Matthew Brittingham is an academic advisor who also coordinates all accommodated testing for Oxford College of Emory University. For years, the office had access to Accommodate but barely used it. When they finally dug in, finals week went from chaos to a streamlined operation, and the results were striking enough that the main Atlanta campus took notice. 👀
A Platform They Had But Didn't Really Use
Oxford College of Emory University is a small, liberal arts-focused two-year campus about an hour outside of Atlanta. It operates with a smaller staff, smaller class sizes, and a more close-knit community than the main Emory campus. It's also, by design, a place where people wear multiple hats.
Matthew Brittingham wears two of the bigger ones. His primary role is academic advisor, but he also coordinates all accommodated testing for the campus, a responsibility that, at larger institutions, often belongs to a dedicated full-time hire. At Oxford, it lands on Matthew.
For the first stretch of his time in the role, Accommodate was technically available but functionally underutilized. The Department of Accessibility Services used it primarily as an information repository. Students submitted documentation, letters went out to faculty, and that was roughly where the system's involvement ended. For the actual work of managing accommodated testing, Matthew's team was relying on a patchwork of forms, spreadsheets, and a lot of back-and-forth email.
"It was hectic. It was really hard to keep everything aligned."
Finals, in particular, were brutal.
The Moment Everything Changed
About a year into his role, Matthew's team started asking a simple question: could they be doing this better? They surveyed their accommodated testing process, talked to other Accommodate users, and discovered something that, in hindsight, seems obvious but hadn't been on their radar at all.
Accommodate could manage the entire testing process, not just house documentation.
"That was like a revelation to us," Matthew says. "Which again is no fault of Accommodate's, but has more to do with the fact that we'd had some turnover at our Department of Accessibility Services, and nobody had really told us like, 'Oh yeah, you could also use this for other stuff.'"
Once they knew, they got to work. They connected with their Client Manager and started building out the testing infrastructure: exam rooms, scheduling workflows, finals logistics. Everything they had been doing manually started moving into the system.
The results came quickly.
50% Less Time. Two to Three Staff Members Worth of Capacity.
Matthew doesn't hedge when asked how much time the shift has saved.
"It's probably cut down the amount of time that the whole thing takes by 50%, to be honest with you."
And that time savings compounds. Because Matthew's role is primarily academic advising, every hour he was spending on testing coordination was an hour he wasn't spending on students. The efficiency gains from Accommodate didn't just make testing easier. They gave him his other job back.
"It allows me to focus on other aspects of my duties and job that are equally as important but are also very necessary to get done."
When pressed on what that looks like in terms of staffing, his estimate is striking: the platform effectively does the work of two to three additional staff members, spread across the various tasks that used to require human coordination.
"I hardly have to ask anybody in our office to assist with a variety of different tasks, not just those associated with testing, because I'm able to spend so much less time on the actual back end of things."
Faculty, Students, and Staff All in the Same System
One of the biggest operational shifts wasn't just about time. It was about who owns the process and where information lives.
Before, Matthew's team was manually inputting accommodation information, relying on faculty to relay details correctly, and chasing students down to remind them about upcoming exams. The whole thing operated through a tangle of email threads and Outlook calendar invites that students frequently missed.
Now, students initiate the scheduling process themselves. Faculty upload exams and receive them through the system. Accommodation information pulls directly from where it's already stored, without anyone re-entering it. And a recently added conflict-detection feature flags any scheduling issues between what a student has booked and what a faculty member has submitted.
"It really has put it into the hands of the right people," Matthew says. "And it's also been very student-facing, so students are initiating that process."
That shift in ownership has changed the student experience in ways Matthew finds meaningful. Students who previously felt nudged or reminded into using their accommodations now have more agency over the process. They can log in, see where everything stands, choose which accommodations to apply, and trust that once they've gone through approval, faculty will be automatically notified.
"It's created a process in which they are much more able to have control and command over the process, giving them a lot more responsibility in it. Which usually they respond well to."
Results Noticed Across Campus
The improvements at Oxford College didn't stay quiet. When Matthew and his team started talking about what Accommodate had done for their testing operations, people at the main Emory College of Arts and Sciences campus in Atlanta started paying attention.
That campus runs a significantly higher volume of accommodated exams and has a dedicated staff hire for the function. And yet, after hearing what Oxford had accomplished with a smaller team and a more improvised setup, they began exploring whether they should adopt the testing management features as well.
"We found it to be so successful and so helpful that when we were singing its praises to other people, they were like, 'Maybe we should look into using this.'"
What's Next
Matthew sees more room to grow, particularly around in-system communication. His campus has leaned on email outside the platform for student and faculty outreach, partly because of Oxford's small and close-knit culture. But he's increasingly interested in routing more of that communication through Accommodate itself, both for efficiency and to keep everything in one place.
He's also been following Symplicity's recent product updates with interest. Seemingly small improvements, like the conflict-detection feature, have landed with outsized impact.
"That's such a simple fix, but it actually helps a lot when it's put into play."
For a campus still working through everything the platform can do, the orientation is the same one that produced the original breakthrough: keep asking what else it might be capable of.
"As we're more and more kind of like, 'Oh, I wonder if it can do this thing.' We're trying to figure out what ways we can push its limits a little bit."
For Oxford College, the story started with a platform they weren't fully using and a testing process that was breaking down every finals season. It ended with half the admin time, a student experience built around agency rather than reminders, and a neighboring campus reconsidering its own approach.
Not bad for a feature they didn't know they had!
