Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am appealing to drop the Astronomy 101 course due to extenuating circumstances in regards to the professors lack of instruction. He did not provide course readings until week 5 of the term, leaving us with 5 weeks worth of readings to do in one week. Additionally, the website for the course was not updated and working until week 4 of the course, so we could not access the syllabus and lecture notes. We also received no grades or feedback before the add and drop date. We were supposed to have 5 online quizzes, we ended up only having 3 due to unorganized professor, leaving no time for the other 2 quizzes. He had computer problems for the last few weeks of class, forcing us to teach ourselves the last couples themes. Specifically, on November 24, we were on theme 9 (11 weeks in), with 3 classes to go and we still had 3 themes to do-- resulting in rushed teaching and us teaching ourselves. Our first assignment was handed in on October 24 and we did not receive our marks back until November 22. He was overall very rushed and unclear in his teaching strategies, and we still do not have the final assignment back or our final mark breakdown (he does not use OnQ).

I discussed the issue with Dr. Bénard who took my concerns to the head of the Department of Physics, and encouraged me to complete this appeal process.