The course-wide rules for extensions, accessibility, AI assistance, academic integrity and the ethics of studying real waits.
Assessment briefs link back to these rules rather than restating them; if a brief and this page ever disagree, this page is the one that’s current.
Assessment and extensions#
Each assessment is due at the time stated on its page. Ask for an extension by email before the deadline, naming the new date you need; extensions requested after a deadline has passed need a documented medical or compassionate reason. Work submitted late without an agreed extension loses 5% of its available mark per day, including weekends, until it reaches zero.
Accessibility#
If a course requirement — a live session, a due date, a fieldwork component — conflicts with an access need, tell the convenor as early as you can, ideally before Week 4. Alternative formats and adjusted arrangements are agreed individually and in confidence; there’s no separate form to fill in first.
AI assistance#
You may use AI tools to help build, code or edit this site, and to talk through an idea before you write it up — declare that assistance briefly in the relevant submission, the same way you’d declare any other help. What you may not do is let a tool invent the substance of your work: a wait you didn’t observe, a source you haven’t read, or a number you can’t point to in your own notes. An assignment that reports something you didn’t actually see or find is a misconduct matter regardless of how it was produced.
Academic integrity#
The Week 1 wait-observation log is a personal record — expect to compare notes with classmates, but write your own interpretation of your own observations. Every claim drawn from Block & Zakay, Block, Hancock & Zakay, Hui & Tse, Pruyn & Smidts or Maister must be attributed to that source, not presented as your own finding. Submitting someone else’s account of a wait as your own observation is treated the same as any other plagiarism.
Experiment ethics#
Week 10’s Waiting Experiment and Week 12’s Waiting Audit both involve studying a real wait, so both are bound by the same constraint:
- default to self-observation, a simulation, or a controlled interface/prototype;
- only run a live intervention on a real waiting system when it is genuinely low-risk, non-disruptive, privacy-preserving, and authorised wherever authorisation is needed — never disrupt an actual clinic, emergency-service or similarly essential queue to test an idea;
- name your own confounds and limitations in the write-up;
- never present a small observational or intervention exercise as strong causal proof — describe what it does and doesn’t show.
The Waiting Experiment and Waiting Audit briefs both point back to this policy rather than restating it.