Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,
My name is Amir Ghafarian, a 2nd year life science student here at Queen's University. I'm writing in regards to an issue I'm having with my PHYS P20 course. I'd like to apply for a late dropping of this course due to several reasons. The first reason is that only 20 of the course grade was returned to us prior to the end date of dropping the course. With only 20 of the grade provided prior to the deadline, it makes it almost impossible for one to make a well-advised decision on whether he/she should drop the course. In addition, the course doesn't have a rubric for the assignments. This makes it impossible for students who didn't receive a satisfactory grade, which I believe I didn't, to work on their shortcomings and become better prepared for the second assignment. Due to this, the marking becomes subjective and all based on a matter of personal preferences. The student has no objective scale by which he can assess his performance with.

Secondly, the professor is unresponsive. I e-mailed Dr. Boris Castel on January the 12th, challenging numerous assertions he made in the beginning chapters of his book. He e-mailed me back asking for a phone number I can be reached at. I replied promptly. Ever since then, he hasn't contacted me. I was left to writing the first assignment with my questions unanswered, and my grade took the toll. Given that this is an online course, I was expecting the Professor to be more attentive to the needs of the students, however this was not the case at all.

Thirdly, the feedback provided to the students was unproportional to the grades allotted. My paper, as the feedback provided with the TA indicates, wasn't lacking in substance. The TA simply wished I spoke a bit more about a specific concept she believed was important, and reduced 25 because of that. I'm assuming that because that's the only feedback she gave. Not only is the grading subjective without a rubric, it's also poorly done. I objectively compared my essay to the A-Grade Essay they posted and the differences are minor, if at all. I hope I don't come off as arrogant, as that's truly not my intention. Being a co-editor and writer for Islamic Insights, with tremendous experience with writing and editing, I genuinely believe that with the amount of effort I put into my assignment, and, in comparison with the A-Grade Essay they released, the grade I received was unjust. Even if my grade was warranted, the three-sentence feedback by my TA wasn't sufficient in providing me with actual constructive criticism for improvement.

I am taking this course with my sister and so we both proceeded to contact the professor after we had received our grades and realized no rubrics were used. However, we have not received a response. We had an academic advising meeting with Heather Carter and contacted Katie Philips about the appeal process. I then got in touch with Dr. Mark Chen for his advice on the situation. He mentioned both my sister and I might have a case since we did not have a sufficient amount of the course mark back before the drop deadline to predict our performance in this course.

If faced with the similar situation in the future, I would contact the TA/Professor in regards to the rubric by which they grade assignments with. If there is no rubric, I would ask for their own advice in guiding me with future assignments, perhaps by providing A-Grade submissions from the past that I can use as a model. I would also contact my fellow colleagues in receiving their help, though this was not possible in P20 as it's an online course.

In conclusion, for the aforementioned reasons, I wish to appeal for dropping this course. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I look forward to hearing back from you.