Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Coming to Queen's University, I'm the first member of my family to go to post-secondary education as neither my parents nor any of my relatives have attended university. As a result, this made my transition to university very difficult, and understanding how post-secondary works was a challenge. With this in mind, I struggled with course selection and because of this, I took the course PHIL-151 Great Works of Philosophy. My current program is Computing and this means I take very math and computer science heavy courses. In an attempt to diversify my course load, I took PHIL 151 as I thought it would be different to my usual field of study. In this course, I found the content difficult as before university, I'd never taken a course similar to it. But with my lack of guidance, I thought as it was a 100s level, I would do fine with my level of experience. During the course, however, I struggled to keep up with the course material and I found the content challenging to understand as it was not to my style of learning. Furthermore, as for dropping the course when it was the appropriate time to do so, I did not do it then because I felt like I hadn't gotten back enough grades to see how my learning was going. By the normal course drop date, I had only gotten back one large assignment back and a few very small assignments, all of which I did acceptable on to the point where I thought I could get my grades higher. However, the parts of the course I struggled with the most only got worse and my grades continued to plummet. As for my other courses, I'm doing great with marks in the A and A+ range but in PHIL-151, I got a C+. Because of this, I feel as if PHIL-151 is not reflective of my academic ability. Lastly, I heard about personal interest credit which allows students in the Faculty of Arts and Science to take courses out of their field of study in order to diversify their course load. Although my situation isn't directly applicable to personal interest credits, I feel like the scenarios are very similar and I wish to receive this privilege of having PHIL-151 applied as a CR so it does not appear on my transcript but I keep the credits.