Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter:
To whom it may concern, I'm writing a petition on behalf of dropping a course from my winter semester of 2022. I, unfortunately, did not pass Phil275 and am now facing the consequences as it has affected my GPA drastically. I require at least a 1.9 GPA to be in the honours program which is why I'm writing this petition as it is part of my plan to graduate with the honors degree. Throughout my three years at Queens, I have yet to lessen my workload while still attending and taking the required honors courses. I have of course fallen on some hard times as a student especially with this class, as I found this class extremely difficult to manage during such a difficult time in my life. In December of 2020 my first year as a Queen's student, I faced a life-threatening accident in my residence room that consisted of me choking on my food to the point of passing out whilst hitting my head in the process. Luckily enough, I somehow managed to retrieve this food with any last effort I had. Of course, due to the accident, I immediately did not want to eat food anymore as simple tasks such as fuelling my body had been extremely traumatic. Throughout this journey, I have faced extreme PTSD and been diagnosed with panic/anxiety disorder as well as depression. This year has been extremely debilitating for me and it's apparent within my performance. Why this is so relevant to my Phil275 course is because closer to the winter season I started to feel my paranoia start to resurface as I was approaching the one-year anniversary of this event. At the time I had been struggling to complete many tasks in the class as I felt the work to be overbearing at times as I was not able to eat once again nor leave the house to attend class or my job on campus. As for the work, I was submitting genuinely to the best of my capability as I had no motivation and was stuck in a long-term anxiety episode. My performance during this time with my other classes had also been affected by my mental state but not quite like this one as the work felt like non-stop and I simply couldn't keep up at the rate I was feeling at the time. Since then I have been working very hard at rebuilding my GPA, which I believe can be seen in this last year. I'm not sure what dropping this course would do for my GPA but I know it would help get me closer to a 1.9 as well as taking summer school in order to help boost it. During this time I have worked closely with my psychotherapist in regulating my emotions, anxiety and paranoia through much needed and consistent therapy sessions. I feel like I've grown from my Circumstances and I believe I've shown a great amount of effort and dedication to staying on this path, whether it be still taking honours classes when not needed to or Simply exercising options such as this petition and summer school could possibly help with getting on the right track.