What can I do for my autistic college classmate?

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I have been attending college for teaching for the past year. I met an autistic girl who is going for a medical secretary degree or something similar. She has flunked basic math twice now. She is very upset because she may not be allowed to take it again due to the school's academic standard. She had a tutor but I wonder if he could really help her or if she simply cannot learn the stuff. She is very distraught; hand-flapping, crying and carrying on at the college but she is so determined to continue and reach her goal. I do not know what her capabilities are but she doesn't strike me as someone who must be a janitor for the rest of her life and she has passed other courses with B's and C's.
I wonder if there's anything that can be done? Can she get special help? Can she get training for the medical field somewhere else and recieve better accomodations?
Does anyone here have any advice? Where should she go for information?

Maybe she should work on getting the hand-flapping and crying under control if she wants to pursue college. I don't think anybody would want to have someone like that working for them, I sure wouldn't...

The school is required to provide her assistance if she has a known disability. I'm not sure if it's the ADA (American's with Disability) or the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) that applies, or both of them, but schools, especially public schools, are supposed to make reasonable accomodations. For someone who is autistic spectrum, that might be providing a quiet classroom to take test, special tutors, someone to take notes in classes, longer to complete assignments, scheduled meetings with the instructors....there's a wide variety of accomodations depending upon what's going on with the person with the disability.
That being said, your question is "what can I do". First, Aspies tend to dwell on the negative and when something bad happens it's "piggybacked" on all the other stuff bad that's happened. Could be in their life, could be the last week. Since they tend to see things as fairly black and white, bad is bad, there's not a ton of "degrees" of bad. And it comes in a bit of a wave often, completely overwhelming them. What you can do is what I call "help them see gray". Remind her of the good things, praise her accomplishments, big and little. If there's something you know about that's specific to math, that would even be better. For my son, this would include lots of hugs to get him to the point where he could pay attention to me. For others, this would be torture. Maybe asking her if she'd like a hug (if you're comfortable with that.)
When she calms down, help her make a plan. The more details and the more specific you can get, the more it will help her, both the procedure (getting help from the school) and the substantive (the math). For example: Call right now and get an appt. with xxx. Call tomorrow morning and get a note from your doctor proving you have autism. Tomorrow between class x and y, spend the entire hour reviewing pages 4-12 in a quiet cube in the library. As you move into problem solving mode, try to elicit suggestions from her......"do you study better when it's really quiet, or do you need background noise" "when you did homework in highschool what tricks worked for you to get things done" To get as far as she has, she will have problem solving skills, she'll just need reminding of it AND that it applies now. (My DS often will "know" but not know how and when to "apply" that knowledge.)
You're a really good friend for wanting to help. Help her help herself and then praise her for doing so! Best of luck!

I had the same problem in college and university. I couldn't do the math. I never got less than a B+ in all other areas, but the math was impossible. I have a diagnosed learning disability in mathematics. I also have some other issues that made post-secondary quite a struggle. I always claim that if I had it to do over again, rather than taking an alternate path, I would file a human rights claim against the school based on their refusal to accommodate my disabilities in their programs. I never filed any such complaint, but I often wonder what would have happened if I had.

What I found instead was that there were alternate paths. There are many schools now that allow self designed programs. You can actually create your own program so that you can work with your strengths instead of failing because of your deficits. It might be that your friend has to take this alternate path or something similar.

I don't know what courses are required for medical secretary. If she could specialize in the areas where she has strengths, and enhance that aspect of her training through taking some extra higher level courses in a self designed learning program that the regular program she is in now doesn't include, then, even though she doesn't have the math component, she could come out with a degree that could be very useful. There are various schools held in high regard that offer these self-designed programs. Your friend could transfer the credits she has gained to a new program or school where her "uneven cognitive profile" could be an asset rather than a problem.

Over the years I learned alot about all the various options, so if your friend needs any specific advice I would be glad to offer more information. You could pm me if you want.

Thanks, everyone, for your input. I asked her if she took the tests in a different room or in the regular class and if she recieved any special help. Aside from tutoring, she has had the same treatment that all of the regular students have had. She said that the problem with math is that she can't translate it into writing. Evidently, something happens between the mental processing and the written component. I asked her if she was labelled with a learning disability but she said wasn't. As I talked to her about her high school classes, I learned that she was in special ed.! I'm not sure she's fully "in the know" about her own condition or if she tries to deny it but she needs alot more guidance than she is getting.
She made decent grades in other classes so it seems a shame to see her educational goals come to an end because of basic math.
I think I'll talk to the college Dean and find out what can be done. Maybe I can work with her. She could contact her high school counselor and get some direction. I don't know how much her parents are helping her, either. I wonder is there's a state organization that could help.

For some reason, in Math, i always get A's nowadays and I do great in them, my English classes and others, are usually B's and C's. Each class requires different forms of study methods. English requires you to learn how to follow directions clearly, being super organized, understanding what your teacher expects you to do and not missing little details. Math requires you to understand numerical concepts and in order to do well in them, you should do things repetitively till you nail them down perfectly. For multiple choice questioned tests I have in class, I would need to use flash cards. I am finally understanding to handle school for the 1st time in my life and it can be tricky. You need to do a lot of explorating in order to understand what study methods are required for each of your classes.

you know there is such things as special needs collages. look it up