Office of Student Accommodations and Testing Annual Report 24-25

“Telling Our Story”

“Who We Are”

The Office of Student Accommodations and Testing (OSAT) staff members are dedicated to helping students with disabilities. That is the reason I as the Director of OSAT prominently displayed the staff photos on the cover page of this annual report. Without the dedicated OSAT staff we could not fulfill our mission statement, vision statement or program elements listed below. The staff members include me Isabel Medina Keiser/Director, Jennifer Nicholson/Assistant Director, Carmen Ortiz/Coordinator (testing), Kelly Rawlings/American Sign Language Lead Interpreter, Greg Gegan/Access Coach, Dr. Josh Roeder/ Access Coach, Kayla Saens/Access Coach, Shasta Steinert/Access Coach and Stacy Shanahan/Administrative Specialist. We must utilize the entire staff to be able to provide accommodation for over seven hundred and sixty students and to proctor over six thousand tests per year. We hope that this annual report will succeed in “telling our story.” 

Isabel Medina Keiser, Director of the Office of Student Accommodations and Testing

“What We Do”

MISSION STATEMENT 

The Office of Student Accommodations and Testing (OSAT) provides leadership, guidance, and facilitation of equal access for disabled students resulting in their full participation in curricular/co-curricular offerings and provides a professional testing environment for the campus and the community. We are committed to maintaining professional testing standards and practices and safeguarding confidentiality of student records. We adhere to the guidelines set forth by the National College Testing Association (NCTA). 

VISION STATEMENT 

OSAT will be a global leader at Wichita State University in developing environments that promote full accessibility for all participants in curricular/co-curricular offerings and will be part of an integrated testing service at Wichita State University that operates within the standards of the NCTA best practices and maintains a facility that is currently going through the process of NCTA re-certification. 

PROGRAM ELEMENTS 

OSAT offers a comprehensive and coordinated approach in meeting a diverse set of needs across the Wichita State University campus. Program elements include:

• Individual one-on-one meetings with students via an interactive process that capture environmental and academic barriers to access and results in individual solutions on a per-student basis. 
• Providing alternative formatted course learning materials that are usable by students including Braille through a collaborative effort with MRC. 
• Consultation with faculty/instructors on the implementation of course-related accommodations without fundamentally altering the course. 
• Participation in campus recruitment events and outreach to students and families considering enrollment at WSU i.e., Discover Wichita State Events, Black & Yellow Days, W-S-YOU and Shocker Honors Scholars Receptions.
• Participation in campus orientation events welcoming students and families (parents) to WSU.
• Consulting with the ADA Coordinator and being a member of the WSU ADA Internal Compliance Team (ICT) to inform and encourage designing for usable and accessible physical spaces. 
• Class presentations centered on Disability Awareness, Accessible Design, and Disability Culture.
• Staff/Instructional presentations that clarify the role and scope of OSAT.
• Regular ongoing interactions with University Residences and Dining/Catering regarding housing and dining accommodations.
• Consulting with the Office of Legal Counsel on an as-needed basis during the academic year.
• Development and sponsorship of Shocker T1, a club for students that have T1 diabetes.
• Development and sponsorship of a Disability Rights, Education, Activism, & Mentoring Group
  for College Students with Disabilities
• Representation of disability on a variety of accessibility initiatives and committees across campus to advance the campus understanding of how environmental design barriers affect the full participation and use for all.
• Consultation with other campus-supported offerings to assure these offerings are accessible by design.
• Serve as a resource to the broad campus community on re-thinking the disability paradigm.
• Developed a student internship program to introduce American Sign Language as a potential career pathway for students. 
• Proctoring course exams for faculty who do not have the resources to provide accommodated testing conditions and proctoring exams for faculty who do not have the resources to provide proctored exams.
• Provide proctored exams for Kryterion, ETS, Meazure Learning, and Pearson to community members. 
• Provide Test Anxiety workshops through our partnership with Trio Student Support Services.

