Another EE in our group attended the same college. I asked her how it was possible for him to graduate with an EE degree. She said her school makes lots of accommodations for students with disabilities. According to her, “Depending on the disability, this may include extra time to take exams, and the student may even be allowed to have a person sit beside them and help them interpret the exam problems.” I have no idea if the person we hired had this type of help, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I think we should always remember that “reasonable accommodation” doesn’t generally include “allow him to cause totally preventable structure fires.”
Yikes. I hope he winds up in some trade association or equivalent where the book knowledge allows him to shine but the practical deficits don’t cause anybody any harm.
Mining the depths of my memory bank, I remember taking physics (30 years ago!) and one of the people in my lab section was totally blind. We knew this because he had two glass eyes. Anyway, he did all the work that those of us with vision did, although somebody else wrote down the equations.
I’ll never forget the lab we did which required a darkened room, and the teacher asked if everyone could see OK, and he piped up, “I can see just fine!”
One big difference: A typical commute is what, about a half-hour? There’s a big difference between being able to tolerate that sort of stress for a half-hour at a time, and being able to tolerate it for eight hours.
I let him go in November 2021. His LinkedIn page says he still works for us. 
These are definitely the two most important things I learned about disability (along with “‘disability’ doesn’t only mean ‘uses a wheelchair’,” also implying that lots of disabilities aren’t readily apparent to others).
There’s a tendency to think: if you can do X once, then you can do it regularly, predictably, all day, 40 hours a week. This is not a safe assumption.
I had a relative with Major Depressive Disorder. He applied for SS Disability. It was counted strongly against him that he did attend every required medical evaluation and court proceeding.
But if you saw what it took him – how many days/weeks of planning, altering behaviors, cutting life way back to the bare bone, etc., and how often he would be virtually bedridden for days after – then you’d have known it wasn’t so simple.
As somebody with a friend who was a SSA Administrative Law Judge, I have sympathy for people for whom … liars tend to say the exact same thing that honest people say. Not an easy role.
I’m talking to Sr. Weasel, who has, as a clinical psychologist, done evaluations that contribute to IEPs, and has worked in school settings, and something’s not adding up. I know you’ve been dealing with people who have disabilities in some career capacity for a while now, but the kinds of questions you’re asking for someone making decisions in this arena are incredibly basic. It’s alarming that you are making these decisions without basic knowledge about disability accommodations. From what you appear to be saying, it’s literally your job to know this stuff – and you’re asking the internet? Can you explain this?
Are you just looking for information that confirms your ideological position that people with disabilities are whining fakers?
nods
Or, a bit more cynically, “A college degree tells me you could be a cooperative and amenably compliant person in a large institutional machine and take orders and follow directions and meet goals and requirements”.
I already feel sorry about this comment, which doesn’t add much to the conversation, so I apologize. I’m just a bit confused about why you’re asking.
I agree with several posts before this one that as you’ve framed it in this post, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to get a reasonable accommodation in an academic setting. The very generalized questions you’re asking, when understood specifically in a disability accommodations context, become tantamount to asking whether people with disabilities should be discriminated against. Like, you’re asking if the ADA is bullshit! My humble opinion is no, the ADA isn’t bullshit.
Asking very generally if a degree with an accommodation should come with an “asterisk” is a dangerous question. The point of a disability accommodation is the diametric opposite of that. The significance of a disability accommodation on a person’s record is to establish that, in a prior context, they could perform the essential functions required of them, once that accommodation was granted. It’s a reverse asterisk. It means that in a similar setting, moving forward, a reasonable expectation is that they can perform exactly those functions, with that accommodation.
Asking at the same time whether “the ability to successfully complete college coursework with adequate attendance/grades suggest anything WRT that individual’s ability to perform less demanding work” seems to suggest to me that, again, you’re reading some sort of universal quality of “being disabled” into the presence of an accommodation. And, again, the problem there is that a disability accommodation is something specifically tailored to prevent a person’s impairment from being a barrier to them performing and being judged in exactly the same way as everybody else! Given that it follows on the heels of your first question, I’m not sure whether what you’re thinking is that most people with a degree can do simpler-than-collegiate work, so people with disabilities who say they can’t do that work must not really be capable of even getting a “real” college degree. But it is at least open to that possible reading, and I would caution you against thinking along those lines (because, like, it’s mean, and also because the ADA exists).
There is already a very robust and very flexible framework for evaluating what a disability means for a person’s ability to perform. It’s the disability accommodations process. There is no good reason that I can think of to try to read between the lines of a disability accommodation and form sweeping conclusions about what a person’s abilities are, and several bad reasons, and several bad things that can happen as a result of doing that. If a person is a malingerer, OK, then they are a malingerer. But they aren’t a malingerer on the basis of some theory of general applicability about how if you can get a good grade on your Modern Political Thought 402 essay, you can do any minimum wage job.
