Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: This year is my fourth but not final year of study. I have opted to draw out my degree as in the past I was more acutely aware of my ability to handle large workloads. This year, however, I decided to try my hand at taking 5 courses in a semester, something I have never done before. Film 240 is a notoriously memorization heavy course, as well as one that relates in now way to the material covered in my degree plan. It was an elective I decided to take this year out of interest. The problem arises over the past few weeks: with midterms for five classes that are entirely unrelated there is a possibility for clustering or even overlap of midterms. None took place on the same day thankfully, but they were all clustered around a two week period. For five heavily memorization based, unrelated courses, this was quite an ordeal for me. Film was the first of five, and thus after the midterm ended, I took time to focus on the remaining four exams.
On a non-academic note, over the past 2 months my family dog of 14 years has been battling with cancer. My parents live with her in Ottawa so I was far removed from the situation, but many phone calls to console, or gain information took up my time as well. Even further still, the emotional burden of losing an honourable member of the family was distracting. This all culminated in her being put down this past Thursday, October 30th.
The amount of work to memorize the material for the midterm exams, the workload to stay on top of existing course material, and the emotional difficulty of knowing my Parents, Brothers, and Dog were likely never going to be all together again were all factors at play. It is because of these circumstances, that when I woke up this morning, I realized the best course of action would be to lighten my course load of this class that for all intents and purposes, pertains little to my degree here.