SPOTLIGHT: Meet the visually impaired Ghanaian who aced GRE test

Kwame Donaldson was diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 8. The Ghanaian young man lived with partial blindness until 20 when he lost his sight completely.

He began an arduous journey through a grey world of the unknown, with no sight but only a monotonous rush of airwaves and sounds that he could not put faces to. Aside from losing his ability to see, his prized affinity for Mathematics started leaving him at inchmeal until he acquiesced and was compelled to accept a new path, different from the one he had envisioned.

When he finally decided to go to the university in 2018, Donaldson, relishing in nostalgia, told TheCable Lifestyle he came to embrace his condition of being visually impaired after eight years of struggles. “It is not like I have some talent and I’m going to become a footballer in life, so I had to jump right back to school,” he says.

But there were hurdles. Some he knew existed, but many others, he could, of course, not see. Like at the university, he had to settle for Philosophy and Political Science, because the institution did not have provision for visually impaired students to take maths-related courses. 

“I wanted to do business but I could not do it because the university did not have the facilities. Visually impaired people do not do maths-related courses,” says Kwame. 

But he had other thoughts in mind: “I just did that with the mindset that I could do whatever I wanted to do outside the course for masters or my postgrad. I decided to do it and do it well,” he adds.

KWAME’S GRE JOURNEY: FROM TWITTER TO MAGOOSH

When Glaucoma stole his sight at a young age, he thought he had lost his ability to do what he loved the most; solving mathematical problems.

Back at Awutu-Breku, his small hometown, when his eyes were partially functional, with the help of magnifiers, he could still solve math questions for hours. While kids in his class took to creative writing, others teamed up at the science laboratories. 

But it was quite unfortunate that he had to drop the magnifiers after losing his ability to see. Things rapidly deteriorated at some point and he could barely solve or learn some aspects of his favourite subject even with the help of basic assistive devices.

“I had not learned math since age 10. When I was in primary school, I kept going but I was not able to do some aspects of math like graphs, diagrams, and construction,” he says while speaking of his fondness for Maths.

“In JSS, I remember I could not do the construction of graphs or anything with figures and diagrams. if anything, I was just doing word problems or basic algebra.”

In 2019 – the second year of his study at the University of Ghana, he stumbled upon a piece of information that illuminated his vision. It was on Twitter that he found out about the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

GRE is a standardised test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada. The test aims to measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing and critical writing skills of test takers.

The content of the GRE consists of certain specific data analysis, arguments and reasoning, algebra, geometry, arithmetic and vocabulary sections. The overall testing time is about 3 hours and 45 minutes and there are six sections with a 10-minute break. On scores, the GRE verbal and quantitative sections are each scored on a scale of 130-170.

“There was this lady on Twitter, who held a space on GRE and talked a lot about it. She made me very interested. I knew I was going to try and do an MBA after school if I had the resources to aid me. I knew I was going to do it outside my country if I could,” he says.

Picking cues from the lady, who is also from Ghana, Kwame embarked on a personal research into the global test in 2020 and he soon found out that the journey was going to be daunting. At one point, he sensed the difficulty in passing the test but yet he did not stop progressing, learning and asking for help when necessary.

“I started going through the materials to see if it was feasible and something I could do. So I started with the quantitative part. ETS, the company that administers the test, actually made some math review materials accessible to visually impaired people,” he says.

After convincing himself that he could achieve his aim, he began the second phase of his plan. By December 2021, he started looking for third-party materials that could help him prepare well considering that he had not done Math-related subjects since childhood.

“The materials on the ETS website weren’t enough. So I started looking for third-party materials. I searched everywhere on the internet for third-party companies like Magoosh, Manhattan, and Princeton for instance but none of them had solutions for us (visually impaired),” he says.

Kwame realised he was not alone in the muddle; some other PWDs in the United States and European countries had also taken to X to complain about how non-inclusive the process of writing the examination was. He says: “So people abandon their dreams of writing. I read a lot on Twitter from visually impaired people who also looked everywhere and couldn’t get resources to do it.”

Kwame said he could do away with all other materials but the Magoosh practice tests were indispensable and he felt he could not pass without them, so how did he circumvent this handicap?

AI TO THE RESCUE AS KWAME FOUND HELP THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

Kwame’s preparation became intense and he found help in Seeing AI, an artificial intelligence application developed by Microsoft that uses a device camera to identify people and objects. The app audibly describes those objects for people with visual impairment.

“When I play a video, the first thing I’d do is take a screenshot when a new question is on the screen and then transfer it to my phone. So, if I see anything online if I see a picture which has text in it, I will screenshot it and send it to the Seeing AI app. It will extract the text from the picture and read it to me,” he says while narrating his two-and-a-half-year journey of preparation for the test in November 2023.

Diagrams in geometry, fractions and exponents were still problems because the application could not describe diagrams to him at the time. So, he had to turn to family and friends both offline and online. He spoke graciously of a particularly close friend, with whom he got creative.

Sometimes – and it happened frequently – when it became difficult to understand diagrams, his close friend would draw the different kinds of diagrams on his back, one shape after another, so he could feel them and mentally follow how the lines were drawn, straightened to form a parallelogram or sharply curved to complete a hexagon.

“Some of the geometry was very complicated. So, if he cannot describe it straight up, he would draw it on my bare back for me to feel it. It was not easy because I would have to write it down when he is done for future reference,” he says.

Coming from an average family in the suburban part of Ghana did not help matters as the cost of registration for the examination was above $200. But Kwame, a fervent social media user, enjoyed the perks of mentorship from the Michael Taiwo Scholarship, a not-for-profit organisation that covers the cost of examinations for bright and financially incapable students from developing countries like Ghana and Nigeria.

Speaking with TheCable Lifestyle, Michael Taiwo, the founder of the private scholarship board, said “we ensured that Educational Testing Services (ETS) was aware of his challenges and provided him with the necessary accommodation such as extra time on his test”.

On November 30, when he was about to write the exam, he faced another challenge; he had to settle for a paper-based test instead of the standard computer-based test (CBT), but he was not deterred. Kwame had already gotten to the threshold, all he had to do was enter and write the test.

When the result came out on December 20, Kwame triumphed, scoring 166 in quantitative reasoning and 155 in verbal reasoning. He scored 321 out of the 340 total GRE scores despite being visually impaired.

With an ecstatic voice, he told TCL what the future holds for him and his plans to apply to Columbia, NYE Stern, Stanford and Cornell business schools — all in the United States of America (USA).

“I think everything is about the mind you have to set your mind to it. Put enough determination and focus, and you will be able to do it,” Kwame adds.