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The University's Academic Appeals procedure is the process you can use to change a finalised mark or degree classification, and you can also challenge academic decisions such as withdrawal from studies, or a transfer to MPhil (if you are a PhD student).

Other decisions, like disciplinary, academic misconduct and academic progress decisions, can be appealed under different procedures. For these cases, read our related articles and contact LUU Advice as early as possible.

You can only appeal against finalised marks. If you disagree with a provisional mark that you got for an assessment, you should contact your School for feedback in the first instance.

Once your results have been published online or you have received your decision in writing, you will have 20 working days to submit your appeal.

The grounds for appeal are the only basis upon which you can appeal. These are:

a) There were relevant mitigating circumstances (for example, illness), and you have a good reason for failing to notify the examiners of these sooner (taught students).

b) You did notify the examiners earlier about mitigating circumstances or some other disruption of the assessment process, but you believe that the examiners or the examining body did not give sufficient consideration to this information (taught students).

c) The assessment was conducted unfairly or improperly or the assessment of your achievement was biased.

d) A material procedural irregularity has occurred in the processing of your assessment or results.

e) The supervision of your postgraduate research (postgraduate researchers) or Final Year Project or dissertation (taught students) was unsatisfactory.

f) The decision to refuse a suspension or extension of study was unreasonable (postgraduate researchers).

Appeals against the academic judgement of the examiner are not accepted. This means that unless you have strong evidence that the marking procedure for your course was not followed, you cannot just appeal because you don’t think the mark is correct and would like it to be remarked.

If you’re looking to change your final degree classification, your appeal likely won’t be processed before your graduation but you can still attend this as a celebratory event. You should inform the Graduation Office (graduation@leeds.ac.uk) if you intend to appeal, to prevent your award being conferred shortly after your celebration date.

You may want to appeal against the outcome of a mitigating circumstances application. You cannot appeal against this directly. Instead, you need to wait for the academic result to come out for the module(s) in question, and if you failed due to your mitigating circumstances request being rejected, you should appeal this finalised mark under ground b).

If you are a Research Postgraduate who wants to appeal, please read our related articles before getting in touch with LUU Advice for further support.

See here for an outline of the appeals process and to get an idea of how long it takes.

If you’re not sure how your situation fits into the procedure, come and speak to an Advisor.