Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am appealing my instructor's decisions on the grading of my term paper in POLS 440 because I believe my work has been substantially undervalued.
In feedback given from my instructor, both on the reception of my grade and when I informally requested a regrading, the reasoning for my grade was that my paper did not connect enough to the topic of ethnic conflict which is the subject of this seminar. My argument in the paper is that the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund weakened social bonds in Rwanda and enriched the presently ruling ethnic regime so that it could better prepare and organize to carry out the 1994 genocide. I lost many marks for not directly referencing ethnicity and ethnic conflict however, the focus of my paper was on how the policies of the IMF and WB enhanced the capacity for Rwanda's ruling regime to carry out genocide. It was never my stated intention to discuss how these development policies incited genocide (and I make this clear in the paper) rather that they enhanced the capacity of the ruling regime to carry it out on the scale that it occurred.
In email correspondence with my instructor prior to my submission of the paper, they said that my approach of showing how the IMF and WB enabled the genocide as it had occurred was appropriate. this correspondence will be forwarded upon my recognition that this appeal has been submitted. As such in my paper, I did not focus on how these policies caused or initiated the genocide rather how they were one enabling factor among many (which I make clear in the paper) that enabled the genocide to occur so efficiently.