Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Sir/Madam,

I am appealing to drop POLS385 - Introduction to Statistics (Winter 2019), due to an extenuating and unforeseen circumstance with was out of my control and have made it impossible for me to continue and receive a passing grade for the course.

Getting into this semester I knew from my peers that POLS385 was going to be a difficult course. Therefor, I decided to take additional courses over the summer of 2018 in an effort to lighten my course-load during the 2018-2019 fall and winter semesters. Going into the course I was genuinely having difficulties with it. Therefor, I put significant amounts of time and work into the course material and this made me feel confidant that I could get at least a passing grade.

However, last week on Friday April 5th, my computer completely crashed, and I lost most of my notes, works and assignments for the course. I did have a backup but even with this backup I lost several weeks, and countless hours worth of work, which cannot be retrieved. Including an assignment which was worth a significant portion of the course¿¿s final grade and was due the night of April 5th. This assignment had been completed 95 and I was planning on finishing it after getting feedback at the tutorial session of that day. However, due to the computer malfunction, all my week worth of hard work was completely gone.

Even with an extension on the assignment¿¿s deadline, I would have to start from scratch and it would taken me days of work to again complete the assignment with a similar quality as the previous lost one. While simultaneously having other responsibilities, including assignments from other courses, and having to study and prepare for the upcoming exams along with the lost POLS385 assignment.

Furthermore, due to the computer malfunction most the work I did during the semester for POLS385 is completely gone, and therefor preparing for the exam would become increasingly difficult. The time spend on this would significantly impact my ability to prepare for my 3 other upcoming exams. Preparing for these 4 exams in total, with the large amount of additional work that would go into preparing for the POLS385 exam which would be required due to the large amount of work being lost would be impossible to be properly done, due to the short amount of time available. My exams are on the 12th, 15th, 16th and 17th of April. All the extra work and time, I would have to put into preparing for POLS385, due to the unforeseen computer malfunction would significantly impact my ability to prepare for other important exams and would heavily impact my grades.

The malfunction only significantly impacted my coursework for POLS385, due to the nature of the coursework including use of the computer program ¿¿R¿ and digitalized lectures constantly required the use of a computer. For other courses all notes are handwritten and were not impacted. As a general rule, I use handwritten notes to avoid these types of situations. However, POLS385 is a course which requires the use of a computer for most of the course works.
Although I had been struggling with this course as many of my peers have been, but I genuinely believed that I could have received a passing grade. However, when my computer malfunctioned unexpectedly it felt like the ground fell from under me and there is no way I could ever pass this course. Due to an extenuating and unforeseen circumstance which was completely out of my control.

Since then I have contacted Cynthia MacIntosh to inquire about what my options are going forward. I have a large number of elective courses left and will attempt to take one over the summer to reduce my course load for next year. Furthermore, as a substitution for POLS385 I will take SOCY211 next winter semester. SOCY211 counts as a statics course and the workload of this course is less intense compared to POLS385. Furthermore, to prevent this issue from arising again, I will continue to do the bulk of my coursework¿¿s on paper rather than a computer. And any work that does require the use of a computer, including assignment will be done on Google Docs, so that even in the event of another computer malfunction, these works will be safely on a cloud and will remain accessible to me.

Thank you very much for considering my appeal request, I am looking forward hearing from you soon,

Yours sincerely,

Sam Schreurs
20013040