilot mentioned. Maybe we shouldn’t ever have engineers with depression because in their own desperation they might design a bridge to collapse. Silly? Yes. And so are many of the assumptions stated here.
Red flag for me is failing the course TWICE. Her knowledge must have been marginal to not get any kind of passing grade each attempt. One does not get credentialed in a profession with severe limitations on being able to perform the work a license entitles one to do. The reality is that she wouldn’t succeed and the school is actually doing her a favor by weeding her out sooner than later. Her desires to be a nurse never outweigh her ability to perform under stress.
Nursing programs have to follow strict regulations set not only by their program but by the state. I work at a university where students are dropped from the nursing program for failing a class once. Nursing programs can risk losing their accreditation by not adhering to policies. Not everyone is meant to be a nurse. You can want it all you want but if you don’t have the knowledge and skills then you need to find a different career. Nursing is a profession where you are dealing with lives and if you have issues of your own that can prevent you from performing your duties then you should not be a nurse. Seems to me this school went above and beyond to help this girl, she needs to accept responsibility for failing the test and move on. If she wins this law suit this could be catastrophic from Universities everywhere.
What her actual accommodation are, as prescribed by the Disabilities office will determine a lot. From the news article it sounds like it was just a verbal agreement from the professor that she would be available. Study, ask questions in class or during office hours. During an exam does not seem to be the right time to be asking questions!
Ready to Roll and Cardinal Fang get it. The original post isn’t clear. It would seem that the student was taking the exam by herself in a “distraction free” environment. The teacher was most likely proctoring in the room where the other students were taking the exam. The other students had access to instructions and had the ability to ask questions. Phoning the professor was a way to level the playing field, legally, and was an accommodation, or rather the logical consequence of the accommodation of taking the exam in a separate room, not a favor. I think she deserves to win this suit.
I recently had a family member in an acute neurological floor at a major teaching hospital. The family member was recovering from a serious head injury and had a week of anxiety post-coma. The very best nurse I have ever experienced told me that she understood, because she had had an anxiety problem. Observing her while working, I could see that someone like her, who ran on adrenalin and was extremely thorough, efficient, smart, and intuitive, might actually be a little anxious when not working so hard. She had a lot of empathy for my family member, unlike some of the other nurses who treated such patients as if they were difficult or dealt with them via overmedication instead of talking.
She is not being rejected on the basis of her diagnosis. She is being rejected on the basis of having failed the required exams twice even when, at least on the second time, she received the accommodation from the school. Posters are also judging her fitness to be a nurse on her excessive reaction to the phone call difficulty. The professor’s offer was extra and not necessary for her particular disability. If a student chooses to absent themselves from the testing room that all other students are in, I don’t think they really can complain that they don’t receive the exact same testing experience that other students did, including potential clarifications of an exam question in response to a student question. Is the professor supposed to call her up and relay this info? Did this professor even have her cell phone number? Why is she allowed to be using a cell phone during an exam anyhow? My guess is that the professor put the phone on vibrate so as not to disturb the students in the exam room and then did not notice it, or silenced it, forgetting that the student might call. Or maybe it ran out of batteries or got switched off accidentally. This hardly constitutes discrimination, and this lawsuit suggests that the student’s issues are far deeper than a bit of anxiety.
" Maybe we shouldn’t ever have engineers with depression because in their own desperation they might design a bridge to collapse."
-So, the depressed ingineer will design the bridge ALL BY HIMSELF. I am very familiar with the engineering job, I was the one and then switched to something else. My H. is an engineer, many friends are. Engineers are NOT designing anything in isolation. There are big teams of proffessionals who do, lots of checks in constructions and yes, unfortunate errors happen. Now, we have a nurse who will be taking care of the very sick people many times in one on one situation and might be under tremendous stress that no help is coming (as an example) becuase they simply happen to be busy with other critical patients. Or the assumption here that nurse is getting trained for the “desk” job? This seems to be silly. There will be lots of tests ahead. Simple class tests in medically related academics are designed to weed out people who are not suitable for this proffession so that they do not commit years of studying before they realize during lisensing exam that they absolutely cannot take it becuase of anxiety. Usually, students are thankful for this early knowledge. It is about 85% of initial pre-meds who fall out of pre-med track realizing that they do not belong there. I did not hear about a single law suit from this huge crowd. Opposite, they are thankful that they discovered early enough in the academic process that they do not belong where they dreamt to be. My D’s program had weed out class in the very first sememster of the freshman year. Many HS valedictorians got derailed from pre-med track by this class, none was suing the university. They simply moved on to something else.
So, @MiamiDAP I really can’t tell from your posts. Do you want all people with certain disorders kept out of the health field, or just this one student?
Just the students who can’t pass the exams
Do you think that students shouldn’t get accommodations for exams?
If you do think that a distraction free environment is an accommodation that students should get, do you think that students who have that accommodation ought to have the same ability to ask questions about the exam that other students have?
