Hey everyone,

27M and four years into my degree at WSU. Hoping for some advice on what my options are before taking anything further.

I have an intellectual disability and nocturnal epilepsy, diagnosed from childhood, and currently take four medications. Even without a seizure, the condition and medication can cause fatigue, slower thinking, poor concentration, and problems with processing information, comprehension and working memory.

Maths is one of the areas most affected, which is honestly embarrassing to admit publicly.

Also just being transparent, ChatGPT helped me organise this post because explaining a situation like this clearly without getting mixed up can be difficult for me.

What happened

When university started in 2022, Disability Services were genuinely great.

My original Disability Adviser knew my history well and was very proactive. If epilepsy caused a missed exam or my disability led to a misunderstanding with an assessment, she would communicate with academics and help sort things out.

She retired, and support became much more difficult. A lot more of the responsibility fell on me to repeat my history, chase emails, arrange meetings and work out who was responsible.

The frustrating part is that the maths problem wasn't unexpected.

Early in my degree, an academic who was also involved in disability coordination told me pretty bluntly:

“If you cannot pass statistics, you will fail the degree.”

The university already had documentation showing significant difficulties with maths, processing and working memory, but there never seemed to be a proper plan for when I eventually reached statistics.

The statistics subject

This year I took Statistical Decision Making, the statistics subject required in my ICT degree.

Enough marks were earned through the semester to reach 50 overall, but the final exam result was 9/50.

There was a compulsory exam hurdle of 20/50, so the final result became a Compulsory Fail despite reaching 50 overall.

That was pretty crushing.

Not because I expect a free pass. The problem is that the final exam put a lot of weight on working through information under time pressure, which is exactly where my disability and medical condition affect me most.

After initially being told the hurdle stood, the matter eventually reached a senior academic. She consulted Disability Services, Student Support, the Subject Coordinator and Program Lead.

They've now agreed to provide an alternative/supplementary assessment instead of the original final exam.

I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity, but also nervous about what “alternative” actually means. If it's basically another tightly timed statistics exam, there's a real possibility of ending up in exactly the same situation again.

I've already asked them, gently, to consider the medical impact when organising it. I'm not asking for the academic standard to be lowered, just a fair way to demonstrate the knowledge.

It has now reached senior university management

The wider Disability Services concerns also reached the Pro Vice-Chancellor responsible for Student Success.

She agreed to an hour-long meeting and said she would look into the academic side and speak with the Dean.

Unfortunately the first meeting ended around halfway through and most of the Disability Services issues I'd prepared weren't properly covered. Another one-on-one meeting has been requested.

She told me she needed roughly a week to look into the academic side, so I'm currently waiting rather than escalating further.

Requesting my own university records

The other thing I'm considering is requesting my own records through the University's Office of General Counsel.

They provided a consent form allowing me to request information held about me, including things such as Disability Services records, counselling/support records, file and meeting notes, emails and other internal correspondence.

The purpose isn't to threaten legal action. After four years of dealing with different people and getting different responses, I'd genuinely like to understand what was recorded and what was being communicated internally about my disability and support.

My concern is whether requesting everything from my enrolment is sensible, particularly because some of it includes medical and counselling information, or whether the request should be narrowed.

Mainly looking for advice on three things

1. Would requesting my own internal records through the OGC consent process be a sensible move, or would you narrow the request to particular records/time periods?

2. If the supplementary assessment ends up recreating the same disability-related problems as the original exam, what kind of internal or external recourse would normally come next?

3. At what point would it be sensible to stop trying to navigate this alone and speak with an independent disability/legal service about my rights and options?

Not looking for someone to tell me I automatically deserve a pass.

Mostly I'm just tired and worried.

Four years have gone into this degree, and there have been plenty of points where walking away would have been easier. I kept going for a reason.

The thought of reaching this point and potentially losing the degree because of one assessment format is pretty frightening, especially when the rest of the semester was enough to reach 50 overall.

Any advice would genuinely mean a lot.

Thanks for reading.