Central Exam Adjustments

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Central Exam Adjustments can be made if you have a documented medical, physical or mental health condition and/or a specific learning difficulty.

School regulations allow for Central Exam Adjustments (CEAs) to be made if you have a documented medical, physical or mental health condition and/or a Specific Learning Difficulty such as dyslexia or dyspraxia.

The purpose of CEAs is to provide an environment that gives all students an equal opportunity in exams. These adjustments are confidential and will not be listed on your transcript or degree certificate.

If you need details of where your exam will be taking place visit CEA and Late Entry Daily Arrangements.

CEAs for long term conditions exist for the duration of your programme at the LSE.

In order to apply for Long Term CEAs you will need to complete a CEA application, in person, with an advisor from the Disability and Wellbeing Service. This is often done at the same time that your Teaching and Learning Adjustments (TLAs) are put in place.

The Disability and Wellbeing Service will then approve standard applications and have non-standard applications referred, along with the appropriate medical evidence, to the CEA Panel.

The recommendations on your CEA application will be considered by the CEA Panel. You will receive an outcome email from the CEA Panel once your application and evidence has been considered.

Once approved, agreed CEAs will remain in place throughout the entirety of your programme at the LSE.

If you believe that you are entitled to CEAs and have not yet spoken to the Disability and Wellbeing Service, please do so as soon as possible so that your application can be completed prior to the deadline.

Some useful points to remember:

not all CEA recommendations are agreed by the Panel.
CEAs for long term conditions are for the duration of your programme and will only need reviewing should your condition change. If you start a new programme, i.e. finish your undergraduate programme and start a postgraduate programme, you will need to apply again.
should your condition alter and you find you need more or fewer CEAs, you will need to meet with your Disability and Wellbeing Service advisor to discuss these.
CEAs and Teaching and Learning Adjustments (TLAs) are not the same. CEAs only apply to centrally organised, in-person, formally invigilated exams and some limited CEAs also apply to short timed online assessments where appropriate.

In order for long term CEAs to be put in place, your application must be completed by the following dates:

For January 2023 assessments: Friday 11 November 2022
For Summer 2023 assessments: Monday 3 April 2023
For Undergraduate Resits & Deferrals (IRDAP) 2023: Friday 21 July 2023

You should ensure that you make your appointment with the Disability and Wellbeing Service in good time as they will assist you with your application.

You can apply for Short Term CEAs if you experience a short term or unexpected medical condition just before or during the exam period which you feel will affect your exams, or if you have other exceptional circumstances that will affect your exams and would benefit from Short Term CEAs. Short Term CEAs can only be put in place if your medical or other exceptional circumstances will affect your exams; they cannot be put in place to compensate for your exam preparation being affected by your circumstances.

You must apply as early as possible and as soon as you become aware of your short-term medical condition, however, adjustments can only be put in place for exams seven calendar days or later after the submission of your application.

Please check here for the specific submission deadline for your examination date.

To apply you need to complete an application for Short Term CEAs. All applications for Short Term CEAs must be supported by up-to-date written evidence in English. The Disability and Wellbeing Service have produced a useful document that you can use to collect evidence you will need.

Please submit your complete application, including evidence, to Student Services as an attachment to this enquiry form. Forms without evidence will not be accepted – you must present both the form and evidence together.

For both Long Term and Short Term CEAs, if we do not receive your application in good time, we may not be able to make the required adjustments and you may be required to defer your assessments.

To maintain impartiality students must not contact members of the Panel directly unless responding to a Panel member’s enquiry. The Panel will email CEA outcomes to students’ LSE email accounts. If you have queries about the CEA process please contact the Sudent Exams Team in the first instance by submitting an enquiry.

If you have CEAs entitling you to extra writing time and/or rest breaks, these will be applied to the following types of online assessment by the department which runs the course:

Short time-limited assessments with a common start/finish time for all students (e.g. a timed 3 hour assessment).
Short time-limited assessments to be taken at any time within a 24-hour window (e.g. 3 hours within 24 hours).

If you have extra writing time and rest breaks, both will be added to the standard assessment time. This is because it is not feasible to ‘pause the clock’ as administered in traditional on-site exams. Rest break time will be added to the total time you have available to complete the assessment, and you will be expected to manage your own breaks within that period.

Extra writing time and rest breaks are only ever calculated against writing time and not reading time, however, for online assessments where technical/upload time has been added, these adjustments will also be calculated against that time.

