Reasonable Accommodations in College and Graduate School

The clock

Where are you in this?

What is still open to you depends less on what you are called than on how far the process has already gone. Find the last thing that happened.

  1. 01A letter, an email, a request to meetNothing formal yet. The most room you will ever have, and the stage where an off-the-record conversation does the most damage.What to do first →
  2. 02A charge, or a hearing dateThe allegation is written down and a process is running on the school’s calendar. Everything you do now goes into a record someone reads later.Find the matter that matches →
  3. 03A decision, and an appeal windowThe shortest clock on this site. Appeal windows are commonly five to ten business days, and they are rarely extended.Appeals and reinstatement →
  4. 04The appeal is decidedThe campus process is finished. What is left sits outside it — an OCR complaint, a demand, an injunction, a suit.What is left after the appeal →
  5. 05It is over, and it is on your recordA transcript notation, a dean’s letter, a disclosure you will have to make for years. Some of it can still be corrected long after the fact.Records, and what follows you →

Not sure which one you are in? Send me the last thing the school sent you — zachary@astudentslawyer.com

Accommodations are granted one at a time. A college disability services office does not approve you in the abstract — it approves extended time, or a note-taker, or a reduced course load, each on its own record, each with its own justification. That is why so many students are surprised to be told they are eligible and then denied the thing they actually asked for.

This section explains the common academic accommodations one by one: what each one is, why schools grant it, what documentation gets asked for, what schools say when they refuse, and what you can do about a denial. If you are looking for accommodations on a standardized or licensing exam instead — the LSAT, MCAT, USMLE, NCLEX, bar exam, and the rest — those run under a different process and are covered in exam and testing accommodations.

The legal framework, briefly

Two statutes do the work. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. § 794) applies to any program receiving federal financial assistance — which, because of federal student aid, means very nearly every college and university in the country, public or private. The Americans with Disabilities Act covers public institutions under Title II and private ones under Title III. The Department of Education’s implementing regulations at 34 C.F.R. Part 104, Subpart E are where the postsecondary rules actually live, and 34 C.F.R. § 104.44 is the provision most of these disputes turn on.

The standards under the two statutes are close to identical in practice. The remedies are not. Section 504 and ADA Title II can support money damages; ADA Title III, standing alone, gets you an injunction and nothing more. That is a reason to think carefully about how a claim against a private university is framed.

Postsecondary is not high school

This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it costs students real time. The IDEA — the statute behind IEPs — stops at graduation. College is governed by Section 504 and the ADA, and the obligations are different in three ways that matter:

  • Nobody comes looking for you. In K–12 the district has an affirmative duty to identify students who may need services. In college, the burden of raising your hand is entirely yours.
  • The school is not required to guarantee an outcome. A high school IEP is built around progress. A college accommodation is built around access — an equal chance to demonstrate what you know, not a promise that you will pass.
  • Essential requirements are protected. A college does not have to change what a degree means. It has to remove barriers that are not essential to the degree.

You have to ask, and you have to ask through the right door

Telling a professor you have ADHD is not a request for accommodation. Emailing a dean that you have been unwell is not a request for accommodation. Courts have held that an institution’s obligations are triggered when a student requests an adjustment through the process the institution has established — which in practice means registering with the disability services office, in writing, with documentation.

You do not have to say the words “ADA” or “Section 504,” and you do not need a lawyer to make the request. But you do need a dated paper trail showing what you asked for, when, and what the school said back. If a dispute develops later, that record is the case.

What counts as a disability is broader than most students think

The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 deliberately widened the definition, and 42 U.S.C. § 12102(4) contains several rules of construction that students consistently talk themselves out of:

  • Medication is ignored. Whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity is assessed without the ameliorative effects of medication, therapy, or assistive technology. A student whose ADHD is well controlled on a stimulant is still evaluated as if unmedicated.
  • Episodic conditions count. An impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active — epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cyclical mental health conditions.
  • Bodily functions are major life activities. Not just walking, seeing, and hearing, but immune function, neurological function, digestive function, endocrine function, brain function, and more.
  • One is enough. An impairment need only substantially limit one major life activity. It does not have to limit any others.

Accommodations by type

Each page below covers one accommodation in depth — what it is, why schools grant it, the documentation that supports it, the standard objections, and the response. These are examples of commonly requested adjustments, not a complete list of what the law allows.

