魔鬼心腸: 200810

all written and sent this semester, between aug-oct 08.
for your enjoyment.

1. Written after ADM IT Department fines me $200 for late return of wacom tablet (actual fine $520 but capped at $200) :

Hi Darren,

I would like to appeal my late return fines of $200 because of the following reasons :

1. $200 is a ridiculously outrageous sum of money for a fine incurred for something that has been in my possession for less than a month. It is also a sum that i can neither spare nor easily obtain, me being a full-time student and having to pay $3152.80 in school fees this semester in cash.

2. I think it's outrageous that a school can fine a fee paying student anything more than $50.

3. I do not approve of the $20 per late day fine. The amount is incredulous. One can hit $200 in fines in 10 days. That is $200 in less than 2 weeks. And one can hit $100 in fines in 5 days. That is $100 in less than 1 week. The amount is incredulous. Especially for a school. Especially for students who are both unemployed and paying school fees. I'm against it and i think it should be amended.

4. I was not aware of the $20 per late day fine until i was told when i returned the tablet that i now had to pay a $520 fine. Believe me If i had known that there was a fine of $20 per late day i would have returned it on time. Perhaps it was in the fine print of the checkout sheet that i signed, but i did not see it and was basically utterly unaware of the penalty. While you can say I deserve it for blindness on my part, i do think that at the rate of $20 per late day more warnings should have been given, perhaps verbally, and care taken to ensure that borrowers are actually aware of such a penalty since they could easily in a matter of days run up a $100 fine. Unless of course the intention is to generate profit from fines in which case it is a highly effective technique.

5. In the past few semesters since the school opened, i used to borrow things and keep them all semester long and return them at the end of each semester. Then last semester i went on exchange to Hong Kong. When i got back and borrowed that valuable tablet, i assumed things were as they were before. But clearly the system has changed, and i have only just been made aware of it with this $200 fine. Again, i think that at $20 per late day, somebody should have made sure everybody understood the presence of such a penalty, preferably before they incurred $200 in fines.

6. When my fines reached $100, nobody cared to inform me. And then it hit $200 and still nobody informed me. And so it ended up at $500 and I was still unaware of the existence of the $20 per day penalty. I only returned the tablet because i wanted to borrow a camera. The National Library sends us warnings via post when we incur fines of more than $6. And you'd have to keep a borrowed book for a few years before you can even accumulate a fine of $500. Again, believe me, if i had been told that i had incurred a fine of even just $20, i would have dropped everything to go return that tablet right away. If i had been aware that i had a fine of $40, i would have even run. I can't accept suddenly being asked to pay $200 in fines when it was not even brought to my attention that fines were accumulating with every passing day, and furthermore at such a horrific rate of $20 per late day.

Therefore i plead that i was unaware of the penalty system and ask to be let off this time without having to pay the fine for this tablet and promise that i will return all equipment punctually from now on.

If my appeal to you here gets rejected for whatever reason, i will continue to appeal upwards until i regain access to the equipment I'm paying school fees for.
Because $200 in fines in really too much.

Please do consider my appeal.
Thank you.

Sincerely,
angry pissed off me.

Consequence : Fines reduced to $20.

2. Written after Dean emails me to say that subjects that i took on exchange that were listed "approved" on online system can not be approved after all because it was an "unfortunate oversight" of the one that approved it :

Dear Russell,

We took these courses because they had been listed as APPROVED as STS courses on the INSTEP subject matching module.
Again, please let me emphasize that, if they had not been approved, i would not have taken them and would have taken something else that could have been cleared as STS instead.
For example, some of the subjects I had chosen to take initially were listed as NOT APPROVED, and so I didn't take them and took the ones that were listed as APPROVED instead.

We made our choices based on the trust that the INSTEP module, being an official school system, was the official means for us to know whether or not the subjects we were taking overseas would be transferable to the NTU system, so that we would not waste time taking subjects overseas that would be useless to our degree advancement.

It was not made known to us that the Chair of ADM would have the final say and ability to override the INSTEP subject matching module or i would have definitely checked with the Chair of ADM to ensure that the subjects i had chosen were really approved or approvable before spending a whole semester taking these subjects.

Also, many of us exchange students sent emails to Julie in the early weeks of our exchange asking if ADM could approve our subjects on the online subject matching module and we were told that we needed to get verbal approval in person from the ADM staff for ADM courses and approval from the other schools for non-ADM courses. There was no mention about us needing the approval of ADM for the non-ADM courses at all.

