Recently, two visually-impaired students, Sun Jingrui and Xu Yun, from the School for the Disabled of the Open University of China (OUC), passed their degree-conferral English examination with scores of 86 and 79 (out of 100) respectively. This was the first attempt of the School to provide test services to students with visual impairments, with strong support from the OUC headquarters and Shenzhen Open University (Shenzhen OU).

Sun Jingrui and Xu Yun are from the School’s tutorial centre at the Guangzhou Disabled Persons’ Federation, and traveled to Shenzhen (a city near Guanghzou) to take the examination and qualify for bachelor degrees. Shenzhen OU leadership attached great importance to this, and made detailed arrangements for the examination, including paper management, a special test room, installment and debugging of screen-reader software, security, and so on, to ensure that it would proceed smoothly.

The students during the examination

The content of the test papers was the same as for other OUC students, with adjustments relevant to their situations, such as the time permitted and the use of screen-reader software. Reading was the most difficult part of the test for these students, since they had to rely on the software to read it out loud. Nevertheless, they overcame the difficulties, and achieved good scores. Both are deeply grateful for the help of their universities, and their positive attitudes and hard work will inspire other disabled students to make similar efforts.

The happiness of disabled students has been enhanced by the fact that their long-standing difficulties taking degree-conferral English examinations have been dealt with.

By OUC School for Disabled Students