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UGA Logo TEXT-ONLY VERSION THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA DIVISION OF STUDENT AFFAIRS DISABILITY RESOURCE CENTER

Eligibility for Students with Learning Disabilities

Certain criteria must be met in order for a student to receive appropriate accommodations for a learning disability. Students are expected to self-identify and present appropriate documentation to the Disability Resource Center. Secondary education eligibility reports, individualized education plans, and a history of receipt of special education services are not sufficient documentation for college-level accommodations. However, such information could be included within any comprehensive evaluation.

Criteria

Psycho-educational Components

  1. Intelligence. Average intellectual abilities should be defined as the students best verbal or nonverbal scores, or best fluid or crystallized domain scores on a standardized global measure of intelligence. A standard score of 90 or above will be considered in the average range.
  2. Achievement. Assessment in the following areas is required:
    1. Reading (decoding, rate, and comprehension)
    2. Mathematics (calculations, reasoning, and algebra)
    3. Written language (spelling, written expression, mechanics)
    To be considered an area of academic deficit, a student's individually administered standardized achievement test results must fall at least one standardized deviation below the student's intellectual abilities, or a standard deviation below the student's other academic abilities as assessed by the same measures.
  3. Cognitive Processing. There must be evidence of correlated cognitive processing strengths and deficits identified on measures other than those used to obtain the global IQ score. Processing deficits and strengths must be evident on multiple measures and not based on a single discrepant score on an individual test or subtest. Cognitive processing must be identified in one or more of the following areas:
    • Attention
    • Oral language
    • Phonological/Orthographic Processing
    • Fluency/Automaticity
    • Memory/Learning (Working Memory, Long Term Memory, and/or Short Term Memory)
    • Executive Functions
    • Visual-Perceptual/Visual-Spatial
    • Visual-Motor
  4. Social-Emotional. Formal assessment instruments and/or clinical interview are appropriate.

Suggested Assessment Measures