Testing and assessment

Classroom access

Time, load and progression

Programs, placements and proceedings

Campus life and housing

Related

The two phrases schools use to say no

Fundamental alteration. A school does not have to change the nature of what it teaches. If an accommodation would alter an essential element of the program, it is not required. This is a real defense and it is sometimes correct.

Essential requirement. Under 34 C.F.R. § 104.44(a), a school may decline to modify an academic requirement it can show is essential to the instruction being pursued, or to a directly related licensing requirement. Note the words can show. The defense is not self-proving.

Here is what students and their families usually miss: courts scrutinize the school’s process far more closely than its conclusion. The leading cases — Wynne v. Tufts University School of Medicine in the First Circuit, the Guckenberger v. Boston University decisions in Massachusetts — hold that an institution earns deference only when it can show it actually deliberated: that it considered the alternatives, weighed feasibility and cost, and reached a conclusion a reasonable academic body could reach. A dean’s conclusory assertion that something would lower standards is not enough. A blanket policy of never considering a category of request is worse.

The practical consequence is that the strongest challenges are usually procedural. The weakest are demands that a school reach a different substantive answer about what its degree requires.

If you are denied

  1. Get the denial in writing, with reasons. Ask for the specific basis. A school that will not put its reasoning on paper has a problem later; a school that does has told you what to answer.
  2. Use the internal grievance procedure. Under 34 C.F.R. § 104.7, an institution with fifteen or more employees must have a grievance process and a designated Section 504 coordinator. Use it. It is fast, it is free, and it builds the record.
  3. Consider a complaint to the Office for Civil Rights. OCR complaints are generally due within 180 days of the discriminatory act. Filing with OCR does not prevent you from suing, and OCR’s resolution does not bind a court.
  4. Preserve the option of suit. There is no administrative exhaustion requirement for postsecondary students — the IDEA exhaustion rules do not apply because the IDEA does not reach college. But damages under Section 504 or Title II require a showing of deliberate indifference, not mere error, and punitive damages are unavailable.

The law that governs a college accommodation request

Two statutes do the work. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794, reaches every school that takes federal money — which is very nearly all of them. The ADA covers the rest: Title II for public colleges and universities, Title III for private ones as places of public accommodation. In the Eleventh Circuit, which governs Florida, claims under the two are analyzed under the same standards.

The regulation that actually decides most disputes is 34 C.F.R. § 104.44, and it is worth knowing what it says on both sides of the line.

What it requires. A college must modify academic requirements where necessary so they do not discriminate — and the regulation names examples: changes in the length of time permitted to complete a degree, substitution of specific courses, and adaptation of how a course is conducted. It requires modified examination formats so that results measure achievement rather than the disability, unless the disability is what the test is measuring. And it requires auxiliary aids — taped texts, interpreters, library readers, adapted classroom equipment.

What it expressly does not require. The same regulation says a college need not provide attendants, individually prescribed devices, readers for personal use or study, or other devices or services of a personal nature. A student who asks for a personal aide or a personal reader is asking for something § 104.44 does not oblige the school to supply, and it is better to know that at the outset. The regulation also provides that academic requirements the school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction, or to a directly related licensing requirement, are not discriminatory.

“Otherwise qualified” — and where Florida students lose

Protection runs only to a student who is “otherwise qualified.” Under Southeastern Community College v. Davis, 442 U.S. 397 (1979), that means able to meet the program’s requirements in spite of the disability, and the statute does not require substantial modifications to the program itself. The Eleventh Circuit put it plainly in Goldberg v. Florida International University, 838 F. App’x 487 (11th Cir. 2020): a qualified student is one who can meet the program’s academic standards with or without accommodations.

The recent Florida cases show where that bites. In Nehme v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 121 F.4th 1379 (11th Cir. 2024), a medical student who failed at least eight courses — five of them after being placed on academic probation — was held not to be a qualified individual, and it counted against him that he conceded he had received proper accommodations for four of the failed exams. In J.A.M. v. Nova Southeastern University, 646 F. App’x 921 (11th Cir. 2016), repeated extended leaves of absence, exam rescheduling and excusal of misconduct were held to be accommodations that would fundamentally alter an osteopathic medicine program.

The practical lesson runs the other way, though, and it is the reason timing matters more than almost anything else: accommodations are forward-looking. A request made after a run of failures is fighting the record those failures created. The same request made before them is a different case entirely.