Having now given a lecture about overgeneralization, I’m going to do a little bit of my own: do you know how hard it is to get a college degree for a lot of these kids? Like have you thought about how much additional stress it is on top of the normal college stress to have to keep rolling the dice every semester and hope that you get 3 or 4 or 5 faculty members who don’t take disability accommodations as some sort of personal insult, or some sort of “special treatment” that they’re requesting? Imagine you don’t hear very well in a classroom setting, or can’t get up and down stairs or can’t focus with external distractions going on around you, no matter how hard you studied, and imagine there’s a federal law that says you’re entitled to go to school and get a degree and it is the school’s job to make sure that you are given every opportunity to succeed and to do anything that is reasonable that will allow you to perform the job of a student, and imagine you get your licensed medical professional doctor to write a letter that says “yeah here’s what he medically requires from you in order to be fully able to do that,” and you give it to the school, and then imagine you show up for the first day of class and your teacher is just like, eh, that sounds stupid, we don’t have to do all that, why don’t you just sit here in front and it will be fine. And then you have to decide, am I going to try to educate this person about federal law, is the school going to take care of this for me, am I supposed to just try to somehow get through this without a disability, should I just try again next semester? If somebody should get an asterisk, it should not be that person when they complete the program successfully. Just look at them as a real individual human person, see what the experts say their impairments are and their approximate levels of work function, and make an individual decision about what is reasonable in their circumstances, it seems like to me is the responsible thing to do.
You know, you had a thread not that long ago asking the same thing, with even some of the same descriptions, and got lots of good input. You might reread it.
It seems pretty clear that some people “claim” they’re disabled and really are, and some aren’t. You’re in a job where you see a lot of false claims, but I wonder if you don’t overcompensate by judging people who truly are disabled as though they’re trying to cheat the system.
For starters, I do not think I used the terms “disabled/disability” in my OP. If you do not know, ask your husband. Those terms are defined very differently by different people in different situations. Do not presume my definition in one setting is necessarily yours.
Same to the guy who claims I’m asking “if the ADA is BS.” Entirely different definitions for the same word - which I never intended to bring up.
And undercaffeinated one - I do not perceive that prior thread at all the same as this one. See above observations as to “disabled”. You really do not know anything about how many and what sorts of claims I view favorably/disafavorably and why. How do YOU know who is “truly disabled” and who is not, when I find it so challenging? Feel free to disbelieve me, but the idea of people trying to cheat the system" really is not one that ever enters my mind.
Yeah, my job/employer - and likely I - have A LOT of shortcomings. I’m perfectly capable of toeing the company line. Am I supposed to apologize for coming here to try to work some things out?
I guess my assumption - which only 1 or so respondents agree with - is that a college degree should be interpreted as suggesting some minimal degree of accomplishment or ability. I also think college is SUPPOSED to be difficult. And if someone is capable of committing themselves to accomplishing something as challenging as college, then I think that is at least somewhat relevant to whether or not they can do something considerably less demanding - whether they want to or feel it is in their economic interest to do so.
In my world, it is not entirely unheard of for SOME (definitely not all) people to be less than fully truthful when it is in their financial interest to do so. And receiving a medical diagnosis does not (IMO&E) automatically qualify one as unimpeachable.
Finally - if you claim you cannot concentrate or attend sufficiently to push a broom or pack widgets at a reasonable pace, my personal preference would be that you not get behind the wheel of a car on public streets.
But this has gone far afield from my original questions. So carry on as you wish.
I would say that graduating with accommodations is important to kmow if those accommodations are not available on the job, or if allowjng them would substantially affect individual or team performance.
For example, I know someone with ADHD who needed a special accommodation for a completely quiet and solitary exam space, because he simply could not stay focused in a room full of distractions. With the accommodation he was fine, but if he had to work in an open office he’d be useless. And if you give that person a private office, it will cause conflict with others who may be more senior but still don’t rate an office - especially if the rules prevent you from explaining to co-workers why he needs the office.
If someone gets flustered under pressure of exams and gets an accommodation allowing for more time on the exam, I wouldn’t hire that person as an emergency service tech or customer support engineer who might be called in to fix an urgent problem on a deadline.
The real world is not as accommodating as school. If you need accommodations to graduate, look for a job where whatever your problems are won’t be a factor.
I wonder if HR’s verification was simply checking the resume he sent in, instead of actually having the thing verified by the school.
There are different kinds of demanding, though. College work is not the same as a desk job is not the same as pushing a broom is not the same as driving. These all require working under different conditions using different cognitive skills. When I attended school, it was a few hours of class a week with the vast majority of the work being done at home, with limited supervision, at whatever time or pace you like. The “working with limited supervision” part is of course why things fell apart for me specifically, but for some other kid that may not be the issue. For some other kid it could be the need for additional testing time or something of that nature. So for me, I work best in a structured, deadline-driven environment, but that other kid, he’s going to struggle to work under time pressure. I have ADHD, PTSD, Recurrent Major Depression and Anxiety OS. What kinds of work I can and can’t do depends entirely on what issue is flaring up and when. But you would have no idea looking at my academic record whether or not I was capable of a given job. You would have no idea how much blood, sweat and tears went into those excellent grades, or what parts of college were difficult for me and which were easily managed. The only thing that can give you an idea of those things are the specifics of the IEP and the candidate’s own perspective.
Your OP heavily implies that you view claims involving IEPs disfavorably, essentially that you don’t see them as equivalent to a real college education. Do you realize that?
November 2021? I don’t think that was all that long ago, but, yeah, he should’ve updated is LinkedIn page once he was canned.
Are you sure?
And that doesn’t really say anything about the meaning or value of that person’s degree, even though it is relevant to what kind of work they can effectively do.
Accommodations in education aren’t about lowering standards; they’re about removing or working around obstacles that would make it harder to achieve those standards. (At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.) Students with accommodations should have the same mastery of calculus, chemistry, history, etc. as students without accommodations, but they may not have attained or demonstrated that mastery in exactly the same ways.
Yes, you did. Third sentence of your OP.
Oops, sorry. I meant 2020… I let him go in November 2020.