Assessment accommodations exist for one reason: to give students with disabilities a fair chance at demonstrating what they know. That’s the stated purpose. The legal frameworks say it. The university mission statements say it. And yet, when you read the actual policies that govern how these accommodations work, a very different story comes through. The language isn’t about access. It’s about cheating.
Nieminen and Eaton (2024) analyzed assessment accommodation policies from 15 major Canadian research universities (the U15 group) and found that these documents consistently framed disability accommodations through the language of academic misconduct, surveillance, and security threats. Their methodology, Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) approach, doesn’t ask whether a policy is effective. It asks what kind of problem the policy assumes it’s solving. And what Nieminen and Eaton found is that Canadian university accommodation policies are solving a cheating problem, not an access problem.
This paper was published in late 2023, and it doesn’t mention generative AI. But the patterns it exposes are deeply familiar to anyone following the AI-in-education conversation. The same surveillance-first mindset that drives AI detection policies shows up here in almost identical form. Dawson, Bearman, Dollinger, and Boud (2024) made a similar argument about AI and assessment: that our obsession with cheating has overtaken our concern for whether assessments are actually valid. Nieminen and Eaton arrived at the same conclusion from a completely different direction.
Three Ways Universities Frame Accommodations as a Threat
The policy analysis produced three distinct “problem representations,” each one treating students with disabilities as potential risks to academic standards.
The first is straightforward suspicion. Nieminen and Eaton (2024) found that nearly every university explicitly stated that accommodations could not lower academic standards. The documents repeatedly insisted that students with disabilities must meet the same standards as everyone else.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But the tone reads as defensive, not supportive. The University of Alberta placed its accommodation information under a heading that combined “Academic Integrity” with “accommodations,” as if the two naturally belong together. The implication: accommodation is a potential loophole, and the institution needs to make sure nobody exploits it.
The second is the fear that students might fake their disabilities. All 15 universities required extensive clinical documentation, verified by licensed professionals, updated within specific timeframes. A diagnosis alone was never sufficient. Students had to demonstrate “functional impairment” through approved channels.
Nieminen and Eaton (2024) connect this to what Dorfman (2019) calls the “fear of the disability con,” a societal panic that people fabricate disabilities to access benefits they don’t deserve. The Varsity Blues scandal in the U.S. amplified this fear enormously. And the fallout didn’t land on the wealthy parents who committed fraud. It landed on students who legitimately needed accommodations.
The third is the most granular: extensive surveillance during accommodated exams. Nieminen and Eaton (2024) document policies that include inspecting pencil cases, monitoring food and drink items, timing washroom breaks, and recording stop-time on breaks. Invigilators and video surveillance were standard across most universities. Even the readers and scribes assigned to help students were explicitly instructed not to assist in any way that could provide an academic advantage. The scrutiny applied to these students goes well beyond what non-disabled students experience.
The Medical Model and the Question of Deservingness
Disability in these policies was framed almost entirely through the medical model: a condition to be diagnosed, documented, and verified by professionals. Nieminen and Eaton (2024) note that the social dimensions of disability, the environmental barriers, the institutional design failures, were almost completely absent. Students didn’t just need to have a disability. They needed to prove they deserved accommodation through medicalized channels with specific professional credentials.
Nieminen and Eaton (2024), building on Dorfman (2020), call this a question of “deservingness”: accommodations are reserved for a narrow category of students whose conditions have been sufficiently validated. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, students of colour, and other marginalized groups rarely receive assessment accommodations, even though the obstacles they face can be just as consequential. The gatekeeping is medical, and the gate is narrow.
Research consistently shows that students avoid applying for accommodations because they fear being labeled cheaters. Nieminen (2022) reported that one student described assessment accommodations as “a form of cheating or academic dishonesty.” Some instructors refuse to grant officially approved accommodations when they personally view them as unfair advantages, which in many jurisdictions is illegal.
Harkins-Brown, Carling, and Peloff (2025) documented similar dynamics in their research on AI and special education: supports designed to help students with disabilities are constantly scrutinized through a lens of suspicion, and the students themselves internalize it.