Program OUTCOMES

OSAT supports an environment focused on reducing student burden to have equal access to curricular and co-curricular activities. As a result of their interactions with OSAT, students will: 

• Gain an improved understanding of their rights to equal access related to all elements of the  University environment.
• Learn more about the ways OSAT can support their access (e.g., educational programming, course accommodation letters, accommodated testing, collaboration with faculty).
• Better understand the role of OSAT in facilitating the implementation of accommodations through engagement with OSAT versus direct negotiation with instructors.
• Succeed and persist at rates like or better than their nondisabled peers.
• Gain an improved understanding of proctored testing options on campus.

Department Highlights 

During the time of this annual report OSAT collaborated with the Student Government Association (SGA) in two initiatives. First, SGA provided funding for assistive technology for students. OSAT purchased a program called Kurzweil 3000. Kurzweil 3000 is an easy-to-use software platform that promotes independent learning—on any device. Embedded customizable tools for reading, taking notes, studying, writing, and test-taking support the full learning process, enabling students to comprehend and articulate new concepts more effectively. This program is available to all WSU students and not just students registered with OSAT. Over 140 students have downloaded the program. 

One trend that we have seen this year is students that are struggling with reading, writing, and lacking study skills. The students do not have a documented disability but are still struggling. Which leads to another collaboration with SGA. During a conversation with SGA, the Director advised them that the cost of evaluation for ADHD, Autism, or Learning Disability can be costly, students typically do not have the funds for the assessments. So, SGA passed the ADHD, Autism, or Learning Disability Testing Scholarship Support Fund that provides funds available to students that need evaluations. 

Another Department highlight is a collaboration with Parking Services. Parking Services is to take over the duty of providing mobility rides to students with disabilities starting August 2025. OSAT will still be the department that okays the accommodation of mobility rides. OSAT through Student Services purchased two new golf carts for this service. One of the golf carts has a ramp for wheelchairs so WSU can now provide mobility rides to students that utilize wheelchairs for mobility. The name of the new program is Shocker Assist, and the hours of service will be Monday – Friday, 7:00 AM – 11:00 PM. The following are the statistics on mobility rides provided by OSAT during the annual report (students do not request during the summer months).

The total of rides for the overall year was 697 rides in all kinds of weather.

Staff Highlights

During the time of the annual report three OSAT staff members; Isabel Medina Keiser, Director, Jennifer Nicholson, Assistant Director and Greg Gegan, Access Coach attended the AHEAD Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The following are the workshops that staff attended: 

• Legal Year in Review
• Ten Strategies to Learn the Language of Your Administration and Build Trust
• Navigating the Early Years as a Disability Resource Professional
• Transitioning from the K-12 System to Higher Education
• Office for Civil Rights Year in Review
• Cohesive Collaboration Between Colleges and High Schools to Support Students with Disabilities.
• Flexibility Accommodations: A Smaller Schools’s Process and The OCR Complaint that Confirmed the Approach
• Sighted Guide for Sighted People: Working with Blind and Visually Impaired Students
• Accommodate This! Your Most Complex Requests, Surprise Situations, and Creative Solutions
• When Faculty say “No”: The Interactive Process to Determining Reasonable Accommodations
• Special Topics in Health Science Education
• Ten Strategies to Learn the Language of your Administration and Build Trust
• Understanding Processing Deficits? Effects on Math Learning, Accommodations and Course Substitutions
• Beyond Accommodations: Increasing the Retention of Students with Disabilities
• Tested By Faculty: Effective Collaboration for Facilitating Testing Accommodations
• Infusing Joy into the Workplace: Tips for Leaders for Retention of Staff

All the staff were able to attend a virtual AHEAD conference. The following were the workshops that were available during the virtual AHEAD conference:

• Legal Year in Review
• Barriers to Access in Higher Ed: The Role of Documentation in the Accommodation Process
• Insights from Deaf Disability Services Professionals
• Office of Civil Rights (OCR) Year in Review
• Cohesive Collaboration between Colleges and High Schools to Support Students with Disabilities
• Building and Implementing a Campus ADA Transition Plan
• Navigating Mental Health Disabilities as a New Professional in Disability Services
• Disability: Access in Prison Education Programs: Lessons Learned from the Inside
• Make Your Data Talk: Program Review Through the Lens of Assessment

Other WSU staff members such as the ADA Coordinator/CTAC attended the sessions. 

