Dear professor Alfeld,

After finishing the final exam, We (your students), have felt the exam to be very difficult weighing heavily against us. Many others and I would like to petition for a way to help us improve our grade because many of us feel we did not place well on this final. So, we would like to request a grade curve on this exam.

We feel as though the previous midterms did not prepare us for the difficulty of the final, because of how simplistic they were. You will see that many students did not answer questions, such as #20 on the final because it was a very difficult question unlike other midterms and this did not help set us up. We believe that many questions had an unreasonable choice of numbers that were just confusing us, which made them very hard without a calculator.

Another concern that many students had was that there was no clear indication of what this final exam will cover, and again as opposed to other midterms we were indeed given that information which enabled us to succeed but with none of that for the final, we were not prepared.

This Final exam will be worth 29% and even 39% for some, and many students struggled from the above reasons mentioned. We are signing this petition to try and do anything we can to help improve our grade at this point. If it is possible we would motion for any opportunity to improve our grade such as exam corrections, curving the final, or working extra credit.

One final note from me, I studied relentlessly for this test and only slept 3 hours on the day of the test all while fasting. It was very difficult for me to study everything altogether for this final because it was not clear what will be on it and yet still that final was more challenging than all the work I put in. This is my experience and I believe many others do share it. We are serious and we hope you can understand our petition, Thank you.

Signed, your students