Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

The assignment I submitted for this course has been substantially under evaluated. I received a mark of 58.7 and minimal feedback justifying how this grade has been calculated. Other students in the class received very detailed feedback as well as a rubric (consistent between students) showing how the grade was decided. Not only was my feedback significantly less detailed, it is also largely unjust based on my submission. For example, the feedback stated that my report exceeded the 5-7 page limit but the assignment description said my report should be 5-7 pages in length PLUS space for pictures. If all pictures were removed from my report and it was just text it would be about 5 or 6 pages long. This is not the only example of feedback being objectively untrue and additional specific examples will gladly be provided.

I e-mailed the professor outlining my concerns but he was very dismissive and also provided some feedback of his own which is also untrue in the context of my report (again, specific examples are available). I wrote him another two emails with the specific examples showing where the feedback was unfair or untrue and requested a regrading from another TA with more detailed feedback and this request was declined stating, The TAs matched their means and standard deviations, so getting another TA to look at it wouldn't have changed anything. You shouldn't draw too straight a line between the TA comments and the mark.

That final statement seems completely unjust as it makes it appear that my final grade was arbitrarily determined so the TA can match the mean and standard deviation. If there is no line to draw between TA comments (the only source of feedback provided) and my mark, what line can be drawn

Any assistance with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Jacob Gladman