Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom this may concern,

My name is Scott Reed and I took prof. Ahmed E. Hassan CISC 322 class last semester (fall 2018) and received an overall grade of a D+. Upon inquiring with my TA, the head TA, and the professor I was told that I failed to submit a peer review for my group¿¿s third assignment (A3) which resulted in automatic failure in this course component. A3 was worth 23 of my overall grade which because of this rule I scored a 0 in it. This caused my grade to drop significantly as my group scored 79.7 on 16 of this assignment and 85.7 on the other 7.

I believe that this ruling is unfair and designed against the student. I proved to my professor that the intent to submit the peer review was there ¿¿ I had created the document before the deadline, I must have failed to click confirm on my submission on OnQ.

Upon further investigation I was linked our course syllabus which is slide 15 in a 30 page slick deck available here: http://cs.queensu.ca/ahmed/home/teaching/CISC322/F18/slides/CISC322_01_IntroductionAdmin.pdf. I find this very inaccessible as I had no idea that this rule was in place until the end of the year when I found out my grade. The rule reads that missing the submission deadline of the peer review will lead to 25 of the assignment grade being deducted and 100 of the assignment grade being deducted if it was not submitted within four days. I simply had no idea that I was about to go from a great grade to essentially failing the course.

Given the severity of this rule there is a reasonable expectation that students should be emailed by their TA¿¿s to alert them that they have missed this critical deadline which dictates the automatic loss of 25 of their assignment grade. Given my performance for the rest of the course this final mark does not reflect my effort. I received no lower than a C+ on every marked assignment in the course. Receiving a final grade of D+ is crushing. If my TA had reached out to me about this rule I would have realized I failed to submit the document. Calculating my final grade, if I didn¿¿t score a 0 on A3, I would have finished the course with a B+. I understand that I failed to meet the requirements of the course but this outcome negates the hours I put into this assignment to demonstrate my knowledge of software architecture. If receiving these peer reviews was so vital to this course, justifying failure, then why is there no reminder email

I have spoken with the undergraduate chair of the School of Computing, Juergen Dingel, in this meeting he understood my frustrations but says that this does not break any Arts and Science academic regulations. I am submitting this appeal in the hopes to restore my mark given the convoluted syllabus and seeming arbitrary ruling to reduce my mark by almost 19 points.

Thank you,
Scott Reed