Should non-native speakers get extra time to compose exam answers?

Question

Today I met with a student who had plagiarized answers on an exam from online sources. She explained to me with apparent honesty that she had spent too long answering the first two questions and then run out of time. In her telling, being a non-native speaker makes grammatical writing in English very slow going. On this exam, I expected the students to write approximately ten to twenty sentences in an hour.

Sometimes our academic counseling department requests disability-related accommodations which allow certain students 1.5x or 2x time for an exam. However, I've never seen one related specifically to speech and language.

Does non-native speech warrant extra time when writing exam answers?

Answer 1

Disability conditions are applicable when there is an uncontrollable disadvantage that prevents the person fairly demonstrating their knowledge, skill and ability in the same timeframe.

This is not the case for a person who has and takes the option of moving to a country or region where their language proficiency is not sufficient to demonstrate knowledge or skill.

Such a person has the choice of developing their language skills to sufficiency or of simply studying at a university where the common language is one they are fluent in. They control the situation and therefore, it is their obligation to resolve it, not the assessor's duty.

Where these two groups intersect is a case rare enough that it should be handled on its own merits according to any applicable policy and law (which most likely will mean the extra time is given to account for the disability).

Answer 2

If the test isn't about language skills, design it such that people with weaker language skills still can complete it. In most but not all cases tests should test knowledge and understanding, not speed. So if you're worried that people with weaker language skills can't complete in time, just allow more time for all students and allow students who finish early to leave early. If you want to ask more questions in less time, you can always use more multiple choice or similar types of questions.

Giving a short time limit mostly tests who's performing better under stress and who's better at learning answers by heart - which is perfectly fine if that's what you want to test.

Answer 3

In short: no, not speaking the language a course is taught in is not enough in its own right to warrant extra time.

As @Nij pointed out, it is the student's choice to have attended this particular academic institution, and they chose to attend an institution where the spoken language is not their native language. An exception would be if it is in the academic institution's policy (i.e. for some institutions where a significant portion of the student body are international students, it may be the case) to grant this student and others extra time based on language.

Another issue here, it seems, is that the student is using this as an excuse (or at the very least, as justification) for committing plagiarism and academic dishonesty. Every student has the choice to cheat or not, and this student decided to cheat. There should be absolutely no excuse for academic dishonesty, and there is absolutely no justification for it.

It should have been apparent to the student before taking the exam that the language the exam was presented in would cause them problems, and the student should have sought help by either the professor (you?)/T.A./academic department with authority to grant extra time. In the event that the student may have been overconfident in their abilities to read/write/speak the language, the student should have approached you immediately afterwards to explain the situation and request extra time.

I would also like to point out that the university I attended had a policy to translate an exam into a student's native language upon request, and I've heard of several other institutions with this policy. These policies were presented in the acceptance materials for my university, and I was not registered as an international student. My point being the student should have been aware of their options before the exam, and it is the students' responsibility to seek these options.

Answer 4

Most schools I researched when choosing a uni, required non-native English speakers to prove their proficiency at English via a certified exam (IELTS, TOEFL, or schools' own exam). Required level of English was never lower than C1 on CEFR scale, which implies that the student

• Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer clauses, and recognize implicit meaning.

• Can express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions.

• Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes.

• Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.

I.e. if a student does not satisfy those, he/she should not be at school in the first place.

In my personal experience as a non-native freshman, ENG 101 essay was not very hard to write in dedicated time (150 minutes for 800-1000 words). Most complications rose from structuring the essay, not picking the right words - the latter is fairly easy acquired, even by watching TV or playing video games.

If your course requires extensive writing with complicated vocabulary, then it would be nice of you to warn your students of possible complications.

One other thing from my experience (I'm studying in a non-English speaking country, but medium of instruction is English in my uni) - there are a lot of people who can barely conjure a sentence, even despite the facts I mentioned on the top, and the fact that my school has a prep school to get people up to B2-C1. Somehow those people just get through - but it's their responsibility from then on. After all, C1 (in my case it's not even C1, it's 6.5 IELTS) is actually a threshold at which you are eligible to study in a uni, the most basic level at which you should be comfortable.

Answer 5

Unless the quality of the language is part of the exam, tell students you do not care about the small mistakes in the grammar. As long as these mistakes do not make the sentence difficult to understand, or even change the meaning so that the answer qualifies as incorrect. "A transformer", "the transformer", "a transformers" - why a physicist should care much.

This will eliminate the possibility of the foreign student to complain that lots of time has been spent perfecting the grammar.

Answer 6

Does the student even know it's acceptable to make grammar mistakes in the interest of efficiently explaining their ideas? Literally if the instructor has never taught this then the student has no chance of knowing this. It may be worth observing that both in "the real world" of industry and later on in academia the majority of communication is naturally done hastily and under time pressure, in the form of a stack of email that must be resolved before one can get on with work. And email, of course, is influenced by the speaker's own conversation style, and it is usually clear enough.

ESL speakers can become fluent while making more or less systematic categories of grammatical deviations that are more or less within the bounds of business English. But the entire culture of written examination in school emphasizes the wrongness of the deviations and not the fact that the communication itself is clear and fluent, and this may be the main issue with your student's struggles.

