Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am currently a full time student at Queen's university. Due to family circumstances (my father's death), I am in full responsibility of supporting myself financially through school (tuition, living accommodations, food..etc). Due to this, I have been working 25 hour weeks alongside being enrolled in 5 courses this term, and it has really effected my stress and my work abilities. In PYSC271, we have had 2 midterms. After the first midterm (worth 15%), I did not do too well. I chose to keep the course and not drop it as I thought if I studied harder (which I did,) I could make up for the low mark I received on the first midterm test. Even my professor had noted after the second midterm that he made it too challenging, and apologized on how difficult he had made the midterm for everyone- nearly nobody passed, and the class average was incredibly low. I can provide photos of the post he made on onQ about it but he stated

Good evening everyone,

I wanted to give you some updates after receiving advice from a supervisor. Firstly, I've been advised to release all the short answer grades at the same time rather than sequentially as initially planned. There are a variety of reasons why this is a good idea; if you can understand why pulling a bandaid off slowly is not a fun time, then I think you can see where we're coming from...

With that, I'm just going to come right out and say that scores on this exam are not great. They are very low, actually, and there will be no denying that for a lot of you it may even be the lowest average on an exam that you've ever seen. I just want you all to know that this does not mean you did not do well or did not prepare well enough. It simply means a couple of things:

First, I clearly still have a thing or two to learn about creating exams, especially regarding how much detail people can be expected to write in a short period of time, particularly in the post-pandemic era with students who may not have much experience writing university exams by hand. Please know that I feel your pain and understand the undue stress and disappointment a situation like this causes, but I hope you will allow me these growing pains, given that that was only my second time creating an exam before (the first being Midterm 1). I'm hoping you can please understand that this exam and everything in this course have been big learning experiences for me and that I really do appreciate all the patience you've given as I get to beta-test my instructional skills for the first time with you all.

With that being said, after the second midterm, my mark is not high at all in this class. I have tried everything in my ability to makeup for the low marks on the midterm (high marks in assignments, quizzes, extra credit surveys..etc) but it is still not sufficient enough to help me in this course. With working so many hours a week on top of my courses, I feel as though there is nothing I can do anymore about this course, and it has been very hard to keep up with this class as the midterms carry 30% of my grade, and I got very much below 50% on either of them. I do not want this course to be included in my GPA, and if I had known that the second midterm would be harder than the first (as he mentioned doing himself), I would have dropped the course much earlier in the fall semester, before the deadline has closed.