The school has to actually think about it — the strongest student-side rule

Deference to academic judgment is real. Courts will not override a genuinely academic decision unless it is “such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to demonstrate that the person or committee responsible did not actually exercise professional judgment” — Regents of University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 225 (1985) — and courts in Florida give the same respect to a school’s judgment about the qualifications its program requires. But deference is earned, not assumed, and that is where cases are won.

Under Wynne v. Tufts University School of Medicine, 932 F.2d 19 (1st Cir. 1991) (en banc) — applied in Florida in Forbes v. St. Thomas University, 768 F. Supp. 2d 1222 (S.D. Fla. 2010), aff’d, 456 F. App’x 809 (11th Cir. 2012) — a school has “a real obligation” to “seek suitable means of reasonably accommodating” a student with a disability, and has to put in a factual record showing that its officials “considered alternative means, their feasibility, cost and effect on the academic program” before concluding that no reasonable accommodation was available. A conclusory assertion, with no evidence of deliberate consideration, is not enough. So the question to ask of any denial is not only “was this decision right?” but “is there any record that anyone actually weighed the alternatives?” Often there is not.

Two further points help. Whether an accommodation would impose an undue burden or fundamentally alter a program is generally a question of fact — Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274 (S.D. Fla. 2016) — which means it is not something a school can simply assert its way past. And to establish fundamental alteration a school has to identify the essential requirement, show that modifying it goes to the core of the program, and show it considered whether any lesser alternative existed.

The interactive process, and a warning about how students lose it

Section 504 and the ADA do not use the phrase “interactive process” for college students the way employment law does, and the Eleventh Circuit has not held in a published decision that failing to engage in one is independently actionable — that remains unsettled. What Florida courts do recognize, from Forbes, is that the process is genuinely two-sided: the student carries the initial burden to identify the disability and make the case for specific accommodations, after which the school must consider the request and make a reasoned decision.

Here is the warning. In Amy v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 2024 WL 5323717 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 20, 2024), the court found that the student broke down the interactive process by insisting on one particular accommodation and resisting any alternative. Where a school does not obstruct the process and makes reasonable efforts to communicate and to accommodate on the information it has, liability does not follow. Refusing every alternative on offer is a way to lose a case that could have been won — ask for what you need, but engage with what is proposed, and put the reasons in writing.

Technical standards

Published technical standards get real deference. Following Southeastern Community College v. Davis, the Eleventh Circuit treats a school’s academic standards as entitled to deference as the statement of the qualifications its program requires: Wood v. President & Trustees of Spring Hill College, 978 F.2d 1214, 1222–23 (11th Cir. 1992); see also Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274, 1285 (S.D. Fla. 2016). They are not untouchable. The Section 504 regulation shields only the academic requirements a school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction or to a directly related licensing requirement, 34 C.F.R. § 104.44(a), so the showing is the school’s to make. And under Wynne, the school has to show that the people responsible actually considered the alternatives — their feasibility, cost and effect on the program — rather than simply pointing to the standard. Courts will not second-guess curriculum or clinical content on a thin record, but a standard that appears nowhere until the moment it is used to exclude a student is a different matter from one published and applied consistently for years.

Retaliation

Asking for accommodations is protected activity, and so is complaining about how a request was handled. A retaliation claim requires protected activity, the school’s knowledge of it, an adverse action, and a causal link — with but-for causation, and the familiar burden-shifting that follows. Retaliation claims sometimes survive where the underlying accommodation claim does not, because they turn on what the school did after the request rather than on whether the student was qualified.

Where to complain, and what it is worth

There are two routes and they are not alternatives you have to choose between carefully — a student may do both.

The Office for Civil Rights. A complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s OCR must be filed within 180 days of the discriminatory act. It costs nothing and needs no lawyer, though what you put in it matters.

Court. A postsecondary student does not have to exhaust administrative remedies before suing under Section 504 or the ADA. Filing with OCR is not a prerequisite.

On remedies, be realistic. Injunctive relief — reinstatement, the accommodation itself, correction of a record — and attorney’s fees do not require proof of intentional discrimination. Money damages do, generally shown through deliberate indifference: that the school knew of a substantial risk of discrimination and failed to act.

