Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Appeal for Late Course Drop

To the Associate Dean (Studies),

I am submitting this appeal to drop ENGL217 from the winter of 2017 semester. The extenuating circumstance that greatly affected my work in this course was an eating disorder. As the course is no longer offered, I cannot take it again to replace the grade, this is also why I am appealing to get it dropped.

There was one essay worth a large portion of my grade that I got a 0 on for this course. The timing of this assignment was concurrent with the severe eating disorder as outlined in the supplemented doctor¿¿s letter. This eating disorder has been on and off for a number of years and during this time period, I was in a severe relapse. My eating disorder has impacted me greatly and was very active at the time of this evaluation. I have anorexia and it comes with many troubling side effects that impacted my ability to attend to academic matters during this time period. Some of the mental side effects of anorexia that I suffered were difficulty focusing, thinking, prioritizing, and switching tasks. During the time that I had to work on this assignment, I had three other large assignments due that I was in the midst of working on. The anxiety of dealing with all these assignments further aggravated my eating disorder. Upon completion of these assignments, I found myself mentally exhausted and unable to complete the ENGL217 assignment to the best of my ability. This eating disorder is accompanied by very disordered thinking and so I was unable to appropriately deal with this academic matter at the time. Part of my eating disorder was also going to great lengths to hide my disorder and denial that I needed help, which led me to not alert anybody at Queen¿¿s that I was struggling and needed help. I ended up going home (Toronto) immediately after the assignment (end of March) to receive medical treatment, stabilize my eating and weight, before returning to write exams after a few weeks.

Due to getting a 0 on the aforementioned assignment, despite writing the exam in April, I did end up failing the course due to the heavy weight of the assignment. I had planned on re-taking this course in either the fall 2017 semester or winter 2018 semester, but I found that this specific course was no longer offered. Due to it no longer being offered, I was unable to re-take it and replace my failing grade.

Upon realization that I could not re-take the class, I eventually learned from a friend that an appeal is the next best option to get the fail dropped. I am happy to say that I did receive treatment predominantly throughout the summer and follow-ups throughout the fall 2017 semester and my eating disorder has not adversely impacted my studies since the winter 2017 semester. I continue to be monitored to ensure this does not happen again and am confident that I will be able to continue to reach my academic goals going forward.

Thank you,

Victoria Dimitropoulos