Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Hello, to whomever it concerns. My name is Michael Wightman, and I am reaching out with hopes of having a grade appealed for my PHIL 343 class. I feel that the assignment I submitted is worth more than the mark I received, and I will outline 5 reasons as to why I believe this.

First, I was docked several marks for supposedly making formatting mistakes, specifically for my introduction and for the section for defining terms, both of which are required as per the rubric.

Secondly, I was docked several marks for having redundant sections of my paper. I feel that this is an unfair issue for the instructor to have, given that the redundant parts of my paper served to explain and offer context for the issues being discussed. Referring to the rubric, it clearly states that we are to Write for an imaginary audience of smart non-philosophers, as such, I find jumping straight into a topic without any sort of indication as to how I arrived where I am to be incredibly counter intuitive to the aim of showing what I know.

Third, the grade which I received doesn't exist, at least according to the professor's own Grading Method which is posted on OnQ (and on any other Queen's website that I've seen). I received an 'F+,' which, according to the professor, equates to roughly 40. On OnQ, however, the only 'F-related' grade is simply an 'F,' which equates 49 and lower. Surely you can see the contradiction here.

Fourth, the grader's notation on my essay indicates that the paper ignores the task of the assignment, which is another thing which I strongly disagree with. The reasons for the remark, from what I have come to understand after both reading through the edits and meeting with my professor, is that I 1) offer my own opinion on the matter in a brief section before the conclusion and 2) have redundant areas of my paper which I, on the contrary, believe to provide a lot of context and clarity to the reader, and are thus imperative.

Lastly, my fifth issue that I take with the grade that I received is that I lost marks for repeating and referring to ideas which were discussed in class that were relevant to the topic. I'm not sure wherein lies the problem with me showing my understanding in this way. I believe that referring to class content and discussion within papers (so long as they are relevant and productive to the task at hand) are great examples of showing what you know.

Thank you for your consideration, my e-mail address is mjw.wightman@gmail.com if the matter needs to be discussed further. I have attached the assignment including highlights where I found the marking to be inaccurate.