Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Letter to the Associate Dean and the Queen??s Academic Appeals Office.


Hi, my name is Charles Jobin and I am a fourth year Econ student. I plan on graduating in the winter of 2022. I am writing to you today to talk about my academic probation, that is currently active. I have been put on academic probation at the end of the winter semester of 2021, following a disaster of a semester on my end. However, I haven??t been properly able to explain the circumstances that lead me to fail 3 out of 4 courses, which brings me here today, wanting to appeal that decision, with the supporting documentation from my counsellor, here at Queen??s.

To start things off, I started working with her in November 2019, when a very traumatic family situation happened for me. This situation was completely out of my control and all I could do was take the hit and try to absorb the damage as much as I could. At the time, measures were taken to ensure that I could keep doing school for the winter 2020, and it worked decently well, without being amazing or anything because I was extremely anxious and nervous about everything. In that same period of time, the pandemic started to happen and everyone became obsessed with it, me included, which led me to be very isolated from that point on, which would be around April 2020. This is the point where things started to go south for me, as I was on a new medication treatment for anxiety and I was isolated to the extreme. My brain was functioning very differently under that new medication and it has greatly affected my capacity to focus, to buckle down and get assignments done and even to analyze situations and write them down. I would also like to mention that during that period of time, I wasn??t able to have any counselling with Chelsea, who I trusted and wanted to keep working with, because I forced to move back to Quebec, where I am from, and it is not allowed to receive counselling from another province. As you can probably see on my transcript, from that point, I had to drop my summer course, did poorly in the fall and even worse in the winter, which lead me to being placed on Academic Probation. It was a very hard period in my life and it took me quite some time to figure out what was wrong and what I could do to make the situation better. I ended up quitting the prescribed medication, changing my living environment and focusing on my physical well being a lot more and it is, so far, working really well for me. This semester, I am taking three courses, two year long and one that ends in December. I am doing really well so far, even if one of the courses is quite challenging I am putting a lot of effort into my health and it has resulted into some better academics and some better overall well-being. Looking back on it now, it is absurd how that medication was affecting me in my academics, but you can??t really see it while you are on them, so I guess I had to really get better first to understand what was happening to me at the time

I plan on keeping it the way it is for now, because for the first time in a while I feel good, I have motivation and I have some energy to keep going. I am graduating in December, which is why I find extremely difficult to be on AP, because it just adds that extra stress to my situation, which in the first place is what lead me here.

To finish my text, I want to clearly state what I am asking for. My request, is to have the following courses?? marks not count on my transcript; ASTR 101, GHPY 203 and ECON 222, which I am re-taking this following semester as it is mandatory for me to graduate. What I am appealing for is to have those marks not count, I don??t care about the credits, since I did not pass the course due to my incapacities, as I do not deserve them, but I also believe I don??t deserve to be penalized because of the circumstances that lead me to do so poorly in these courses.

Cordially.

Charles Jobin