Greg Gegen/ OSAT Access Coach attended the Landmark College Professional Learning Days in Putney, Vermont. Landmark College is a community designed exclusively for students who learn differently, including students with a learning disability (such as dyslexia), ADHD, autism, or executive function challenges. They champion a strengths-based model for education, giving students the skills and strategies they need to succeed in life. Landmark pays half of the cost to attend the event. 

Also, Trio DSS awarded the Trio DSS Lighthouse Award to OSAT Access Coache Dr. Joshua Roeder.

“Our Wins”

Our first win is on the page of this report. In the center of the cover page is a photo of the front door of our new office space. David Marcus and Billy Marcus covered the cost of the building of our new office space “Bonnie Marcus Office of Student Accommodations and Testing” We have been in the new facility since July 15, 2024. The following article published by the WSU Foundation about the Marcus donation to our new office space:

Bonnie Marcus was the oldest of her three siblings, with younger brothers David and Billy. She loved writing poetry and was fiercely passionate about animal conservation, joining Greenpeace after moving to Los Angeles in her twenties.

“My sister was just a sweet, sweet person. She was good-natured, bright, and personable,” David said. “And she was always giggling, just a little bit.”

Bonnie, who had bipolar disorder, autism, and a learning disability, passed away in 2007. She was forty-one.

Growing up in the 1970s, Bonnie was among the first generation to benefit from Section 504, a federal law published in 1973 to protect students with disabilities from discrimination. In time, universities across America established accommodation centers to assist students with a range of learning disabilities.

David, who has practiced psychiatry for 23 years, specializing in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) treatment, sees the benefits of these accommodations in his day-to-day life.

 “Through my training, I’ve seen children and adolescents with psychiatric problems using testing accommodations – extra time, a quiet room – which was very beneficial,” David said.

Beginning in the fall of 2024, the Bonnie Marcus Office of Student Accommodations & Testing in the Shocker Success Center will provide these resources for students across campus, empowering students of all learning capabilities to reach their full potential.

“People with disabilities can do amazing things,” David said. “The support we’re providing at Wichita State will help them to achieve their goals.”

Again, we would like to thank David Marcus and Billy Marcus for their generous support and encouragement. 

During the annual report Wichita State University/Foundation and Alumni Engagement informed OSAT that George and Nikki Hansson listed OSAT as an estate gift recipient. George and Nikki Hansson already provide us with funds for assistive technology that we utilize every year. We would like to thank George and Nikki Hansson for their generous support and encouragement. 

Also, we would like to thank Alyssa Hoffine, CFRE, Director of Development, College of Applied Studies and Lynette Murphy, MA, CFRE, Senior Director of Development and the staff at Wichita State University/Foundation and Alumni Engagement for establishing the funding for OSAT. 

“Our Wins” also includes quantitative and qualitative wins. First, we will address our quantitative “wins” by providing you with our service statistics. The following graph represents the number of students that utilize their accommodations per semester.

The number of students that utilize our services every semester is consistently increasing. It is the norm that every year we have around 150 -200 students registered with OSAT, but they choose not to utilize their accommodation. We still reach out to those students to remind them that their accommodation is still available to them. Sometimes students just want to have the option of accommodations in case their disability flares up. This summer semester we had a higher-than-normal number of students taking summer classes and utilizing their accommodations. OSAT conducted a major campaign of reach out to the students to remind them to utilize their accommodation every semester and especially the summer semester. The results of OSAT’s outreach campaigns reflect in our statistics. 

Below are other interesting facts about the students we serve, the accommodation we provide and our caseload.

