Math 1b

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I am writing to respond to a misleading article about me which appeared in The Crimson on Thursday, April 13. ("Blind Student Rejects Offer by Ad Board for Retest.") First, at the time that the article appeared, I had not yet responded to the Ad Board's offer. Thus The Crimson's headline was both premature and inaccurate. Since April 13, I may note, I have written to the Ad Board accepting their offer to let me retake my Math 1b make-up final examination.

More disturbing than the factual error was The Crimson reporter's intimation that in contesting my failing grade on a Math 1b make-up final examination, I am taking advantage of my disability to shirk my academic responsibilities. A correction printed in The Crimson on April 15 acknowledged that "the article also contained misleading inferences that the student failed to cooperate with the registrar's office in arranging for the exam." A mere correction buried on page four of The Crimson is, however, insufficient. In impugning my motives, the article prejudices the entire University community against any sensitivity to the needs of disabled students at Harvard.

In light of The Crimson's damaging article, I feel compelled to explain the circumstances of my exam once again. Your readers may judge for themselves whether I am justified in seeking to have my Math 1b exam results overturned.

I am totally blind, and thus unable to read an examination myself. The registrar's office therefore arranged for a proctor to read my Math 1b make-up final to me aloud, in a separate room. A week prior to the examination, I spoke with the scheduling office about the necessity of finding a proctor who knew calculus, for I feared that someone unfamiliar with mathematical symbols would be unable to read the exam to me accurately and efficiently. The scheduling office assured me that the proctor assigned to administer my exam would be fully familiar with the material. At no point did the office offer to braille my exam. That would, of course, have been the ideal means of accommodating my disability.

Despite the scheduling office's assurances, within minutes of starting the exam on March 13, it became obvious that the proctor assigned to administer the exam to me knew very little calculus. He did not know the names of mathematical symbols on the test and resorted to describing each symbol to me by its physical appearance. Thus an integral sign, the most basic symbol of calculus, was "something that looks like an 's'." Those who are not blind often fail to appreciate that I have never seen mathematical symbols. Blind people use the Nemeth Braille Code of Mathematic and Scientific Notations, which has no relation to the physical appearance of printed mathematical symbols. Thus my proctor's efforts to describe the physical appearance of symbols on the exam, in lieu of identifying them by name, were meaningless to me.

Imagine, if you will, having someone unfamiliar with Greek read a Greek examination to you by describing the individual letters in each sentence. Then imagine how much harder it would be to understand the reader if you had never physically seen any of the Greek letters he was describing to you. That scenario approaches a sense of the difficulties I faced trying to take my Math 1b examination with a proctor who could not read math.

After a frustrating hour-and-a-half of trying to guess what symbols the proctor was attempting to describe to me, I finally asked him to call the registrar's office. Two members of the office's staff came. One of them asked, with some hostility, what more I could have expected their office to do for me. The professor of the course was summoned and arrived half an hour later. He identified two or three symbols on the exam for the proctor and then left. Unfortunately the exam contained many more elementary notations which he presumably expected the proctor to know but with which the proctor was in fact unfamiliar. The examination was further disrupted when, due to a mistake on the part of the scheduling office, we had to move twice to different rooms. Over 90 minutes of time were spent trying to resolve the situation and moving rooms.

These were, needless to say, extremely adverse conditions under which to take an examination. My failing grade on the exam did not come as a surprise. Yet the problems I encountered could have been easily avoided had the University only taken care to find a proctor who was comfortable reading mathematical notations out loud.

The Crimson article ignores an important reason for my decision to contest my examination grade: a sense of responsibility to the disabled community at Harvard. Had I remained silent, the University might never have recognized the importance of hiring skilled proctors to administer exams to the visually impaired. As disabled students we are not asking that academic rules be bent to our advantage, as The Crimson has implied. We ask only that the University provide reasonable accommodation for our impairments so that we may share the University's resources equally with all members of the Harvard community. Soonkyu Shin '91