The Silence on Inclusive Assessment Design
The most significant gap in these policies is what they don’t say. Nieminen and Eaton (2024) found that none of the 15 universities addressed how assessment itself could be redesigned to be more accessible from the start. Other forms of assessment, portfolios, peer assessment, group projects, barely appeared. The University of British Columbia even referred to “testing accommodations” where the official term should have been “assessment accommodations,” revealing just how exam-centric the institutional imagination had become.
Corbin, Bearman, Boud, and Dawson (2025) described AI and assessment as a “wicked problem” that can’t be solved through detection and surveillance alone but requires rethinking what assessment looks like. Nieminen and Eaton reached the same conclusion about disability accommodations two years earlier: the problem isn’t individual students who need adjustments. The problem is an assessment system designed so narrowly that it excludes people by default and then treats the fix as suspicious.
Assessment Security Is Not Academic Integrity
Nieminen and Eaton (2024) draw a sharp line between assessment security (detecting and preventing cheating) and academic integrity (promoting values like trust, fairness, and respect). Their central argument: accommodation policies operate entirely within the security paradigm. As they put it, “our analysis shows that in Canadian higher education, the assessment accommodation institution is grounded firmly in the paradigm of assessment security rather than academic integrity” (p. 989).
And the core issue, as the authors frame it, isn’t about the answer to whether accommodations constitute cheating. It’s about “the fact that we have to ask the question in the first place” (p. 991). The very act of repeatedly linking accommodations with cheating in official policy documents perpetuates the association, regardless of what the answer ends up being.
Eaton (2023) made a parallel argument about plagiarism in the age of AI, proposing a “postplagiarism” framework that moves beyond detection and punishment. The logic is the same here: when policies are built on suspicion, the students they’re supposed to help end up carrying the heaviest burden.
Limitations and What This Means Going Forward
The study focuses exclusively on Canadian U15 universities and on policy documents, not on how those policies are experienced by students or implemented by staff. The WPR method analyzes how problems are constructed in texts, not outcomes. So we’re looking at what the policies say, not necessarily what happens in every classroom.
Still, fifteen major research universities all constructing accommodation through the same cheating-and-surveillance framework suggests something systemic. The authors call for reorienting accommodation policy toward trust and care, following the disability activism principle of “nothing about us without us.” They also suggest making certain accommodations available to all students without documentation, especially in low-stakes assessment contexts.
That feels like the most productive direction. If extended time on a low-stakes quiz doesn’t compromise the assessment’s purpose, why require a medical file to access it? The energy universities spend policing who deserves accommodation could go toward designing assessments that need fewer accommodations in the first place.
References
- Corbin, T., Bearman, M., Boud, D., & Dawson, P. (2025). The wicked problem of AI and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2553340
- Dawson, P., Bearman, M., Dollinger, M., & Boud, D. (2024). Validity matters more than cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 1005–1016. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2386662
- Dorfman, d. 2019. “Fear of the disability Con: Perceptions of Fraud and Special Rights discourse.” Law & Society Review 53 (4): 1051–1091. doi:10.1111/lasr.12437.
- Dorfman, d. 2020. “[Un]Usual Suspects: deservingness, Scarcity, and disability Rights.” UC Irvine Law Review 10 (2): 557–618.
- Eaton, S. E. (2023). Postplagiarism: Transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19(23). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00144-1
- Harkins-Brown, A. R., Carling, L. Z., & Peloff, D. C. (2025). Artificial intelligence in special education. Encyclopedia, 5(1), 11. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia5010011
- Nieminen, J. H. (2022). “Unveiling Ableism and disablism in Assessment: A Critical Analysis of disabled Students’ Experiences of Assessment and Assessment Accommodations.” Higher Education, 85 (3): 613–636. doi:10.1007/ s10734-022-00857-1.
- Nieminen, J. H., & Eaton, S. E. (2024). Are assessment accommodations cheating? A critical policy analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 978–993. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2259632