Academic Standards

Independent official third-party letters(s) must support the student's extenuating circumstances claim.

The burden of proof to support the appeal/waiver always lies with the student.

Supporting documentation presented by students must meet the following standards:

1. Written by qualified professionals (independent of the student) with first-hand knowledge of the extenuating circumstance.
2. The Letter MUST:
   • be on official letterheaded.
   • be signed and dated by the designated professional(s).
   • supporting documentation presented by email may be acceptable if the author has sent the email from the organization's domain name.
   • The official letter must confirm that the extenuating circumstances occurred, and it must provide relevant date(s) instead of being self-reported by the student.
3. Students should note that Weigel Health Center and the Counseling Center will unlikely be able to provide documentation if the student has had no active engagement for service(s).
4. The student must be engaged with the office/service during the affected semester(s) to secure official documentation to support the appeal/waiver. 
5. For any death in the family, the student must provide:
   • a death certificate, or 
   • grief counseling documentation, or
   • obituatry and evidence that the deceased person is related to the student, i.e., name listed in the funeral program.
   • NOTE: Federal aid considers immediate family as mother, father, legal guardians, your children, and siblings only. 
6. All supporting documentation must be in English.
   • It is the student's responsibility to provide supporting documentation, and any translation should be by an accredited translator (i.e., the International Insitute of Buffalo).  
7. The student may not alter ANY documentation.
   • Documentation amended for any reason will be deemed inadmissible and may be subject to investigation under the Academic Misconduct Procedure 
8. File types for attachments.Our online system accepts a variety of file types for uploading documentation. If you upload a document outside of these, it will cause a delay in the processing of your appeal (you will have to resubmit it in the approved types).   

• bmp (Bitmap Image File)
• .gif (Graphical Interchange Format File)
• .jpg and .jpeg (JPEG Image)
• .pdf (Portable Document Format file)
• .doc and .docx (Microsoft Word documents)

Apple iOS users: our system does NOT accept HEIC (High-Efficiency Image Format) files. Please convert them to a .jpeg or another accepted file format.

For multimedia users, we do not accept HEIF and HEVC formats.

We DO NOT take any videos, pictures, x-rays, sonograms, or any recordings (audio or visual) as documentation. 

The Academic Standards Office reserves the right to take such steps as are deemed necessary to verify the evidence submitted without student notification. If the appeal/waiver is not accepted, the SAP Committee reserves the right to request the original documents to approve/deny the student's appeal/waiver request.

If there is evidence that a student has fraudulently presented documentation, the Director of Academic Standards reserves the right to consider it under the Colleges Academic Misconduct regulations. Additionally, if applying for a waiver, the Financial Aid Office must report suspected fraud cases to the Office of Inspector (OIG) General for further investigation.