Last updated on November 26, 2023
The situation, which represents at least three or four emails I receive per school year:
A student requests exemptions from collaborative assignments and participation grades.
The professor declines.
Disability studies office asks me what the right solution is to this conflict.
More often than I would like, this occurs in writing courses required by colleges or universities. The leading culprit happens to be first-year composition, also known as college writing. I’ve struggled with this question as an instructor and as a student.
Collaboration on writing is difficult. Collaborating and participating are stressful and they lend themselves to misunderstandings.
I can collaborate on programming projects, design projects… but writing collaboration proves to be emotionally draining. As a freelance writer, I rarely collaborate. I write and I email the finished work to an editor. Rarely do I trade edits or ideas with someone else.
When coding, you can test the options and decide which solution is best, based on the requirements. One solution might be faster. Another might require less memory. There are clearly best answers with computer code. Same with most science problems. There’s no debate once you test and evaluate the possible solutions.
Not so with writing. What you propose is something you believe to be best. There’s no way to test this empirically, though.
Many disabled students seeking my assistance with a campus hearing are STEM majors taking required writing courses. There are issues with language, participation, and collaboration face-to-face.
The worst source of conflict I encounter between professors and students is the “participation checkbox.” In this model of grading, an instructor counts speaking in class towards a final grade. Speaking in groups counts, too. Participation is viewed as an active exchange, even though many people do best when they listen and respond later.
How do you grade the Deaf student who has to pause, watch a translator, sign or type, and then be “heard” by others? What about those with speech impediments? Or the autistic student who has issues reading cues? What about PTSD and social anxiety?
For the disabled and marginalized, the checkbox for speaking is often a cruel rejection of the special challenges these students encounter.
What is the participation that makes it so valuable as to serve as a gatekeeper? Is it merely a way to force students to pay attention? (“Oh, no! I might be called!”) Is it a genuine effort to foster discussion? Plenty of research raises questions about this — the most likely to speak might not make the best contributions. Males speak more than females. Certain social classes speak more, and more readily, than others.
When I teach, I use the online LMS for open discussion. But why demand everyone post a question or answer or whatever? What if more than one had the same question? Do we only reward the first to ask? Do we reward similar posts or verbal comments?
The MFA experiences were very strange, as the works that were later produced on stage or screen were the ones peers disliked the most. What does that tell me or anyone else about peer discussions and feedback? Part of the problem is the MFA courses favored criticism over critique. I left one MFA program and struggled to finish the second, but I did finish.
Disabled students tend to have many strikes against them in the writing courses and other general education requirements.
Show Your Work, Or No Credit
I can’t show my work for mathematics. I had both calculus and statistics professors make me take tests in front of them to prove I was able to solve the problems without any work on the page. “You don’t understand the process, and that’s important.” No, you don’t understand my process, so you must assume I am wrong. There is a difference. I ended up with my only grad school “B” in a stats course because I didn’t show some work on an exam.
As a student, I hated discussions. Too often, it felt like a chance for dominant speakers to show off and for the rest of us to doodle. Discussions caused anxiety and stress, and were a nightmare. Most classrooms are already a sensory nightmare, so juggling the stress of discussion just added to the overload.
My writing process isn’t and wasn’t what I was forced to show in writing courses. I would do things my way, then prepare the required formal outline or draft to the instructor’s standards after I had used my own methods. Twice the work, and I still write the same way (but on a computer) in Scrivener — I write loose ideas, move them around on the cork board, then get things my way. When an “outline” was required, I would convert my notes to the approved notes.
How insane is it to require students who have their own process to comply with the approved process? I find that to be ridiculous and indefensible.
What is the process value? And the answer should be much, much deeper than it often is. What is the value of discussion? Participation? I’d demand a precise defense for any grade that could sink an acceptable, good, or great writer based on participation and process.
Social Skills vs. Academic Skills
Basically, the writing courses favor social skills too much. If the participation, collaboration, or process elements of assignments can cause a student to fail the course, despite that student writing well, then the grading is wrong. When asked for my opinion during hearings, I state bluntly that the instructor in question is placing more value on social skills than the desired academic outcomes.
During some of these hearings, I am told that the professor found the special needs student was odd and made others uncomfortable. So what? We should never be grading students on whether or not we like them.
I realize autistic students face unconscious (and conscious) discrimination from professors and classmates. Unreasonable grading rubrics are yet another form of discrimination.