Submitting an Appeal

To submit a formal academic appeal you need to:

1. complete a Formal Appeal form in full and save it as a Word Document or .pdf file
2. ensure you are able to provide all the evidence to support your case
3. send your Formal appeal form and evidence within the ten working-day window by e-mail to the relevant e-mail addresses below:

• Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy - ESE-Facultycases@ex.ac.uk
• Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences - HASS-Facultycases@ex.ac.uk
• Faculty of Health and Life Sciences - HLS-Facultycases@ex.ac.uk
• For students based at our Penryn Campus - Penryn-Facultycases@ex.ac.uk
• For all Postgraduate Research appeals - pgr-student-cases@ex.ac.uk

For any other type of appeal (such as review stage appeals) please contact studentcases@exeter.ac.uk.

The University is unable to accept appeals submitted by third parties (including any health professions, parent, or tutor of the student concerned). Nor are we able to discuss details of an appeal with any third parties without the written consent of the student. This is due to data protection regulations and is intended to safeguard your personal information. All appeals must be received from students directly, ideally from their University of Exeter email address.

The formal appeal form is at section 6.1 of the Procedures and is entitled ‘Formal Appeal Form’.

Other forms listed in the procedures relate to other types of appeal and should not be used in appealing against marks or progression decisions made by an APAC.

Please submit your formal appeal form in Word or .pdf format. It is not possible for the team to access documentssubmitted via share facilities such as “google-docs” or one-drive.

You are required to supply any evidence you feel is relevant to support your case. The evidence should be independent, i.e. not written by a family member, for example. If it is medical evidence this should be verifiable (we will not take steps to validate your evidence for you, you must do this yourself), and if it was originally produced in a language other than English it is your responsibility to provide an authenticated translation.

However, it is entirely your decision as to what evidence you supply to support your appeal. If you need advice on what will best serve your purpose, we recommend that you contact the Students’ Guild Advice Unit, or your Welfare Advisor in your Hub or Info Point.

Please note, our procedure states that it is the responsibility of the student to provide their own supporting evidence, especially if this is medical evidence as there can be issues with data confidentiality if we are attempting to obtain anything on your behalf. If the evidence is already held by another team at the University, we may contact them to request a copy, but this may cause delays in our consideration of your appeal, so it is best if you provide such information with your appeal form if you can.

If you intend to submit an appeal but do not have access to all your evidence yet, please ensure to submit your Formal Appeal Form within the 10 working-day window with a note to explain when you expect to supply your evidence.

Where a student declares the pending evidence in their appeal form, we are typically able to allow up to two further weeks for students to provide additional evidence. We would liaise with you to agree a reasonable deadline for your remaining evidence, and we would then hold the consideration of your appeal to give you an opportunity to provide this evidence. If you do not supply your evidence within that new timescale, it will very likely be necessary to consider your appeal without the remaining evidence, so you should ensure to contact the team if you think there may be further delays.

The 30-day response window would start at the point we received all the additional evidence, or from the evidence deadline, whichever is sooner. This does mean that additional evidence can cause a delay to the outcome for the appeal; therefore, the sooner you are able to provide this evidence the sooner we are able to proceed with your case.

Students who want to appeal about the same thing can submit a group appeal. The group will need to nominate a member of the group to act as their spokesperson and key contact for the Faculty Cases Team during the appeal process. It is also the responsibility of the group spokesperson to report back to members of the group about the outcome of the appeal.

In the case of group appeals each student will need to give their expressed consent that they wish to be part of the group appeal by signing the statement for appeal. (This can be a list of typed names rather than handwritten signatures, but the students should each be copied into the email submission of the form so as to act as confirmation of their knowledge of, and agreement to the submitting of, the appeal.)

If no member of the group is willing to act as the group spokesperson, they may appoint a member of the Students’ Guild or Student Union to represent them through the appeal process.