MEDICAL CERTIFICATES

Updated 22 August 2013:

Those students who seek to be exempted from a late penalty for overdue essays, on medical grounds (illness or serious injury), must pay close attention to the following set of instructions taken from the Faculty of Arts and Science Calendar and website:

• The Faculty seeks documentation that provides pertinent evidence for decisions determining whether or not an exception should be made to regulations that are designed to ensure equitable treatment for all students.

• Medical Documentation: The University of Toronto 'Verification of Student Illness or Injury' form (revised in January 2013) must be submitted in support of a request for an exemption from Faculty regulations, if illness is being used as the reason for the request. The claim of illness, however, is not sufficient grounds in itself to guarantee approval of the request.

• This certificate is available here as a PDF file.

• Download and print this form, and have the attending physican fill out and sign the form, which you (the student) must then complete, with your own printed name, student number, signature, and date. Note that the physician’s report must establish that the patient was examined and diagnosed at the time of illness, not after the fact.

• To repeat: Both you and your physician must sign and date this document; and your physician must supply his/her full address (stamp, business card, or letterhead are all acceptable), medical registration number (CPSO) and his/her telephone number; and he/she must specifically answer, in full, all of the required questions. If this document is in anyway incomplete, it will not be accepted.

• The Faculty will not accept any medical statement that merely confirms a report of illness made by the student and documented by the physician.

• Please note this official university regulation to the effect that 'Other medical notes will be not be accepted.' I am now forced to make a significant exception: for the Health Service of the University of Toronto Koffler Student Services Centre, which issues its own certificate and thus refuses to use the official University of Toronto Student Medical Certificate, described above. So, I will accept either of these two University or Toronto certificates; but I will accept no other certificates. Please do not give me a personal form supplied by your own doctor: it will not be accepted.

• For my own purposes, I require medical authentication of an illness or injury that commenced before the official due for the essay and that also extended right up to the day of submission of a late essay. Thus if the medical certificate refers to an illness or injury that occurred some days or weeks before the late essay is actually submitted, I will not accept it, unless the doctor or other medical authorities can authenticate that the medical disability continued until the day or eve of the submission; and furthemore, that the said doctor personally treated the patient from the beginning of the period of illness or injury specified and up to the very date on which the medical certificate was signed. I note, with some dismay, that the Koffler medical certificate has no such provisions included; and if students do not have the doctor specify the exact and full period of personal treatment, I will reject the certificate. BE WARNED!!

• Registration of all student absences on ROSI: This is a new regulation: that all students must go online to their account on ROSI and formally register all absences.

Medical certificates for depression:

• By far the most common medical excuse that I receive is for 'depression' or 'anxiety', including inability to sleep, eat, or work -- i.e., to do university assignments (though many such students actually hold a paying job). Nobody questions that depression is a common and widespread phenomenom. Most of us -- including me -- have suffered or do suffer from some form of depression. And many doctors will assert that depression can be or become a serious mental illness.

• The problem that we professors face, however, is the actual conditions and causes for the supposed depression are almost never specified, let alone documented. I thus reserve the right to reject certificates contending that the medical cause of the student's inability to produce an essay, etc. is 'depression', unless more specific evidence is provided. I absolutely demand that any such certificate specify clearly that the physican or other medical official who signs the document has personally treated the patient from the beginning of the specified period of depression. Our problem here is that so many doctors will sign a certificate attesting to a depression that they have never or only recently treated, by accepting the student's own word. We will not accept such a student claim.

• Furthermore, a student who seeks an exemption for a late penalty on the basis of a medical certificate concerning such a 'depression' must inform me of that medical problem and that medical excuse within one week of the official due date of the essay. Every year, I receive such medical certificates for 'depression' with a petition for an exemption of the late penalty for the first-term essay -- an essay submitted to me only at the end of classes. I will not accept any such letter and will not exempt any such students from the full late penalty (19 or 20 weeks, at 3 marks per week), if that student had not informed me of his or her condition by mid-December at the latest. Nor will I accept any such medical certificates concerning 'depression' and exempt students from late penalties on the second-term and/or third essay, if, to repeat clearly, that student had not informed me, or had someone inform me, of that condition within one week of the formal due date. I may decide to modify the late penalty, but I will not omit the penalty.

• Obviously, if a student presents a medical certificate attesting to hospitalization as treatment for depression (with a hospital certificate), that or those certificates will be accepted without question, provided, of course, that they contain the required information and signature(s).