Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean Academic,

I am appealing to request for a Credit standing (CR) in Math 121 and a drop for CISC 101. I wrote the Math 121 exam on 17th April, 2022. Although before the exam I was going through a lot of psychological experiences, I made the bad decision to push through it. I was performing fairly well prior to exam, finishing with a A- by the midterm. My psychological health has been poor for sometime, however it has never significantly affected my academic performance in the past. I was taken by surprise when I began to experience anxiety attacks and overall poor psychological health during the examination period. During the Math 121 I felt nauseous, tense, internal trembling, discomfort, absence and muscle tension which made it difficult for me to think and write coherently and complete my work. I attributed these feelings to being nervous because of the nature of the proctored exam but this assumption proved to be wrong when I had the same issues during my unproctored, open book CISC 101 exam the next day on 18th April, 2022. The symptoms I was experiencing were extreme and frequent. Looking back I have realised that it is unfortunate that those final exams were so close, because given a little bit more time I could have managed my situation more or reached out to someone for academic considerations. These symptoms also affected my performance on my ECON 112 exam on April 20th, 2022 as well, but because of the way the course assessments were weighted, my grade was not severely impacted by my performance on the final exam. The weight of the final exam for Math 121 impacted my grade negatively and for CISC 101 we were required to pass the exam in order to pass the course and because I failed the exam due to the psychological problems I was facing, I failed the entire course. For context, I performed much better on the exams I had a week after this time period because I had acknowledged that I needed to seek help from a professional and did accordingly. Although my performance was still not to the best of my ability because I was still going through psychological problems, the severity of my problems during the MATH 121 and CISC 101 exams were more impactful. I would like to clarify that these experiences are not just due to exam nervousness or test anxiety because I was adequately prepared for those exams and did not feel stressed about my performance prior to the actual time period. Rather personal problems in my life continued to take a toll on my psychological health and this in turn, unfortunately affected my academic performance. As mentioned earlier, I have acknowledged the uncertainty of my psychological situation and I am currently actively seeking help from a professional to manage my experiences and find solutions to improve my well-being. I assure you that I am committed to excelling academically, I am currently retaking MATH 121 in the summer term since I am seeing positive results from my counselling sessions and believe I have the ability to perform better overall as to improve my GPA. I initially enrolled in CISC 101 but after some discussions and deliberations with my counsellor, I have decided to drop it and not overwhelm myself. I am determined and focused on getting better health-wise during the break so as to prepare for the actual school term . I am actively going for counselling sessions and doing all the things advised and required of me to improve my psychological health. I have acknowledged that the nature of my situation is sensitive and unpredictable and I need to be consistent and diligent so as to get better. I am seeing positive results from the counselling sessions and I am hopeful that I will be able to perform to my full potential very soon. I hope all of these things will be taken into consideration and my request will be granted. Thank you so much for your time.

Kind regards,
Desiree.