Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am submitting this appeal to request credit (CR) standing in three of my fall/winter first year courses. Due to extenuating circumstances this year my academics have faltered. Although I have accommodation as it got closer to exam time my performance anxiety heightened. This lead me to go to my family doctor, where we discussed it being best to pursue a new type of accommodation. I obtain this letter stating my anxiety had increased, as I knew I would need documentation from a professional for the accessibility office. I then spoke with my accessibility advisor where we discussed how to approach emailing Professor McEachern (Math Professor). I tend to struggle with math exams the most. We then proceeded to draft an email together which she later sent me in order to copy to my Professor. He later responded (see attached) with an extremely discouraging email. Professor McEachern¿¿s response greatly affected my anxiety in a negative manner. His response showed me that he clearly did not understand my type of anxiety and left me no longer willing to correspond with him for fear of another discouraging email. I respect that it is up to the discretion of the professor to allow extra assignments to be given and understood the Professor McEachern was not going to allow this. The issue that I have with his response is that he commented on my previous accommodation which I did not even have and went so far as to suggest it had done a great disservice to me. Approaching Professor McEachern was a huge step for me as I had been working towards talking to Professors all year. After this response it was more difficult to study for exams as someone I previously respected said something so discouraging to me. This email had me questioning whether I should even be in University. I also had my concerns about my exam being fairly graded after this response as he clearly did not understand my anxiety or accommodation. Earlier in the year I had to email Professor McEachern as he failed to post my fall exam mark. The deadline to drop the course had already passed by this point. As I hope you can understand that made me very anxious. Any correspondence I had with Professor McEachern has been discouraging and anxiety provoking.