Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean (Academic),

I am writing to respectfully petition for a review of the grading decisions for my final assessments in MAPP300: the Holiday at School presentations. I am requesting reconsideration because I believe the work may have been substantially under-evaluated, and because the basis for the grading has not been clearly explained despite my efforts to seek clarification through an informal review with the instructor.
In this term, we had two main presentations, and I received a grade of 67 on both presentations. What concerns me is not simply the grade itself, but the fact that the second presentation received exactly the same mark even though I made a clear and deliberate effort to improve it based on the feedback from the first presentation. After the Autoethnographic Seminar, I carefully reviewed the instructor’s comments and made changes to the PPT content, structure, and presentation approach for the Holiday at School assignment. However, the second presentation received the same score, and I was not given a detailed explanation of why those changes did not affect the outcome.
A central concern in this case is that no detailed grading rubric was provided for these presentations. Without a rubric, I have not been able to determine the criteria by which the work was assessed, the weighting of different components, or the specific reasons why both presentations were graded identically despite revision and improvement. In the absence of a clear marking framework, the grading has appeared highly subjective from my perspective.
As required, I attempted an informal review with the course instructor before pursuing this petition. In my email, I respectfully explained my concerns, including the lack of a rubric, the unchanged grade despite changes made in response to feedback, and my difficulty understanding the basis for the evaluation. However, the response I received did not address these specific concerns. Instead, it was brief and did not clarify the grading criteria or explain how the work had been assessed. As a result, the informal review process did not resolve the issue or help me understand the justification for the grades.
I recognise that oral group presentations can be more difficult to review than written assignments. However, I am submitting the relevant materials that are available for reconsideration, including the presentation slides, the feedback received, and my correspondence with the instructor. My concern is not only with the presentation performance itself, but with whether the submitted term work and the documented revision of my final assignment, Holiday at School, were fully and fairly evaluated. I also wish to note that I carried a substantial share of the work within my group throughout these projects, including planning, content development, and preparation. For that reason, I do not believe that 67 as the group mark fairly reflects my individual performance or should be treated as an accurate measure of my final academic ability in this context.
I am therefore requesting a formal review of the grading decisions for my final assignment, Holiday at School, or any review that the Office deems appropriate, on the grounds that the work appears to have been under-evaluated and that the grading process lacked sufficient transparency for me to understand or verify the basis of the marks assigned.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Madilyn
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