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Accommodations for Students with Disabilities
- UCLA School of Law has a long history of supporting equal access to education for students with disabilities, in collaboration with the UCLA Center for Accessible Education (CAE). Students with disabilities who intend to request accommodations during law school must register with and provide relevant documentation to CAE, which will then provide recommendations to the Dean of Students regarding reasonable and appropriate accommodations.
- The School of Law policy is to provide reasonable accommodations to students with documented permanent and temporary disabilities. In addition, the law school strives to provide accommodations to those students with conditions not necessarily recognized by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as “disabilities,” including pregnancy. Reasonable accommodations are those that are consistent with the fundamental nature of the law school’s program of legal education, that can be provided without undue financial or administrative burden, and that can be provided while maintaining academic and other essential performance standards. Whether or not a proposed accommodation meets these requirements shall be within the discretion of the Disability Standards Committee, in consultation with CAE and the Dean of Students. The Dean of the Law School retains ultimate authority over these decisions.
- Applicants to and candidates for a degree from the School of Law, must have the abilities and skills to achieve the Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) as established by the law school faculty, either with or without reasonable accommodations. (ILOs can be found here.)
- Any of the following procedures, individually or in combination, may be adopted in individual cases by the Dean of Students after consultation with the CAE, and, when appropriate, with the Chair of the Disability Standards Committee and/or the relevant faculty member:
- Extension of time for completion of an examination or take-home examination.
- Provision of a private exam room.
- Provision of a reader-writer (who shall not be a lawyer, law student or other person with legal training) during the examination.
- Taping or scanning of the examination questions.
- A revision of an examination question or format that without such a revision, would present insuperable problems as a consequence of a student's disability.
- The Disability Standards Committee will consider requests for more extraordinary accommodations, including those for reduced course loads, a change in the curriculum, or a waiver of any rule in the Academic Standards, and report their decisions on these requests to the Dean of the Law School, who retains ultimate authority over them. A student seeking such accommodations may contact either the Dean of Students or the Chair of the Disability Standards Committee and must comply with XII.A. above relating to registration with the CAE.
- Whenever a reduced course load is approved for a first year student, that student’s academic performance will be reviewed under the rules in Section V pertaining to academic dismissal, probation and special academic requirements at two different points in time: At the end of two semesters of work; and again when the first year curriculum has been completed.
- To the extent that any of the procedures in this section render application of the anonymous grading system impossible in any particular instance, the application of the system shall be waived
- A copy of these rules shall be provided to every student who has self-identified as disabled during the law school application process prior to commencement of classes in the first semester of legal studies
- Any student who wishes to appeal an accommodation (or failure to accommodate) on the part of the School of Law may contact the Center for Accessible Education or the Office of the Vice Chancellor, Student Affairs—ADA & 504 Compliance.