Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am appealing to drop the Astronomy 101 course due to extenuating circumstances in regards to the instruction that the professor provided. He did not provide the readings for the course on the website until week 5 of the course leaving us with 5 weeks worth of readings to do in one week. The website for the course was not updated and working until week 4 of the course so we could not access the lecture notes. There was also no grades or feedback given to us before the add and drop date. We were supposed to have 5 online quizzes to gain marks in and we ended up only having 3 quizzes because he was so unorganized he ran out of time for the other ones. He then had computer problems the last few weeks of class which left us having to teach ourself the last theme on our own.

On November 24 we were on theme 9 (11 weeks) and with 3 classes to go we still had three themes to do which resulted in rushed teaching and us teaching ourselves. This was due to his computer issues and wasted classes. Out first assignment was handed in on October 24 and we did not receive our marks back until November 22. He was overall very rushed and unclear in his teaching strategies and we still do not have the final assignment back or the mark breakdown because he does not use OnQ.

I discussed this issue with Dr. Bénard who took my concerns to the Head of the Department of Physics and encouraged me to complete this appeal process.