For online assessments of 24 hours duration or longer, the assessment window is specifically designed to be longer than the approximate effort required to complete the assessment task. For example, within a full 24-hour assessment window, you may be required to apply approximately 3 or 4 hours of effort to the task. Therefore, the assessment window should give you the opportunity to complete all the tasks at a time that is appropriate to your circumstances, including taking breaks. Extra writing time and rest breaks CEAs will not be applied to this type of assessment. Any student, either with or without CEAs, can apply for an extension to an assessment deadline longer than 24 hours if they are struggling to meet a deadline due to circumstances outside their control.

If you have a Letter of Notification (LoN) as part of your existing CEAs or My Adjustments, you should attach this to all of your online submissions irrespective of their duration. This will notify the examiner/s of any relevant information that should be considered. If you do not have a digital copy of your LoN, please contact the Disability and Wellbeing Service.

The CEA process is run jointly by the Student Exams and SSC Support Team and Disability and Wellbeing Service.

All non-standard recommendations and applications for CEAs are considered by the CEA Panel. The aim of the Panel is to ensure that all CEAs are fair both to the student involved and also all other students. The Panel will check to make sure that all recommendations/applications are properly evidenced and appropriate to the condition.

If, having received the outcome email from the CEA Panel, you believe your CEAs are not appropriate then you have the right to appeal.

These are the grounds for the appeal process:

The CEAs do not make sufficient adjustments according to the documentation describing your condition. If you are appealing a decision relating to a Short Term application, you must provide new evidence. If you are appealing a decision relating to Long Term CEAs, you may request an administrative check of the evidence held on your file by the Disability and Wellbeing Service. If the check confirms that the CEA decision was appropriate, you may be asked to provide new evidence before your appeal is concluded. If you have information that the Disability and Wellbeing Service has not previously seen, please attach this to your initial appeal; do not wait for the administrative check.
There was a procedural defect in the Panel’s decision making process.
Your condition has changed/there is an additional condition which you wish to have considered/added within existing CEAs.

To appeal you must complete the Appeal Against a CEA Panel Decision form. If you are basing your appeal on evidence then you must attach the evidence to the form, if this is new evidence you should also explain why this evidence was not submitted with the original application.

If you wish to appeal, you must do so within ten working days of receiving your outcome email from the CEA Panel which contains your agreed CEAs.

The Appeal Panel will consider all of the information presented to it and decide whether the original decision was appropriate or if the CEAs should be changed. Please bear in mind that the Appeal Panel may decide to offer fewer adjustments than were offered initially.

When the Panel has made its decision it will contact you by email and explain the decision within seven working days of you submitting an appeal.

To maintain impartiality students must not contact members of the Appeal Panel directly unless responding to a Panel member’s enquiry.

The Appeal Panel aims to consider your application as quickly as possible, and within seven working days of you submitting an appeal. You should be aware that it can take some time to put CEAs in place, so even if a decision is made before an exam you must remember that it may not be operationally possible to put the CEAs in place in time for your exam if the decision is close. Please therefore aim to submit your form as soon as possible.

If you have queries about the CEA appeal process please contact the Student Exams Team in the first instance by submitting an enquiry.

If CEAs have been agreed you will take your exam in a designated venue rather than a main exam room. We do this because we cannot put adjustments in place in the main exam rooms.

The location of your exam will be shown on the Central Exam Adjustment and Late Entrants list. This is published online, five calender days before the exam and posted as ‘pink lists’ in the Student Services Centre and in the entrance of Clement House on the morning of your exam. Please ignore any rooms showing on your personal timetable in LSE for You.

Your CEAs will only be available in the exam room indicated on the above lists; you will not be able to take advantage of your individual adjustments in any other room.

CEAs are provided for many students and for a variety of reasons. As a result there will usually be several students in the same CEA room. Some of these students will have permission to take rest breaks and/or leave the room at different times. As such you are expected to take rest breaks and leave rooms quietly so as to minimise any disruption to other candidates.

The factsheets below provide some more detail on how some common adjustments work. If you have been granted adjustments then we recommend that you read the factsheet prior to your exams.

If you require a factsheet in an alternative format then please contact either the Disabilty and Wellbeing Service or the Student Exams and SSC Support Team who will be happy to assist.

The list above is by no means exhaustive and the Panel may offer you different adjustments. If you have any queries about the adjustments that you have been offered please submit an enquiry.

CEAs are intended to remove inequality at the point you take the exam, so Boards of Examiners are not made aware of approved CEAs for any individual candidate.

If you feel that your CEAs were insufficient, e.g. as the result of an acute episode of a chronic condition, you should inform the Board by submitting proof of Exceptional Circumstances.

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