Top 5 Disabilities:

• ADHD
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Autism
• Other Mental Health Disability

Top 5 Accommodations:

• Extended Test Time
• Private Testing Environment
• Recorded Lecture
• Flexible assignment due dates
• Formula/Crib sheet for testing

Number Of Accommodation Letters Sent to Faculty:

• 6648 letters

Average Number of Courses Per Student:

• 3.67

Caseload 

• The average caseload is two hundred students per Access Coach

Number of Hours of ASL Interpreting Service Provided

• The total number of ASL Interpreting Services hours was 743.

Proctored Testing 

Our facility has proctored a total of 6,525 exams during the time of this annual report. The total number of unique students is 2,673. The total of unique exams is 970. The total number of exams accommodated is 4,307. The average number of completed exams per day is nineteen. The average number of no-show exams per day is two. The average registration turnaround is 114 hours. OSAT reported Fifteen integrity reports to Student Conduct and Community Standards to investigate. We can proctor over one hundred testers per day during midterms and finals.

The following table shows the number of completed, scheduled, and no-show appointments made by testers from June 2024 – July 2025. These testers vary between all WSU students and community members.

Total Number of Proctored Exams

Challenges and Opportunities 

At OSAT our challenges become our opportunities. Just as it is for students with disabilities their challenges can become their opportunity. The following is a list of our challenges and how we made them our opportunities. It is like the saying goes” if you have lemons make lemonade.” 

Early Connections

Attending Discover Wichita State -Admission Events is how OSAT addressed the challenge of connecting with students earlier rather than waiting until they are at our door. 

For the past five years, a representative from our office—has regularly attended Wichita State’s admission events in various cities. These events have yielded consistently positive outcomes for both our office and prospective students. Each academic year, we receive direct communication from students and parents who attended these events, often expressing appreciation for the information provided regarding disability documentation requirements and available accommodations. Students have shared that this early connection helped them feel more prepared and confident about transitioning to college. Students have even cited the information they received at these events as a contributing factor in their decision to attend Wichita State University.

Retention

One of the challenges for OSAT is the retention of students with disabilities. OSAT fall 2023 cohort to fall 2024 has the following retention rate of fall-to-spring 90.3% and fall-to-fall 69.4%. 

One of the retention programs that OSAT has been active with is Resource 2 Success (R2S) established in 2023, Resource 2 Success is dedicated to supporting incoming students within the WSU community by providing them with the technological resources required for them to successfully graduate from WSU. The primary initiative involves partnering with on-campus organizations to identify and supply qualified students with laptops/Chromebooks as well as technical support for the devices. Through R2S, OSAT connected with fourteen qualified OSAT students during the period of this annual report and provided fourteen students with a laptop.
 
The following was an email response from one of the OSAT students that received a laptop through R2S:

I am writing to extend my deepest gratitude to you and the OSAT program. As a student with physical challenges, I am incredibly grateful for the support your program provides to individuals like myself. The laptop computer your organization has generously provided is truly invaluable to me and will significantly help me in achieving my educational goals.

I would also like to ask you to pass along my thanks to the R2S group for their generous contribution to making this grant possible. Their support is profoundly impacting my ability to succeed, and I am deeply appreciative of their commitment to students in need.

With this new tool, I am more determined than ever to succeed academically, and I will always remember the role OSAT and R2S have played in making that possible.

Thank you again for your time, your generosity, and your dedication to students like myself. I wish you an excellent day ahead!

The above student will be a junior in the fall of 2025, and the student is registered for fall 2025 classes. 

Graduation

The following chart shows the number of OSAT graduates within the colleges for fall 2024 and spring 2025 that utilized their accommodation while attending Wichita State University. 

