OP- you are not going to believe me but I’ll post this anyway- there are tens of thousands of people working in the medical device field who are NOT engineers. These companies have departments of finance, marketing, human resources, government relations, corporate strategy, strategic communications, etc. Even the R&D departments likely have folks with degrees in statistics/applied math (very important for designing clinical trials) who are NOT engineers. Even a high tech team of engineers who create and test composite materials rely on a purchasing department to figure out how to buy titanium or how to hedge the price fluctuations in aluminum to assure a steady supply of a mission critical component.
If you expand out of companies who develop and make devices into the allied field- hospitals which test new devices, lobbying firms which employ people who figure out which congressional sub-committee will have the power to fund or de-fund a particular federal program, etc. you are now talking about tens of thousands MORE people who focus on medical devices who do not have engineering degrees.
So sure- do your level best to stay the course. But you are sabotaging yourself if you’ve decided that the one and only path that will work for you is engineering.
I get at least one of these every semester. I call them the “special pleadings” and I hate it. I never boost a student’s grade because of their pleadings. Perhaps this professor will have more sympathy, but for the sake of your actual education I hope not.
You can ask for anything, but do not count on getting an incomplete. Your situation doesn’t fit the criteria, and most professors HATE dealing with incompletes.
According to their website, the student has to be passing in order to get an incomplete. I think that’s standard at a lot of schools.
Where I went to college you had to request an incomplete BEFORE the term ended…not after you got a failing grade.
In addition, incompletes were granted only when the student had work to complete,fr a course and was not able to get it done prior to the end of the term. Incompletes were not grated after a student failed a course.
This student never mentioned incomplete work. He mentions failing the course.
^ Those are the criteria I mentioned. In addition, a student needs a compelling good reason (such as illness) for not completing the work.
The two most recent incompletes I assigned were to a woman recovering from a stroke and a man with severe anxiety. Both let me know they were struggling long before the end of the semester.
That was my concern too. I wasn’t even sure that it was even possible for a professor to change a grade this long after the semester is over. It’s also problematic because it’s hard to really think of a reason/excuse why this is being discussed now, after the course is over, if it wasn’t mentioned at all before grades were in. The letter makes it sound as if the student was struggling the entire time; it wasn’t as if the final exam was the first bad grade.
I think it honestly makes more sense to work on an appeal just because it might be hard to get an incomplete at this stage even if the professor was willing to assign one and it might be hard to justify one this long after the class ended.