So in other words, it is not really our fault that the courses are now not accepted because to us, for the past 7 months, they had been listed on the INSTEP subject matching module as APPROVED.
And we took these courses simply because they had been listed as APPROVED.
And it would be quite unfair for us to have to pay the penalty for the unfortunate oversight in the system when we had been making our choices based on what we thought WAS the system all this while.

I say it is a penalty because (after you put in all the other subjects taken on exchange and this semester), i have only 1 untaken major prescribed elective/unrestricted elective slot left.

Which means, because i do not see how the 3 newly unapproved STS subjects i took on exchange are going to be able to fit in that one slot and because i was hoping to use that last slot to complete the last Performing Arts module i need to clear to register for a Performing Arts minor, i will thus have to take an additional 3 modules next semester on top of the +1AU module required to graduate which would bring me to taking 10 subjects in total next semester, which include FYP, Production II, Producing, Professional Practice and now 3 science subjects, which is really impossible to handle, not only intellectually but also because it will undoubtedly be a scheduling nightmare.

And staying on in NTU at the cost of $3000++ for another 1 semester just to complete the 3 STS modules is totally out of the question because i do not have $3000+ and will not be able to attain $3000+ if i continue being a student and do not see why i have to pay an extra $3000+ when that 3 STS subjects i had taken had clearly been listed as APPROVED all the while when i was on exchange and even for the next few months after i came back.

My point really is, Academic Chair of ADM should have made their decision earlier.
It is rather late to say now that the subjects are invalid because there is no easy way out of the situation, whereas there had been had Academic Chair of ADM made their stand earlier.

Can you really, in good conscience, expect a student to go through the hell of taking 10 subjects a semester or expect a student to graduate later than expected and at an additional cost of $3000++, just because of an unfortunate oversight of the school, which had nothing to do with the student at all?

My plea to you is that you let us clear those subjects as STS and accept that the ADM exchange system/timeline for last semester had its failings and learn from it and come up with a better system for the semesters ahead, instead of penalizing us, the first batch of exchange students from ADM ever, who had no clear instructions/system to follow other than that that was provided to us by INSTEP, which we followed.

So really, please do consider my plea.
If not i will keep appealing upwards till i get a satisfactory solution, because right now i simply can't see/accept why i to pay time/effort/money for this unfortunate oversight of the school.

Sincerely,
angry pissed off me

Consequence : Dean approves unapproved "approved" subjects.

3. Written on the student feedback system about the professors after they created a FYP system where i had no individual FYP to do :

feedback for Prof A of FYP Class :
He has not taught me anything. All he has done is insulted my ideas and denied me the chance to do my own film for the FYP. I feel like he makes comments about my ideas at whim in the moment of presentation and does not put deeper thought into how his comments will help me to improve my ideas or how his decisions will affect my career and portfolio. And reasons like "we do not have time to grade so many different FYPs" is not valid enough a reason for me to accept why i cannot do my own FYP since i'm paying school fees anyway.The benefit of his presence in this class to me is simplynonexistant

feedback for Prof B of FYP Class :
She has not taught me anything. We have had only 5 actual classes for this course and it was all students pitching ideas so basically none of the professors taught anything. She says things at whim at the moment of presentation but does not seem to being giving concrete advice/information/knowledge that i can possibly apply to improving myself or my work. I have nothing else to say because i don't even feel like i've been taught by her at all. If she had anything to do with lesson planning then i would say : very lousy class planning, class does not benefit me at all.

feedback for Prof C of FYP Class
He taught nothing in the class. Kept talking about the changes to the FYP system. Utterly confused everyone with what was the system and what was expected. Instructions changed every week. Kept telling us they (the profs) "have been discussing this and we don't know how this is going to work out". Class in awkward silence. At the beginning told us all of us could make our own FYPs and pitching was just for sharing of ideas. One day just tells us we have to vote for 9 films. My film wasn't selected and then i never saw him again. Just like the rest of the professors for this class.

Consequence : Pending because i just wrote these one hour ago but anyway i really hope they poke gai.

so in summary this is why i now kinda hate my school.
and maybe why you should just give me what i want.

魔鬼心腸

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My complaint letters to NTU

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On holiday