And one recent development that changes what these cases are worth. In Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, 596 U.S. 212 (2022), the Supreme Court held that emotional distress damages are not recoverable under Section 504, because it was enacted under the Spending Clause and funding recipients never consented to that exposure. The Eleventh Circuit extended that to ADA Title II in A.W. v. Coweta County School District, 110 F.4th 1309 (11th Cir. 2024). Earlier Eleventh Circuit authority allowing emotional distress damages, Sheely v. MRI Radiology Network, 505 F.3d 1173 (11th Cir. 2007), no longer holds. For most students this means the value of a case lies in getting the accommodation, the place, or the record put right — not in a damages award for the distress of the fight.

This page describes how these rules work in general. It is not legal advice about your situation, and no outcome can be promised in any individual case.

Common questions

Do I have to disclose my diagnosis to my professors?

No. Accommodation letters normally state the accommodation, not the condition. Faculty are entitled to know what to implement, not what you have been diagnosed with. If a professor demands your diagnosis, that is a conversation for the disability services office.

My school approved me but my professor will not follow the letter. What now?

That is an implementation failure, and it is the school’s problem, not a new accommodation request. Report it in writing to disability services the same week, and keep the email. Repeated failure to implement an approved accommodation is one of the cleaner claims a student can have.

Can the school make me re-document a permanent condition every year?

Documentation requirements have to be reasonable and connected to the accommodation being requested. Annual re-testing for a lifelong, static condition is a frequent target of challenge, and many institutions back down when asked to justify it in writing.

How long should this take?

There is no fixed statutory deadline, but the obligation is to respond promptly. If a request is sitting unanswered as an exam approaches, say so in writing and ask for an interim accommodation. Delay that causes concrete harm is itself a problem for the institution.

Does asking for accommodations go on my transcript?

No. Accommodation records are kept separately from your academic record and are not reported to graduate programs, licensing boards, or employers by the school.

This is an individualized, fact-specific inquiry

Every determination described on this page is individualized. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights says so directly: asked whether there is a list of all possible academic adjustments, OCR answers no — adjustments “must be individualized,” and “sometimes the most effective and practical academic adjustment for a given situation is a new solution rather than an off-the-shelf response.”

The lists on this page are examples. They are not comprehensive, they are not a menu, and they are not a ceiling. Two students with the same diagnosis can need entirely different adjustments, and OCR’s own guidance uses paired examples to make that point — one student whose treatment plan calls for supervision, another whose plan calls for privacy, same condition, opposite accommodation. A school that applies a fixed package to everyone with a particular condition has already made an error, whatever the package contains.

Nothing here predicts what any particular school will do, or what any particular student is entitled to. That depends on facts this page cannot know.

This practice is student-side only

A Students’ Lawyer represents students and families. It does not advise, defend, or consult for colleges, universities, testing agencies, or licensing boards. Knowing how a school is supposed to run this analysis is what makes it possible to show when it has not — where the interactive process was skipped, where an essential-requirement finding was assumed rather than made, where a denial rests on a blanket policy rather than on this student’s documentation. The standard reads the same from either chair. The reason to know it cold is to hold the institution to it.

When it is time to call a lawyer

Most accommodation requests should never involve counsel. Register, document, ask, receive. The moments that actually warrant a call are narrower and more specific:

  • The denial rests on a policy rather than on you. “We don’t do that” and “that isn’t one of our accommodations” are not individualized assessments, and OCR has said as much.
  • An essential requirement is invoked but cannot be found in writing. A technical standard or program requirement that appears for the first time in your denial letter is worth examining.
  • The school offers withdrawal, a leave, or a lighter program instead of a modification it never evaluated.
  • Something changed after you asked. Requesting a modification is itself protected activity, and a grade, a referral, a schedule, or a tone that shifts afterward raises a separate retaliation question that does not depend on whether the original request was correct.
  • A deadline is running. Internal appeal windows are short, an OCR complaint is generally due within 180 days, and a graduation or licensure date does not wait.
  • The stakes have escalated. Once probation, dismissal, a conduct referral, or a technical-standards determination is on the table, the matter is no longer an accommodation request.

These are fact-specific questions, and the answer usually turns on details — what was asked, in what words, to whom, and what the file says. If you are not sure whether your situation is one of these, that uncertainty is itself a reasonable reason to ask.

Get in touch to talk through a specific situation, whether you are a student or a family.

General information about disability law in education. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it cannot account for the facts of your situation or the law of your jurisdiction. Guidance documents from the Office for Civil Rights are cited throughout; OCR guidance does not itself have the force and effect of law, and OCR states that its enforcement determinations are based on the particular factual circumstances of each individual case.

Where to go from here