Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

My name is Madeleine Hoskins and I am writing to appeal my final grades in Sociology 309 and Sociology 389. In summary, the reasons for my appeal are 1) inconsistent marking practices between TAs and between courses and 2) unreliability of TA generated feedback as the work was in progress with wrong advice given with regard to referencing and general style. The marks for my essays in Sociology 309 neither were a fair reflection of the amount of work I put in nor were they fair assessments given the assignment questions and the marking rubric that were given at the initiation of the project. This was also the case in my final exam for Sociology 389. In my other courses with similar demands, my marks were much more reflective of my work and effort. Some of my best work was for my sociology 309 class but yet these were some of the lowest grades I have received at Queen¿¿s. There are no rational explanations for these discrepancies in marks as I began to work even harder after receiving a poor initial grade and began to seek more TA and professor driven advice for sociology 309. I have become aware that there was a deliberate policy to keep the average for the class low. This matters because I am applying for medical school and have to compete with fact based, non-subjective disciplines i.e. biology and chemistry. The minimum average that I need to get for medical school is a 3.6 , which I had until I took these two courses with their differential marking, inaccurate feedback that did not reflect what was asked, and discrepancies between the actual TAs marking and marking style. Further details on my reasons for appealing both of the courses are found in the following paragraphs.

In regards to Sociology 309, I am asking to appeal my first assignment, the movie review, and my final paper worth 50 of my grade. For my first assignment, we were told that in order to receive a high grade we should include around ten sources. I included nine sources in this paper on the movie Eagle Eye and related it to modern day surveillance practices. As a result, my paper was not solely focused on the movie but instead focused on aspects of the film, surveillance methods and how this film can be seen to be an accurate representation of modern day surveillance practices and theories. Before writing this paper, I met with Professor Murakami Wood to discuss my ideas and how I should go about executing them. When I received my mark back for this paper I was extremely disappointed and confused. I then went to go see the TA who had marked my paper as I was not satisfied with her feedback on Moodle and wanted to understand how I should go about approaching our other assignments for this class. When I went to see this TA, Colby Pereira, she told me that after reading my paper for the second time, she thought that she actually had given me a B- and not a C+. I then talked to the professor about this discrepancy. When the professor subsequently asked Colby about it, she denied telling me that she thought she had given me a different mark. In this same first meeting, Colby had also told me that after my explaining to her why I wrote the paper in the way that I had that she now understood why. She also pointed out sections of my paper that she had really enjoyed. These sections were in fact the areas that according to her original critique I should have changed. An example of this can be seen in her comment on my section on Big Brother. On Moodle she commented that this section should have been condensed down to one or two sentences, whereas in person she told me she really enjoyed my section on Big Brother and that it was well done. After this assignment, I began to go to Colby¿¿s office hours on a regular basis and went also to see the professor to discuss my ideas and writing style and get feedback ahead of writing and submitting my assignment. My final paper was marked by the other TA and one of the comments was that my referencing was not accurate. I had gone to see Colby about this, as I was struggling with finding resources on how to accurately cite government pieces of legislation and articles without dates, locations and author¿¿s i.e. The Economist and U.S government policy positions. She looked at my paper and told me that what I had written looked fine and to leave it as is. I am frustrated with this course because we never knew who was marking our assignments, what their style of marking was, if they were accurately following a marking rubric and, as it turns out, their marking was highly subjective. I found that the TAs had very different marking styles and that the questions asked in our assignment outlines did not help predict the TAs marking. The outlines were far too general for the way in which they were marking our work. This course did not provide enough concrete guidance as to what truly was required of us, resulting in there being a high level of discrepancy between what the professor had asked and what the TAs were looking for in practice. I believe the work that I produced for this course was graded unfairly. Further compounding the problem was that students were not told who was marking their work and thus were unable to tailor their work to the TAs subjective preferences. This is exemplified in my final paper, whereby I met with Colby numerous times to discuss my paper and its execution and yet the final paper was graded by the other TA who I had never met or conversed with.

I am also appealing my final exam worth 65 of my grade for Sociology 389 with Dr. Fiona Kay as there was a discrepancy between what was asked in the exam questions and the marking rubric that was given to the TAs. It was a three hour exam and I answered the questions specifically and fully. This took me one and a half hours as I knew everything that was asked. I could of answered the questions more extensively (as it turns out the marking rubric was looking for) but did not because of both the page limit and the way the questions were phrased, which did not give any indication of these extra concepts. I am aware of this because I contacted one of the TAs from this course when I received my final grade in order to understand what I did wrong. In class, Dr. Kay told us that each short answer section should be about half a page to a page long. This did not provide students with very much room to answer the questions. I did my best to answer what was asked of us on the exam while keeping to the page limit. One of the examples the TA brought up with me had to do with the short answer question about the conceptual diagram of power control theory. The question asked us to draw the diagram and list four factors that were not included when this diagram was made, this is what I did. The TA then told me that they were told that we were supposed to have explained the diagram and how these four factors would contribute to future crime research. I would have done this if the exam question had told us to expand or elaborate on these ideas, but it did not. I believe that this exam was not accurately marked because the questions asked on the exam did not reflect the grading rubric that was given to the TAs. I had thoroughly studied for this exam and was fully prepared to expand up these ideas if it was asked of us. On leaving the exam I believed that I would receive a grade within the A range as I had known and was able to answer all of the question as written on the final.


Thank you for considering my appeal.


Madeleine Hoskins
10042188