Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean (Academic),

My name is Rayna Bhanji (Student ID: 20496393) and I am a first year Con-Ed Arts Student. I am submitting a petition to request permission to add the course INDG 101 for the Fall 2024 semester after the deadline.

I have been struggling with my MATH 110A and MATH 120A courses and have been rethinking my plan to major in math this weekend. Many questions arose, such as: What do I really want to major in? What have I been programmed to think is the ‘best’ major? Do I have what it takes to major/minor in math? What are the requirements for a minor in math? How does this all transfer to my teachables (I am in Con-Ed)?, etc. As you can imagine, these were not easy questions for me to answer, so I wanted to take as much time to be confident in my decision.

On the evening of September 16, 2024, I was making the last change in my courses, adding INDG 101 to my Fall Timetable. As I was clicking ‘Yes’ to the ‘Are you sure you want to enroll?’ question, SOLUS showed a buffering circle then took me back to the SOLUS homepage without adding the course. Immediately after I got to the SOLUS home page, Google Chrome crashed on my device and brought me back to my device’s home screen. I kept repeating this trying to enroll, and SOLUS would not add it to my courses and my device would crash. I tried restarting my device, closing the tab, and signing into SOLUS again but the problem persisted. Finally I tried updating my device, which took a while, and by the time I went to enroll in the course, it was already 12:03 AM, and as expected, SOLUS gave me this message: ‘Unable to complete your request. You do not have access to perform this transaction at this time.’ I was filled with disappointment and frustration but tried not to panic. I emailed the Arts and Science Student Services and researched how I can come back from this and found out I could petition my case. To summarize, due to technical difficulties with my device, I was unable to enroll in the intended course, which affects me because now I am not on track to completing my degree on time (I am supposed to have five Arts or Science courses every semester). I hope you can understand that what happened to my device on the evening of the 16th was out of my control, and consider allowing me to enroll in one more course for the Fall 2024 semester.

If I am allowed to add this course, I will be in close communication with the instructor and/or TAs on how to get on track/catch up from the past two weeks. I am committed to dedicating my time and effort to compensate for this situation. In terms of my device, this has never happened before but as mentioned, when I updated my device, it seemed to resolve the issue. I will also bring a second device to school in October so that in case this situation were to happen again, I would have another method to work around it.

Unfortunately, I did not think to screen record what was happening on my device as I was more focused on getting it to work. I was unaware of the procedures of an appeal and the value of that type of evidence. However, I was on call with my sister during this process and have attached her letter confirming this situation.

I have requested a letter from the INDG 101 class instructor, Kelly Maracle, to show her support towards my efforts to enroll in this course. The Arts and Science Student Services have advised me to submit this petition without her response and when she does give her support, it will be forwarded to the Petition Team.

Thank you for your consideration!
Sincerely,
Rayna Bhanji