College of Liberal Arts and Science

Sciences/Bachelors - Total 52 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
A23A Psychology
A12A Biological Sciences BS
A18A History
A39A Criminal Justice
A14A Engl Language and Literature
A14B English-Creative Writing
A22A Political Science
A13M Chemistry Pre-Medicine
A39D Homeland Security
A32K General Studies Communication
A26R Modern and Classical Languages
A12K General Studies Biology
A12Q Field Major Biology
A28A Anthropology
A27K General Studies Sociology
A32I Journalism & Media Production
A32M Communication Studies
A42K General Studies Social Work
A53K General Studies Anthropology
A21A Physics BS
A32N Communication-Open Emphasis
A32U Commun-Integrated Marketing
A40K Genl Studies Music Composition
A42A Social Work
A42K General Studies Social Work

College of Engineering - Total 25 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
E11B Aerospace Engineering
E14C Mechanical Engineering
E18B Biomedical Engineering
E17A Computer Engineering
E19A Engineering Technology
E15D Prod Design & Mfg. Engineering
E31A Computer Science BS
E21A Applied Computing
E19B Applied Engineering
E22A Cybersecurity

College of Health Professions - Total 13 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
H11A Nursing
H12E Dental Hygiene
H28H Health Science
H15A Medical Laboratory Sciences
H30A Commun Sciences and Disorders
H11D Nursing-Accelerated BSN

College of Applied Studies – Total 17 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
D21X ECU/Elementary Educ Apprentice
D21A Elementary Education
D20B Early Childhood Unified
D13Q Org Leadership & Learning
D13U Org Leadership & Learning
D22S Earth and Space Science 6-12
D13R Sport Management
D13M Exercise Science
D23F PreK-12 French
D22H History and Government 6-12

College of Fine Arts - Total 20 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
F18A Art Emphasis
F30J Performing Arts BFA
F30L Performing Arts
F16F Art - Studio Art 
F32A Music Performance-Voice
F32I MP - Jazz & Contemporary Media
F17A Graphic Design
F50A Media Arts
F16E Art Education Emphasis PK-12
F23D PK-12 Music-Special Music Ed

W. Frank Barton School of Business - Total 23 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
B12D Finance
B12M Entrepreneurship
B16D Marketing-Real Estate
B12G Marketing
B12X Management
B12L Business Administration
B12R Human Resource Management
B12F Management
B15B Info Tech & Mgmt. Infor Systems
B11A Accounting
B12N Human Resource Management
B13A Economics

Graduate College – Total 30 OSAT Graduates in the following majors:

Major
G15Z Physician Associate - Masters
G20W Criminal Justice - Masters
G32G Mgmt. Sci & Supply Chain Mgmt. - Masters
G14S Social Work - Masters
G20G English - Masters
G20K Communication - Masters
G21K Communication Sci and Disorders - Masters
G17M Counseling - Masters
G17F Educational Psychology - Masters
G18C Special Educ - Low Incidence -Masters
G18D Special Educ-High Inc Alt Cert - Masters
G16B Music Performance- Masters
G12J School Psychology (BA to Ed S) - Specialist Post- Masters
G11W Nursing Practice MSN to DNP - Doctoral
G11F Physical Therapy - Doctoral

Student Satisfaction Survey

The following are responses from the most recent student satisfaction survey, and it is a fitting example of qualitative data on how we help our students with disabilities obtain an education.

The survey question, “Do you have any additional feedback about the services provided by OSAT?”

“I received great service! It has minimized my anxiety already”

Mr. Greg Gegen has been outstanding, getting all of my information in place and helping me feel settled in WSU. I appreciate his encouragement and support!

The survey question, “What has been the most helpful part about being registered with the Office of Student Accommodations and Testing?”

“Being accepted”

“Feeling like I will have support when and if needed.

“Have a private testing room and have more time to take my test”

“I was surprised to be able to receive a new laptop to help with my studies. This was a wonderful blessing, and I cannot express my gratitude for the OSAT program helping to provide this support.”

“It has been immensely helpful with my ability to talk to professors to communicate my needs so I can do well (as well as the accommodations improving my scores so much) but it also has helped me to feel confident in my academics.”

“Knowing that a team of people who are sensitive to and accepting of my disabilities and accommodations has been the key component to utilizing the OSAT. When anything goes awry, I know I can contact them and expect thoughtful suggestions for dealing with my issues.”

“Provides sound of mind.”

“The most helpful part is to know there is an office who can assist with someone who has anxiety over taking long math-related tests.”

“The reassurance that I have accommodations when I need them are very helpful.”