Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

My name is Aaron Pagulayan (20158735). I would like to request an academic appeal regarding waiving the one-term deadline and the opportunity to drop a course that passed the without academic penalty deadline. Due to an urgent family matter involving a close family friend notifying my family that they had reached the stage of Stage 4 Breast Cancer. This event had negatively affected my mental health and my ability to productively attend to my coursework when I was at home as my anxiety for their health was at an all-time high. Unfortunately, I do not have any professional documentation to provide proof of how this event affected me as at the time, I was thinking about the well-being of our family friend and not how much it was affecting me.

Mind you, I was at home (Toronto) and because of this event, it was very stressful dealing with both the pressure of concern for health and hopeful recovery at the time while also dealing with all my coursework at the same time. This event occurred before and until after reading week when I returned to Kingston following the return to in-person classes.

It wasn't until after returning to Kingston on March 7th (3 days after the dropping of the course deadline) when some of the stress had somewhat subsided that I had realized the overwhelming amount of coursework I had to deal with. Reviewing my coursework deadlines, I saw that I had missed a few deadlines for assignments and even reached out to one of my professors asking for an academic consideration regarding a heavily weighted assessment to be allowed to submit for grading.

As a result, I had decided after analyzing which courses I would still be able to succeed in that I would be unable to complete the course of BIOL 321. Note that I have already missed too many important deadlines including many aspects such as data collection and analysis for the main experiment, which would prevent me from successfully catching up with other courses during the last weeks of this semester. This appeal does not come from asking for leniency towards missing the drop course deadline, instead, I am asking for a chance to ameliorate an already stressful situation on the part of my mental health and my academic performance in my other courses. Sadly, I fear that if I am unable to drop this course (BIOL 321), the repercussions of being unsuccessful due to struggling to finish the coursework for this course will ultimately and negatively affect my performance to complete the culminating assessments with a decent grade for my other courses and the exams.

Sincere regards,

Aaron Pagulayan