Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: On my exam, the question given to me was along the lines of How should we use data analytics to find out which practitioners are overprescribing? My answer, while it didn't use direct techniques taught in class, did use ideologies taught in class, and was more efficient than any other method we had learned. Never before in any computing class have I been penalized for using methods that were beyond the course material, and usually I have been actively awarded for doing this.

The professors' direct criticism of my answer was that it would be wrong because many practitioners prescribe non-harmful drugs, such as Advil. I explicitly stated in my answer that I would omit those entries from my analysis, and as such, I should have gotten quite an accurate result from my technique.

The concept in question was called Clustering, and while we had learned many techniques for this concept, I found a better one for this particular scenario. I also did not explicitly state that what I was doing was a version of clustering, as it should be very obvious from my method used that this was in fact what I was doing. There was also zero indication that we shouldn't be allowed to use any techniques taught outside this class, and as I have actively been awarded extra points for doing so in every other computing class, I had assumed this was okay to do.

I understand that it may have been acceptable to award me a less than favorable mark due to me not using concepts taught in class, however, I was awarded 1/15 (7%), on a final exam, even after explaining why I wasn't using other techniques for this problem. I believe this is quite unfair, as it very well may cause me to fail a course that I went into the exam with an 80% for.