Late work, extensions, academic integrity, safety scope and what to do when something is wrong with a mark or a band.
Policies and support#
Rules that apply across the whole course, so that an assessment brief can link here instead of restating them and getting one of them slightly wrong.
Safety and scope#
This course designs systems. It does not build or operate them.
Nothing in SLOP4761 asks you to construct, plumb, commission, eat from or drink from anything. Every deliverable is a drawing, a calculation or a written justification. If a tutorial activity ever appears to ask otherwise, it is a mistake in the material and you should say so.
That boundary is deliberate. The course works with sanitation, water treatment and fermentation, and each of those has a failure mode that hurts somebody. A design exercise can be as rigorous as we like about them without putting a single student at risk.
Course design rules are not legal requirements#
Several of this course’s rules are stricter than the law at some or all of the five sites, and in a few cases they are stricter than the law everywhere.
Wherever a rule appears on this site it carries its status: a course design rule with its reasoning, or a legal requirement with the jurisdiction and the instrument it comes from. Where the two differ, the page says so.
The obligation this puts on you is simple and it is assessed: state what your own jurisdiction actually requires, and cite the instrument you read. Not a forum post, not a supplier’s page. Week 11’s tutorial runs this as its main activity.
Figures, labels and what you may rely on#
Every number on this site is labelled with its basis:
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Sourced | Taken from a named document, with a citation |
| Course assumption | Set by the course for assessment consistency |
| Indicative cost | From a retail listing, for the costing exercise only |
| Model estimate | An output of the course’s screening model |
| Synthetic data | Generated for teaching. Not a measurement |
The screening model is not a validated engineering design, and its outputs are not predictions of real yields. Reproducing its numbers is part of the work; trusting them outside this course is not.
Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source, the page says that too. Week 3’s mushroom yields are the clearest example: they rest on search summaries, they are labelled, and nothing that is banded depends on them.
Assessment#
Four records, totalling 100 %:
| Item | Weight | When |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorial completion checkpoints, ten at 2 % each | 20 % | Friday of each week from 2 to 11 |
| Five quizzes, 4 % each | 20 % | Weeks 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 |
| Assignment 1 — Year-long Measurement Programme | 20 % | 5 pm Friday of week 7 |
| Assignment 2 — Household Resilience Investment Proposal | 40 % | Assessment period |
There is no oral defence and no examination. The calculations, the supplied findings and the written justification already test whether you understand your own recommendation, and an oral component would add a condition that is hard to apply equally to everyone.
Tutorial checkpoints#
Marked complete or not complete on a good-faith attempt: a legible attempt at every output the tutorial page lists, with assumptions and units shown. Correctness earns written feedback rather than changing the completion mark.
Attendance alone is not completion, and completion does not require attendance — every tutorial page says what to open, what to do and what the output is, so the work can be done independently and submitted by the Friday. The extension and late rules below apply to a 2 % checkpoint exactly as they apply to the 40 % proposal.
Weeks 1 and 12 are ungraded practice.
Quizzes#
Conceptual multiple choice, on paper, at the start of the tutorial. Twenty minutes, no calculators, no numeric working — if a question can be answered by arithmetic it is not on the quiz.
They are spread so that keeping up is worth more than catching up, and none falls in the week Assignment 1 is due.
This website does not collect or store quiz answers. It is a static site with no server behind it. The practice questions on each quiz page reveal their own answers in the browser for your use only; nothing is recorded, marked or transmitted.
Performance bands are not grades#
The reference bands place your reported indicators against your own site’s thresholds. They are evidence inside the marking criteria — they inform Calculations and Loop integration — and nothing converts a band into a mark.
A band 2 design with honest assumptions and a closed balance marks above a band 3 design whose numbers cannot be reproduced.
The bands are recomputed and republished whenever a course constant changes. If that happens mid-semester, the affected thresholds are announced and no work already submitted is re-marked against new ones.
Late work and extensions#
Work is due at the time stated on its brief. Ask for an extension before the deadline and it is routine; ask afterwards and it is not.
Where an extension is granted, the new date is the date. Where circumstances go beyond what an extension covers, use the university’s own process rather than negotiating with the course.
Academic integrity#
The usual rule: the work you submit is yours, and anything that assisted you is declared.
Two things worth saying specifically for this course.
Declare your tools. Spreadsheets, scripts and generative tools are all fine and several are expected. Say what you used and for what. A model that computed your tank balance is a method; an unstated one is a problem.
Assumptions are where the marks are, so make them yours. Two students on the same preset will produce similar parameter sheets, because the preset is the same. They should not produce the same assumptions, the same uncertainty list or the same account of what fails first. Those are the parts being assessed.
If you think a band or a mark is wrong#
Bands first: they are computed by a published method from a published model, so if one looks wrong it is checkable. Bring the numbers to the convenor and we will recompute in front of you. This has happened, and the model has been wrong before.
Marks: raise it with the marker first, then the convenor. A re-mark is a fresh read by a different marker, and the new mark stands whether it is higher or lower.
Getting help#
- Design questions go to your tutorial. The answer is usually useful to more than one person in the room.
- Course-level questions — the price schedule, a client target that looks unreachable, a threshold that looks wrong — go to the convenor.
- Choosing a home. There are five fixed client homes and no others; the choice is made in week 1 from the clients page.
Accessibility adjustments are arranged through the university’s process, and the course accommodates whatever that produces without needing to know why.