Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Deans of studies:
My name is YeChen Li (10062009) and I am appealing of an Aegrotat standing for ANAT 316 ¿¿The Human Visceral System¿ course I took in the 2018 January-April school period. I feel like due to extenuating circumstances of physical illness made worse by family problems heavily affected my grade in this course. Though I tried my best to complete the course I feel like my resulting grade was not a good representation of my studying ability. I began the course with great enthusiasm and as reflected by the first midterm of the course that I was doing ok in terms of grades for the class. I have the disorder of nocturnal seizures which is mainly caused by stress, sadly due to news that I received from my father in China worsened my condition considerably this 2018 Winter semester. Usually I only have seizures during sleep but starting around the beginning of February I began to have Gran-mal seizures as well as blank-spells occur while awake. This was very stressful for me as I was not accustomed to having this kind of loss of consciousness during the day. I got very scared because I thought my condition was getting better and it got very hard to keep up with the heavy workload of ANAT 316, I also became really depressed because I had tried very hard to fix my condition only to have it worsen, which also hit my confidence hard. I was hit with multiple times with the blank-out spell and also once from a nocturnal seizure during the winter term. This can be seen in my sudden drop of grades on the next two midterms that followed. That and I had two more courses to study for made it extremely hard to keep up with the material. I even stopped attending the BIOL 202 lectures to make time for me to study for the ANAT 316 midterms as I have previously taken BIOL 202 before. I knew that two more ¿midterms¿¿ will follow and each of them required a tonne of studying. To mitigate my condition worsening, I tried to get as much sleep as possible while still trying my best to keep up with the course load. I tried my best to sustain in the course in the end, but I still received a failing grade. I¿¿m confident that had I not been suffering from the emotional trauma resulting from the worsening of my condition I would have done much better, and only the grade of my first midterm in ANAT 316 truly reflected my ability to study.
To fix my worsening condition, I immediately went to my neurologist to talk to him about my condition. He deemed that my condition was taking a bad turn and raised my current medications to supress the symptoms. It was bad enough that my neurologist deemed me unable to drive safely and placed a temporary ban on my driver¿¿s licence. He also booked me several more appointments to see the effect of the newly raised medication dose, scheduled me for blood tests and an MRI scan of my brain to see if the worsening of my condition was due to physical changes to my brain. I also scheduled more acupuncture appointments with my Chinese doctor over to the summer as well as consult him about finding a suitable Chinese medicine to treat my symptoms. I also started up Tai Chi to strengthen my body and talked to several people to raise my confidence and become positive again.