VIU is committed to supporting the academic success of our most vulnerable students by ensuring those who are registered with a disability are afforded accommodations enshrined under Human Rights legislation.
The progress we have made as an institution is in large part owed to you as faculty. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to achieve our mandate, and for that, the University thanks you. Further, your individual and collective support positively contributes to our students’ success and in turn, student retention.
The University is fortunate to have committed and compassionate faculty and departments. There have been strong examples of highly successful student accommodations this year in departments like Welding, Chemistry, Math. Faculty members in those departments, such as David Drury (Welding), Dean Slonowsky, Melissa Huggan and Lev Idels (Math), and Susan Sanders (Biology/Nursing) have been highlighted by students and by our Student Affairs team as exemplars in student accommodations.
The Welding Department, as an example, has been fantastically proactive with supports for their students with accommodations including developing their own version of D2L over the past five years. This initiative comes with built-in accessibility features like a text to speech button that reads the text. Welding made this move toward a more Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach after extensive national and international consultation with other welding standards groups looking to dissolve barriers rather than accommodating around them. Dave Drury and his colleagues (Instructional Assistant Stephen Cander and welding Instructors Brad Harrison and Colin Hastie) have been communicating the value of this approach to other Trades departments.
As an access institution, we support a higher number of students relative to other BC post-secondary institutions who require personalized services and tailored accommodations through our Accessibility Services (AS) and Assessment and Exam Services (AES) units within Student Affairs.
How many students do we support?
To give you a sense of the volume of accommodated students we support in Accessibility Services (the office that meets with students and determines reasonable accommodations), we have included statistics dating back to 2017. These figures represent the number of currently enrolled students seen by Accessibility Services.
- 2017-2018 – 707
- 2018-2019 – 705
- 2019-2020 – 721
- 2020-2021 – 597 (pandemic)
- 2021-2022 – 678 (pandemic/post-pandemic)
- 2022-2023 – We are seeing an upward trend of accommodated students who registered with a mental health disability despite the overall decrease in enrolment following the pandemic.
In terms of accommodated exams, the Assessment and Exam Services (AES) department (the unit responsible for administering accommodated exams) reports the following statistics dating back to 2018. These figures represent the number of individually/tailored accommodated exams for each student we serve. This is a very labour intensive service as we need to schedule private exam rooms, employ special software, schedule invigilators, and communicate with faculty. In 2022, we saw an increase of 109 per cent compared with 2019 numbers (pre-pandemic) and a staggering 246 per cent increase from 2021, despite a decrease in institutional enrolment.
- 2018: 1,460
- 2019: 1,863
- 2020: 751 (pre-Covid shutdown in March)
- 2021: 828 (between Sept and Dec only, after reopening)
- 2022: 2,040
Faculty Resources
Accommodated Exams: Instructor Guide
This guide will provide you with information on:
1) How to receive and review your students’ accommodation letters
2) When to send your test materials to the Exam Centre
3) Completing accommodated exam request forms and more
Accessibility Services
Use this link to learn more about student and faculty resources. It can also be used to inform students on how to register with Accessibility Services.
Assessment and Exam Services (AES)
Learn more about the tests we administer ranging from Accuplacer to accommodated exams.
If you are interested in learning more about academic accommodations at VIU or have specific questions about how to support your students through the accommodated exam process, please connect with Bryan Tinlin, Director of Student Services at bryan.tinlin@viu.ca.
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