I think that goes without saying, and there are multiple opportunities to dismiss students who can’t cut it academically, from the pre-reqs all the way up to state licensing. And those dismissals have absolutely nothing to do with accommodations. If students can’t do the work, they should be redirected. But if you read a number of posts here, it sounds like the posters don’t want students with this particular disorder (and who knows how many other disorders) to be granted access to the field at all.
^Any person who prone to depression and anxiety attacks that prevents them from a simple task of taking class exam in UG should not be put in patient care situation. This episode is a clear indication of person who do not belong in health field and many many others are accepting it as is and move on. “Disability” status is not there to be abused, person still should be on the same level as people wihtout disability in medical proffession much more than any other. And as I mentioned previously, person with trembling hands (caused by whatever, disability or not) should not be a dentist. Dentists are not trained for the “desk” job and nurses are neither. I know one young nurse who was attacked many times (spit on, etc.) in psych ward. She is only 25, she had tons of reasons to have an anxiety attack on the job, then what? In her position, the results could have been fatal. She is obligated to keep cool and think very fast or patients’ and her life may be in great danger.
ADA definition of disabled person:
Does one have to “officially” declare in advance of an event that one is disabled? Or can one simply claim a disability after the unhappy outcome of the event?
Accommodations are not retroactive.
@MiamiDAP Thank you for clarifying.
This student also was getting extra time, and so if the professor was able to, it would have been good to check in with the student after collecting the other papers and see if there were any questions. However, I don’t think the student has the right to insist on this happening. The professor may be busy or unable to do this. Taking the exam elsewhere is the student’s choice and may result in decreased access to the professor during the exam. Since the student also received substantial extra time, they could, perhaps, have gone to the exam room with the question when the prof did not answer the phone rather than freaking out.
Legally speaking, I would think that the strength of the student’s case would depend on whether or not being able to call the professor during the exam was a formal accommodation or not. I also think it would be relevant to examine how much feedback the professor was providing to other students during the test. If the professor was giving extensive aid and making significant clarifications, this student should have had the same opportunity. If this test was anything like the vast majority of testing situations I’ve ever been in, though, that probably wasn’t the case. While it is nice to have a professor around for clarification if necessary, finals are supposed to be self-explanatory enough that having the prof around to reassure you that you are, indeed, interpreting a question correctly shouldn’t be a make-or-break situation. Presumably, if the prof had had a family emergency during exam day and been unable to proctor the test, the exam wouldn’t have been rescheduled. Precisely because his or her presence shouldn’t be essential to a student’s success on the exam, the relative availability of a professor during a final seems to me to fall into the realm of reasonable variation.
Whether the student has a legal case or not, I don’t think it is at all out of line to seriously question her ability to be a nurse. I myself have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, which I manage through medication and, in certain difficult periods, therapy. It does not manifest in a way that has ever caused me to require an accommodation of any kind, and has proven purely a personal cross to bear. But this isn’t a case of discriminating based on a diagnosis in and of itself, but of questioning whether or not someone who does need such accommodations to get through a program would be equipped for the field in question. I don’t mind the extra time, as I can see where the capacity to answer multiple choice questions quickly would have little relevance to one’s ability to be a successful nurse. But being anxious enough to require a silent and distraction free testing environment seems less than conducive to success as a nurse if she wants to be doing anything much more sophisticated than taking patient’s height and weight.
Barring a formal agreement that the professor make him or herself available to the student, I just don’t see a case, morally or legally. This seems to me like a desperate student grasping at straws; if it hadn’t been this, it might have been “I could make out the strains of passing traffic” or “the proctor came twenty minutes late” or “there was a fire drill and it interrupted my concentration.” None of these would constitute, IMO, substantial violations of agreed upon accommodations.
One of my kids has type 1 diabetes and the school required her to take exams in a separate room. In the case of the nursiing student, this was no doubt an accommodation requested by her doctor or offered/required by the school. The abiilty to call a professor with questions would have been part of this accommodation, if the presence of the teacher offered opportunities for clarifications and questions to the other students. It would be unfair (and legally improper) for other students to have that access when the isolated student did not.
One time one of mine was home after surgery and took and exam at home (an accommodation offered by the school). The class had not studied WWII but most of the questions were on that time period. My child had studied really hard. She found out later that the students in her class had protested to the teacher, who was in the room at school, and the teacher granted extra credit for all the questions on WWII. (This was his way of saving his own a-- for the mistake.) Meanwhile, my daughter was having a freak out in our kitchen. Just an example of what can happen…an extreme one maybe…
The comments on here about mental health are shocking. The rates of depression and anxiety are sky high in our culture. Many great doctors suffer as well as some of the most empathetic nurses and social workers.
If the nursing student failed the exam WITH full and proper accommodations, then she should not pass and should leave the program. But if the professor did not answer the phone while she was required to take the exam in another room (and chances are this was a requirement, not an option) then she has a case and should be able to retake with proper access to a professor in an environment free of distraction.
These are legal issues, and allowing the standard for accommodations to slip means establishing a precedent. This young woman is helping others by pressing the matter. Precedent is what establishes practices in the evolving field of disability accommodations.