North American Medical Schools’ Experience With and Approaches to the Needs of Students With Physical and Sensory Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To determine the nature and frequency of impairments and related underlying conditions of medical students with physical and sensory disabilities (PSDs), and to assess medical schools' use of relevant publications in setting admission criteria and developing appropriate accommodations. METHOD: A 25-item survey addressed schools' experiences with students known to have PSDs and their related policies and practices. The survey instrument was directed to student affairs deans at all 163 accredited American and Canadian medical schools. The authors limited the survey to consideration of PSDs, excluding psychiatric, cognitive, and learning disabilities. RESULTS: Eighty-six schools (52.8%) responded, representing an estimated 83,327 students enrolled between 2001 and 2010. Of these students, 0.56% had PSDs at matriculation and 0.42% at graduation. Although 81% of respondents were familiar with published guidelines for technical standards, 71% used locally derived institutional guidelines for the admission of disabled applicants. The most commonly reported accommodations for students with PSDs included extra time to complete tasks/exams (n = 62), ramps, lifts, or accessible entrances (n = 43), and dictated/audio-recorded lectures (n = 40). All responding schools required students' demonstration of physical examination skills; requirements for other technical skills, with or without accommodations, varied considerably. CONCLUSIONS: The matriculation and graduation rates of medical students with PSDs remain low. The most frequent accommodations reported were among those required of any academic or clinical setting by the Americans with Disabilities Act. There is a lack of consensus regarding technical standards for admission, suggesting a need to reexamine this critical issue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".