Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

This academic year, as many students and faculty of Queen's University know, has not been a usual academic year due to the COVID-19 situation causing the latter half of the 2020 Winter Term, and all of the remaining academic year to be moved to an online-remote learning method of instruction. Along with these changes comes uncertainty within individual student's choices as to how to continue with their academic career. I have struggled with my decision as to how to continue over the summer break but ultimately decided I would continue with my studies in the 2020 Fall Term. As a fourth year BAH student, I made my decision about which classes I would take this semester based on both my requirements for graduation, and the courses that would be available this year after adjustments to SOLUS had been made to prepare for a remote learning semester.

I am submitting this appeal because over the last several weeks I have been in and out of hospital due to health issues that I started having at the very end of September. Luckily they are not COVID related, but they are health issues that are most likely autoimmune related and so more testing still has to be done. The time I spent ill in those weeks caused me to fall behind in some of my classes and well I was able to get extensions for some of my assignments, I felt there was just too much to try to catch up on while still being ill. This semester in particular I have taken on an extra class to maximize my ability to reach all my graduation requirements by the end of the academic year and so I have been trying to manage 18 credits this term instead of the usual 15.

I understand that the deadline is a couple weeks passed but since I didn't seem to have any health issues once the deadline had come, I thought I might have been able to push myself to catch up in the classes where I have missed the most. However, just this week I fell ill once again, and once again started finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with deadlines. The moment I started feeling better again I decided I needed to come to a decision quickly as to how I should go about finishing this semester which is why I am now writing this appeal to drop CISC 101. Being able to drop this course would mean I could focus on the remaining classes I have to ensure that I can still do well in them, even if I fall ill again before the semester comes to an end.

I hope you will consider my appeal and trust that this will better help me as I move on to finish my academic career in this unprecedented year that the whole Queen's University community has faced.

Sincerely,

Luke Garrison
20072302