What should I include in my Faculty Appeal?

When you come to writing your Faculty Appeal form, you will need to make sure that you are appealing under at least one of the below possible three grounds. You will need to provide further information outlining the grounds of your appeal, along with sound evidence to support the appeal, and will also need to outline your desired outcome too so think about what it is that you would ideally like to get out of the appeal:

1) There were extenuating circumstances, for example, you were adversely affected by illness, which the original decision makers were not aware of, or that you could not disclose at that time to them. 

If you have experienced any extenuating circumstances that have affected your performance, then you would normally be expected to notify the University of these by using the Serious Adverse Circumstances (SACS) process as soon as possible, more information about that process can be found on the University website here and within the Teaching and Learning Handbook. You can however submit an appeal to declare retrospective adverse circumstances, you must be able to present evidence to support your appeal (for example a medical report if the circumstances are medically related), but also have good reason why you did not notify the University earlier, for your appeal to be considered. You will need to reflect on this within your appeal, and clearly explain the circumstances that you were facing, the impact these had on you and why you didn't let the University know about these circumstances sooner, along with providing evidence too. You can take a look at our article here which tells you what kind of evidence you can submit with an appeal. 

2) There is evidence that procedures were not applied correctly, or marks were calculated incorrectly.

If you are wanting to submit an appeal under these grounds then you should include relevant evidence, and you should clearly state which procedure was not correctly applied and/or demonstrate why you believe that your marks were incorrectly calculated. If you are appealing that your marks were calculated incorrectly then you can only appeal an overall mark or grade, you can't appeal against individual marks for pieces of work, exams etc as this would be classed as questioning academic judgement (if you're not sure what academic judgement is then this is covered in this article). .

3) That the original decision was not reasonable in the given circumstances.

Again, full details must be given, including what decision has been taken and why you believe it not to be reasonable, along with evidence to support the appeal (you can find more information about what evidence you can submit here). 

Keep reading our articles here to find out what will happen once your appeal form is submitted...