Petition Letter
The subject matter for appeal is a final paper in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The guidelines for the paper were open-ended in terms of content, provided that students were given a list of topics to chose from. The paper in question was not fairly marked on the grounds that the TA/professor criticized lack of specific content, which contradicts the open-endedness of the assignment. Furthermore, the commentary was nit-picky, and arguably did not make much sense. Specifically, when writing a paper on Palestinian press in the 1910's, it is impossible for a student to cover all newspapers, unless otherwise specified. If the student chose a theme of Palestinian mindset and briefly employs a popular thinker during that time who affected writers of that decade on the basis that the paper was open-ended, there are arguably little grounds to penalize them for it. Lastly, the vital point of appeal is the comment that the paper did not demonstrate enough anti-Semitic rhetoric. This is problematic, because a) it eliminates the freedom of the student to remain neutral b) the paper already tended towards demonstration of Palestinian radicalism c) given the entirety of the course it is unclear whether the professor demonstrates a bias towards Israeli perspective. If other papers had counterpart commentary such as lack of anti-Palestinian rhetoric, this may give the commentary of the paper in question more merit. However I remain to use these points to appeal my grade on the final paper.