Exam adjustments break down when universities treat disability in isolation
Updated Jun 22, 2026
An exam adjustment can look generous on paper and still leave a student carrying more risk than everyone else in the room. At Student Voice AI, we often see universities treat accessibility complaints as isolated process issues when they are really evidence about how assessment systems recognise, or fail to recognise, the full reality of students' lives. That is why Lois Ruth Harris, Joanna Tai, Paige Mahoney, Joanne Dargusch, Margaret Bearman and Rola Ajjawi's Teaching in Higher Education paper, "An intersectional analysis of students with disabilities’ exam experiences", matters for universities using student voice to interpret concerns about fairness, support, and access. It shows why accommodation systems fall short when they treat disability as a single category rather than something shaped by care, work, geography, money, stigma, and disclosure.
Context and research question
Most universities now have formal arrangements for assessment adjustments, and many would reasonably assume that this means equity is being addressed. The problem, as this paper shows, is that a compliant-looking system can still ask students to do repeated, exhausting work to prove eligibility, explain fluctuating conditions, and fit their circumstances into rigid categories. That matters in UK higher education because disabled students' exam experiences often sit at the intersection of accessibility policy, assessment design, student support, and wider EDI work.
The paper asks a practical question: how do students' intersecting identity positions shape, and become shaped by, their exam experiences? The authors explore that question through semi-structured interviews with 12 Australian university students who were registered with disability services and also held additional marginalised identities. They analyse the material through structural, representational, and political intersectionality. For UK teams, that makes the study useful not because it produces a universal score, but because it shows the mechanisms through which assessment systems can quietly produce inequity.
Key findings
Single-axis accommodation systems created hidden workload for students. Participants described having to evidence disability repeatedly, translate complex or fluctuating conditions into administrative language, and argue for adjustments that matched their actual barriers. Visible disabilities were often easier to legitimise than invisible ones such as mental health conditions or learning difficulties. For UK institutions, the warning is clear: a process can be formally available and still place too much interpretive labour on the student before support begins.
Exam difficulty was often produced by the interaction between disability and everything around it. Travel to regional centres, caring responsibilities, paid work, financial strain, fatigue, and unstable home study conditions all affected whether an adjustment actually worked. This echoes what we already see in what deaf and hard of hearing students say makes higher education accessible: support only becomes meaningful when it fits the conditions in which students study, communicate, and complete assessment. A standard menu of extra time or a separate room does not automatically create equity.
Stigma shaped behaviour as much as policy did. Some students limited or avoided help-seeking because adjustments made them conspicuous, invited questions from peers, or forced repeated self-disclosure. The paper shows that accessibility systems can unintentionally turn support into another source of emotional labour rather than a route out of it.
"You've got to be prepared to tell your story whenever you go into an exam centre if they have you set up as different."
Policies recognised some disadvantages and erased others. Disability could unlock formal support, but carer responsibilities, financial hardship, shift work, and gendered expectations often sat outside the frame. That helps explain why assessment fairness does not feel the same to every student: students are not judging a neutral process from identical starting points. If universities want a more defensible reading of fairness, they need to ask which burdens the assessment system is currently treating as visible, and which it quietly ignores.
Practical implications
Universities should audit adjustment systems as lived processes, not just policy entitlements. Check where students must duplicate evidence, where invisible or fluctuating conditions are harder to support, and where travel, timing, technology, or caring constraints are treated as someone else's problem. The benefit is straightforward: fewer students fall through gaps created by process rather than principle.
Institutions should also design more flexibility into assessment before individual requests arrive. The paper argues that inbuilt flexibility around timing and mode can reduce the need for case-by-case adjustment. That does not mean abandoning rigour. It means asking earlier which parts of an exam are essential, which are historical habit, and where equivalent alternatives can lower avoidable barriers without lowering standards. For UK teams, that creates fairer assessment conditions while reducing emergency fixes late in the cycle.
A third implication is to treat disclosure and help-seeking as experience data, not only compliance data. If students are reluctant to use support because it marks them out, a university can meet formal duties and still fail in practice. Open-text comments from module evaluations, accessibility reviews, and student support surveys are valuable here because they show where students describe embarrassment, exhaustion, or distrust in their own words. Student Voice Analytics is relevant when institutions need to group those signals consistently across courses and cohorts, rather than relying on whichever cases happen to escalate. That gives teams earlier evidence about where support is breaking down.
Finally, universities should handle disability-related comment analysis with stronger governance. Institutions need clarity on purpose, minimisation, access, and onward use when comments reveal health conditions or intersecting vulnerabilities. A robust student comment analysis governance checklist helps teams analyse this evidence carefully while keeping it usable for quality enhancement. That gives accessibility, assessment, and student experience leads a firmer basis for action.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply this paper when reviewing exam adjustments?
A: Start with one assessment cycle and map the student journey from disclosure to sitting the exam. Check where students repeat evidence, where support depends on one primary diagnosis, and where travel, caring, work, or digital conditions make a nominal adjustment ineffective. Then add one open-text prompt after the assessment period asking what made access easier or harder, so teams can improve the process with live evidence rather than assumption.
Q: What should universities keep in mind before generalising from this study?
A: This is a qualitative study of 12 students registered with disability services in Australia, so it is best read as strong explanatory evidence rather than a prevalence estimate. Its value lies in the mechanisms it surfaces: single-axis policy design, hidden workload, stigma, and unrecognised intersecting pressures. UK universities should use it to test whether similar patterns appear in their own survey comments, accessibility feedback, and complaints data.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It suggests that student voice work should stop treating disability as a standalone field and start listening for overlapping pressures. A comment about extra time may also be about childcare, travel fatigue, money, stigma, or disclosure. When institutions code those issues separately, or fail to notice the overlap at all, they miss the real barrier and weaken the value of the evidence they collect.
References
[Paper Source]: Lois Ruth Harris, Joanna Tai, Paige Mahoney, Joanne Dargusch, Margaret Bearman and Rola Ajjawi "An intersectional analysis of students with disabilities’ exam experiences" DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2025.2573703
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