Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am appealing to drop the 9 failed classes that I received in the 2015-2016 school year, and the one class that I failed in Winter of 2015. Those classes are: Pols 244 (Winter 2015), Musc 102, Pols 244 (Fall 2015), Pols 351, Pols 385, Dram 205, Phys P20, Pols 313, Pols 384, Pols 396. I am also applying for Credit Standing for Pols 332, and Pols 364. I should have appealed to drop these classes years ago, but the circumstances of my situation made me drop out of Queen¿¿s and want to never return. This meant that a few failed classes were the least of my concern.

In the spring of 2015 I began to get sick, but I did not address these problems, because I had never really been sick before. I did quite poorly on all of my exams that semester, but I believed at the time I just wasn¿¿t working hard enough. Despite the fact that I did not sleep before my Pols 244 exam, because I had been throwing up all night, I still went in and failed in the morning. I spent the summer of 2015 trying to get better and rest, but I still didn¿¿t know what was going on. When I returned to the school in Fall 2015, I was okay for a few weeks but my health was seriously deteriorating. Between November 2015, and mid-December I had lost 30 pounds and was still getting smaller. I had no energy or strength to do anything. I ended up leaving the school in November and didn¿¿t end up writing most of my exams or handing in the majority of my cumulative projects for the semester, so I ended up failing four out of five classes and my fifth class was a D. I suspect I only passed this class because of the extra help and time that was allotted to me by Dr. Stefanie von Hlatky. At this point I had been sick for months and my physiological state had unravelled. Instead of alerting the school and trying to get my exams deferred and pulled from the winter semester, I spent my time trying to focus on getting better. Eventually I found out that it was a chronic inflammatory bowel disease and I began learning how to live with it. However, at this point with my weakened mind and defeated spirit, I believed that it was too late for me to fix my grades and return to Queens. In the Winter of 2016, I did not live in Kingston and did not complete one single assessment, despite being enrolled in 5 classes. After some serious convincing from my parents I ended up returning to Queen¿¿s in Winter 2017. I was able to stay afloat, but towards the end of the semester, the workload caught up to me and I had to sign up for student accessibility services to help handle everything. My professors were good about accommodating me, but I was only able to complete enough of the workload in Pols 332 to barely pass. Instead of completing my last semester at Queen's I decided it would be best for my body and health to complete the final semester online at home. I am still trying to figure out how to manage a healthy and productive lifestyle.