Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am writing to formally appeal the grade assigned to my POLS 312 term paper. I respectfully submit that the final grade does not accurately reflect the quality of the work in relation to the course rubric and that elements of the evaluation were applied in a manner inconsistent with the stated assignment guidelines. I attempted informal resolution with the instructor; however, the concerns outlined below were not substantively reconsidered.
The assignment guidelines did not specify a required citation format. I cited the paper using the Chicago Notes–Bibliography system, which is a recognized and standard citation format commonly used in political science. I have used this format many times throughout my degree without an issue. Despite this, my citations were dismissed as incorrect and a 10-point deduction was applied. During the informal reconsideration, I clarified that the paper followed the Chicago Notes–Bibliography format and that I had verified the citations against the Chicago Manual of Style. However, this clarification was not substantively reviewed or verified, and the citation assessment remained unchanged. In the absence of a specified citation requirement, penalizing the use of a recognized and consistently applied citation system represents a misapplication of evaluation criteria. Given the weight of the deduction, this issue had a substantial impact on the final grade.
A further concern relates to the evaluation of my analytical approach, particularly the use of pre-2024 data, including material from earlier electoral cycles. From my understanding during the informal reconsideration, the expectation was that the analysis focus on a single election in isolation. While such an approach may be appropriate in some electoral contexts, it is not well suited to the South African case, where electoral outcomes are the product of long-term political and behavioural processes rather than discrete electoral shocks.
The African National Congress’s loss of its parliamentary majority in 2024 represents the culmination of a slow and steady decline in support over multiple decades, driven by persistent governance failures, socioeconomic frustration, and shifting patterns of voter engagement. The use of pre-2024 data was therefore essential to demonstrate how these longitudinal dynamics shaped voter behaviour and ultimately produced the 2024 outcome. Earlier electoral and socioeconomic indicators were used to trace the erosion of partisan loyalty and the normalization of voter withdrawal and fragmentation that became electorally decisive in 2024.
In this context, voter behaviour in 2024 did not emerge suddenly or independently of prior conditions. Rather, it reflected entrenched trends that unfolded over successive election cycles. The course rubric emphasizes analytical reasoning and the effective use of evidence to explain political outcomes; the inclusion of pre-2024 data strengthened my analysis by situating the 2024 election within the broader trajectory that made the ANC’s loss of its majority possible. I am therefore concerned that this methodological choice was undervalued in the final assessment.
In class, it was indicated that the paper should include approximately three pages of background, and my paper followed this guidance. All background material discussed developments that occurred or intensified between the previous national election in 2019 and the 2024 election. The background was therefore temporally proximate to the electoral outcome under analysis.
The inclusion of material conditions such as the COVID-19 period, food insecurity, load shedding, and rising social tensions was not intended as irrelevant or excessive background, but as necessary analytical context for understanding the 2024 result. These conditions were used to explain how lived experiences of governance shaped voter behaviour and evaluations of the state in the lead-up to the election.
This approach reflects the specific nature of the South African case. Unlike electoral contexts where outcomes are heavily influenced by changing candidates or short-term campaign dynamics, South Africa is a post-liberation democracy in which the same governing party has held power for three decades. In this context, electoral change is driven less by candidate turnover than by cumulative material conditions and public assessments of governance over time. The background was therefore essential to explaining why the 2024 election produced a historic shift, rather than treating that outcome as isolated from the conditions that made it possible.
Prior to writing the paper, I submitted a proposal outlining my intended analytical approach to South Africa’s 2024 election. In the proposal, I explicitly stated that the analysis would situate electoral outcomes within South Africa’s historical and social context, noting that “the country’s legacy of apartheid and its highly diverse ethnic composition, including Afrikaans, Zulu, English, and Coloured communities, make it a relevant case for studying identity politics and how they interact with electoral change.” This proposal was assessed on a pass/fail basis and approved. I therefore structured the final paper in reliance on this approved framework, integrating historical context and identity dynamics with course theories to explain electoral change in 2024. I am concerned that elements of this approach were later treated as deficiencies in the final assessment, despite having been clearly articulated and accepted at the proposal stage.
In my proposal, I indicated that I would use the course reading on affective experience habituation to analyze voter behaviour in South Africa, and this approach was approved. In the final paper, the framework was applied to explain how repeated electoral experiences since 1994 conditioned voter expectations and emotional responses over time, shaping patterns of disengagement and political behaviour that culminated in the 2024 election. During the informal reconsideration, this application was characterized as explaining “behaviour from 1994.” This does not reflect how the framework was used in my analysis. The theory was not employed to analyze behaviour in 1994 itself, but rather to trace a longitudinal process through which earlier experiences informed and produced the behaviour observed in 2024. I am therefore concerned that this component of the paper was evaluated on the basis of a mischaracterization of its analytical and temporal focus rather than on its substantive contribution to explaining the 2024 outcome.
A further concern relates to the relevance of attendance in the evaluation of my written assignment. My absences during the term were limited to a two-week period and were communicated to the instructor at the time they occurred, including the reasons for those absences, which involved bereavement and the absence of a local support system following the sudden death of a close friend. These circumstances have since been documented and submitted for retroactive Academic Consideration via email. Despite this, attendance was referenced during the informal reconsideration in relation to my performance on the term paper. Attendance is not listed among the assessment criteria for this assignment, nor does it bear a clear relationship to the evaluation of a written paper submitted independently of in-class participation. In this context, invoking attendance introduces an extraneous consideration into the grading process that is not grounded in the stated rubric or assignment guidelines.

(Sorry for exceeding 800 words, there is a lot to this appeal)