Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

This semester I enrolled myself in MATH 401 ¿¿ Graph Theory. I needed to take this class in order to get the correct amount of credits required to graduate. At around week 6, I contracted a bug that had disabled me from going to class. This occurred during the third and fourth assignment out of 5 (worth 20 of my grade out of 50). Due to the fact that I was disabled from going to class, I wasn¿¿t able to take sufficient notes to do the assignments. It was at this point that I tried to ask people in the class for their notes. Unfortunately, I wasn¿¿t able to properly understand the material to do well on these assignments. I received decently poor marks on these two assignments that were done while I was sick and my ADHD may have contributed to this. I find that I only thrive in theoretical classes when I am able to constantly approach the professor after class in order to ask questions about the material taught.

Since there is no final in this course, assignments are worth 50 and 2 midterms are worth 50. The only material released to study for these midterms were the assignments. There were neither practice tests nor solutions to the assignments to study from. I tried emailing the prof to see if solutions or practice material would be posted to no avail. I started redoing my assignments with classmates for study material because mine were of no use to me. I also reviewed practice problems in the textbook and went to see the prof when I needed help (We didn¿¿t really follow any textbook in this class). My questions were not well received and I was left still confused and uncertain about a lot of the course material.

Due to the fact that I had two midterms that morning (back to back), I had asked my 401 professor to change the midterm date to the Friday instead of the Wednesday so we could have time to study for both because I was still feeling lost. Even though about half of the class had a 463 midterm the hour before the 401 midterm, he still refused to move the test.

The day of the midterm came around and I walked from my 463 midterm directly to my 401 final. The only material I had to study from were my assignments that I had only done moderately well on because I missed class due to the bug and my redone assignments that I could barely understand because other people had walked me through the answers. I took the test and had absolutely no idea how my grade in the class would be affected because I had only received 40 of my final grade back at the time. I ended up failing the final worse than any test I have ever taken. This class really doesn¿¿t represent my mathematics degree at Queen¿¿s and I would hate for this theoretical Graph Theory class to potentially limit me from doing what I dream of doing, Finance. I hope that this class can be removed from my transcript with only a financial penalty.

Thank you for the consideration,

Andrew Grubel
10097647