A certain amount of grammar mistakes only modestly impacts readability. Even if it moderately impacts readability, not penalizing these mistakes in a time-pressure quiz or test format is a good idea. This applies to all students. ESL and all students deserve time offline to polish.

Work with your student to find compromises between what they can express fluently and efficiently, and what they can express grammatically in the allocated time. The student may understand this as a bargain: they focus on clarity, and you forgive mistakes. I would suggest being collaborative with the student. Perhaps you will have a need to penalize some mistakes that compromise clarity, but the student deserves the chance to work through which mistakes are better to make.

I want to emphasize an important point about this answer: I advocate no special treatment in grading for the ESL student here. Education should be specialized to the students in need, and changes to evaluation is a last resort. (Of course reflecting on this situation may lead to new perspective in grading, but that's the point of asking questions like this in the first place.)

Now, the OP's question can be answered independent of the act of plagiarism, but I do have something to say about that regarding the circumstance: I would emphasize that inasmuch as justice is about punishment, it is also about when punishment ends so that the perpetrator may get on with their time in society. In this case, it means not depriving the student of their right to quality education assuming the punishment is anything less than expulsion. At the risk of being political, I might suggest that part of what turned the student to this crime was lacking any other way to succeed. That is within your ability to impact as an educator, and relating this empathy to a path forward in this student's education has nothing to do with lessening or excusing the offense.

Answer 7

There are great answers already, but I hope my personal perspective may also be helpful.

I have team member who is deaf, which is considered a disability by most. But he will not accept that he is disabled and has held himself to the same standard as everyone else, which makes him a great asset to our team. He doesn't communicate verbally, but performs his responsibilities as well as anyone else on the team. He isn't afraid of difficult tasks and rises to whatever challenge we throw at him.

I teach a class with a "hearing-impaired" student who also insists that she does not have a disability. She is very bright, capable and a good learner, in part because she has had to work a little harder. From each of these individuals, I have learned that while some accommodations should be made for special circumstances, if we go too far, we do more to handicap the student/employee/friend/family member than their actual condition.

For the student mentioned in the question, if she is allowed to use the language barrier as an excuse for cheating and to receive special accommodations for future tests, she will be further handicapped, not helped. If you care about her personal and academic development, you need to hold her to a higher standard and convince her to believe in herself and put forth the effort required to succeed despite the obstacles and challenges. In the long run, she'll be miles ahead if she breaks this shell on her own.

Answer 8

I think this depends on whether you give other people who might write their answers slowly additional time. For example, people with dyslexia also write and read more slowly.

I think that in general, if people with dyslexia also get extra time (which is, in my country, usually only 20% (at most) of the allotted time extra), then you can consider giving the same extra time to that person. I know this is done for high school exchange students.

However, I would only do this for a limited period of time. After, say, a year (or maybe even earlier) of university, it can and should be expected that the student knows the language well enough that he or she is not slowed down by it extremely, especially if the test requires only ten to twenty sentences an hour, which is not a lot. If they still don't know the language they're expected to know after a year, they are going to have a hard time when studying anyway.

I tried to write this answer primarily for students who didn't cheat, by the way. I think that is currently irrelevant to the question. However, in such cases, you might of course decide that the student has wasted their right on extra time.

Answer 9

Unless the exam is about the English language itself, non-native speaking students should have an extra time because they take more time to read, understand and write in English.

An example to this question.

Cisco CCNA exams are only available in English in most countries. The exams in English speaking countries must be solved in 90 minutes, while in non-native countries must be solved in 120 minutes (they have more 30 minutes).

One might think it is unfair that non-English speakers have more time to solve the exam and have a better grade. But they spend more time reading, understanding and writing, which is less time on thinking, the main objective of the exam. Hence the extra half-hour.

Answer 10

There are two separate issues here, but both come to the same answer.

If the student is studying maths, physics or engineering, then using fully grammatically-correct sentences should not be part of the marking scheme. So long as the maths/physics/engineering is clear and correct, supporting text is secondary. Any exam should not generally be asking for long essay-form questions because it is not an appropriate way of assessing the course. Since there shouldn't be a need for large amounts of writing in English, there should be no need for extra time to be allowed.

If the student is studying some subject which requires discussion, conversation and writing in English, their standard of written and spoken English has to be good enough to allow this. This applies just as much for native English speakers as non-native English speakers. Native English speakers are often not taught English grammar at school to academic-level standards, so a native English speaker may well have the same problem as a non-native English speaker with written assessments. Regardless, the ability to communicate in written English is a core requirement for the course. If the student cannot meet that core requirement, a foundation year to get all their skills up to scratch may be more appropriate for them, but you can't allow them extra time to cover their lack of core skills.

For a further problem, your student has clearly cheated in the exam, been caught cheating, and admitted cheating. Your organisation should have a standard policy for dealing with cheating, and saying "I couldn't finish the exam in time" is not a justification. Students who approach their teachers/tutors/lecturers with their academic problems ahead of time are likely to get some kind of help, whether that's extra mentoring in English or whatever. Students who cheat and then say "I couldn't do it" as justification can only get what the disciplinary process says they deserve though.