Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Queen¿¿s University Associate Dean (Academic),

I am writing to you to request an appeal for a review of an instructor¿¿s final exam mark for PHIL 318 (Fall, 2020). This course was both required to take to complete my Philosophy minor and a possibility to complete my Certificate in Law. Furthermore, this is my fourth year, and I am looking to apply to further education which will be looking at my top two years as factor for acceptance. I have made communication with the Professor to review the exam or provide opportunities to improve my final course grade, however other than brief feedback and providing my exam mark I was not granted an exam re-mark. There are no personal extenuating circumstances that have contributed to this grade ¿¿ I very much enjoyed the content of this course. However, I found it quite a challenge and am aware of some of my own responsibility for such uncharacteristically low marks throughout this course because of this.

I have achieved exceptional marks in all other courses this past semester and would even argue this was my best academic semester in terms of work ethic and GPA, excluding the course in question. Throughout the course, I stayed on top of required work, lectures, and content, taking in-depth notes and re-reviewing readings multiple times, feeling as if I had a basic grasp on the course content. I consciously spent most of my time on this course out of all five this semester and so it is disheartening to see that I failed so significantly on the final take-home exam. I felt good coming out of the exam and confident that I had done well. I had a B- (which was already low for me) in the course going into the exam but came out with a C-, receiving a 40 on the final written exam. My sense is to fail the exam so significantly would be to not answer the exam questions even remotely. I followed all instructions to prepare for the course and I am not sure how much more I could have done, with respect to a margin of difficulty I had with the content. However, I feel I deserved a passing grade at the least as I answered all areas of the questions posed and met all the requirements with respect to the word count, and keeping clear, concise and logical writing as was listed in the instructions. However, an area of speculation can be made that citation style lost me marks. I followed the citation style instructions but assumed the format was consistent with APA guidelines. I only realized my mistake when I received my final essay feedback after the exam where I lost marks for doing so. As a result of receiving my final essay mark after my exam, I was unaware of this error and failed to be aware of changing it when writing my take-home exam.

In terms of an academic plan going forward, I intend to continue to work hard in my final undergraduate semester, with the goal of bringing my CGPA up to a 3.5 and achieving my best academic semester. It is quite uncharacteristic for me to do so poorly on a course overall, and especially having put so much time and effort into this course which I was passionate about, I feel as though my retention and knowledge was not tested fairly or adequately to demonstrate I understood the course content.

I am hopeful you will accept my request, and I thank you for taking the time to read my Letter of Appeal.
I am happy to supply any additional documentation of notes, email correspondence, exam instructions, or my exam itself upon request.

Sincerely,
Helena

Helena Kanga
20055516
16hdk2@queensu.ca