The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.
Policies and support#
These are the rules specific to SLOP6608. The university’s own rules still apply; nothing below replaces them. What follows is the part a general policy cannot cover, because it concerns a text that is easier to paraphrase than to find.
What counts as a citation#
A citation names the 卷, and for the five 山經 (Shānjīng, the Mountains chapters) chapters the 次 section and the mountain or water the record is filed under. It quotes the line character for character, in the traditional forms the edition prints. The edition this course reads is the 四庫全書 text of the 山海經 (Shānhǎijīng) with 郭璞’s commentary, as transcribed at Wikisource. Any complete edition is acceptable if you name the one you used.
Transliterating a quotation into simplified characters is altering it. The course’s own prose is simplified; quoted lines are not. So 肥遗 (féiyí) in a sentence and 肥遺 inside a quoted line are both correct, in their places.
When you cannot find the line#
Mark the entry verified: false, say where you looked, and stop.
This is not penalised. It is the correct result, and in several cases the only honest one. An unverified entry claims nothing after that point: no omen, no use, no confident prose around the gap. Marked that way it is a complete submission and can score full marks.
What is penalised is filling the gap. Supplying a plausible line, reconstructing one from a translation, or paraphrasing into quotation marks is fabrication of evidence, and it is treated as misconduct rather than as a citation error. The rule applies to staff exactly as it applies to students: two of this course’s weekly lines were wrong until the edition was opened, and the corrections are recorded rather than quietly made.
Translations and the edition#
Read translations. Birrell, Strassberg and the annotated Chinese editions are all useful, and a translation may sit beside a quotation in your work.
A translation may not stand in place of one. The disagreements this course is built on — a tail that changes between two records, a name that arrives without a body — are exactly the details a translator has to resolve in order to produce readable English. The resolution is the translator’s argument, not the text.
AI assistance#
Use of an assistant is permitted and must be declared, in a short note naming the tool and what it did.
The declaration is not the check. The check is that you can locate any line you cited, in the edition, while someone watches. Assistants generate Classic of Mountains and Seas quotations fluently and incorrectly, and a fabricated line is the one failure this course is guaranteed to find, because every citation in every submission is looked up. A line that cannot be found is unverified and unpenalised, provided you declared it so before the marker found it.
Assistance with English prose, structure and formatting is unrestricted, and still declared.
Late work#
Five percent of the available marks per day, to five days, after which the work is not marked. Extensions are granted for the usual reasons, through the usual form, and asking early costs nothing.
The specimen cards are the exception worth stating. They are a running submission written across twelve weeks, and a late hand-in of the set attracts the ordinary penalty. Cards written in the last fortnight are not late and are not a misconduct matter. They simply do not work, because twelve cards written at once all sort by the same rule.
Being wrong#
A well-argued reclassification the marker disagrees with scores above an unargued one the marker shares.
This is a policy and not encouragement. The course’s answer to its own question is that the system can be built partly, and that the failures carry more of the argument than the successes. Work is marked on the argument, the evidence and the declared cost of holding a position, not on arriving at the reading the convenor happens to hold. For 肥遗 and for 窫窳 (yàyǔ) there is no such reading.
Getting help#
Ask in the session, or by email to the convenor. Questions about whether a line is really in the edition are always worth asking and never count against you.