Policies and support

How the safety rules work, who sees the records you make about yourself, and why marks never depend on whether your day improved.

Three of these are specific to this course and worth reading before week 1: what happens when a lab asks you to change something about your own day, who sees the records you make while doing it, and what the marks are actually awarded for. The rest are the ordinary university policies, stated briefly so you know they apply here too.

Safety, stopping rules and alternatives#

Four of the twelve labs ask you to change something about your sleep, your eating or your caffeine, and others ask you to look hard at a record of yourself. Every lab above the lowest risk level carries three things, printed on the page itself rather than collected here:

• a stopping rule, the point at which you stop, stated before the protocol
• a limit, what the exercise must never turn into
• an alternative protocol, a different way to learn the same method that asks nothing of your body

Taking the alternative costs you no marks. It needs no reason, no medical evidence and no conversation. Tell your tutor you are taking the alternative, or do not tell anyone and just submit it; both are fine. In week 11 the alternative is arguably the better exercise.

If a protocol worries you and you are not sure whether it should, ask the convenor. You do not need a reason ready in order to ask.

Stopping early is a result, not a failure, and a report that says “the stopping rule fired on day three and here is what that tells me” is assessed as a finding.

The records you make are yours#

This course asks you to write down a lot about your own life: when you slept, what you ate, how often you reached for your phone, how you felt at four in the afternoon. That is unusually personal for a first-year course and it deserves a policy rather than an assumption.

• Your raw records are read by your tutor and nobody else. They are not circulated, not kept after marks are finalised, and not used as examples without asking you first.
• What gets pooled is agreed in advance. Two labs use class-wide data: week 9 pools week 5 records to show regression to the mean, and week 11 uses a synthetic dataset. Anything pooled is stripped of names before it reaches the room, and you can withdraw your own records from the pool at any point, before or after the lab, without giving a reason.
• You may redact. If part of your day is nobody’s business, write “redacted” and move on. You will not be marked down for it, and being able to say what you chose not to record is explicitly assessed in week 1.
• Nothing here is clinical. No one teaching this course is qualified to read your sleep data as a health record, and nobody will try. If something you measure worries you, that is a conversation for a doctor, and the university’s health service is the right first stop.

Marks follow your reasoning, not your results#

You are assessed on the quality of your inference and never on whether your day got better. This is not modesty about what the course can achieve; it follows from week 9. People start new routines on their worst days, and unusual days are followed by ordinary ones, so almost any intervention appears to work. A course that awarded marks for improvement would be awarding them for arithmetic, and would be teaching the exact error it spends a week dismantling.

So a carefully run experiment that found nothing scores well, and a report concluding “I cannot tell from this data, and here is precisely why” scores well, while a confident claim that the design cannot support scores badly however true the underlying feeling. Null results are written up at the same length and with the same care as positive ones, and the marking criteria make no distinction between them.

Extensions and late work#

Ask before the deadline and extensions are straightforward: email the convenor, no documentation needed for up to five days.

One exception, and it is absolute. A pre-registration cannot be extended once you have begun collecting data. The whole value of the document is that it was written first, and a pre-registration submitted afterwards is not a late pre-registration; it is a different kind of document. If you have started, submit what you have and say when you wrote it.

Academic integrity#

The usual rules apply. The one specific to this course: declare every departure from your pre-registration. Deviating is normal and is not penalised: measures take too long, weeks get eaten, stopping rules fire. Quietly presenting a changed design as the original one is the single thing in this course that reads as dishonest rather than inexperienced.

Your data is your own and cannot be shared between students, for the obvious reason that a sample of one stops meaning anything if it is somebody else’s one.

Getting help#

Start with your tutor in the lab: who runs which lab is listed, along with who to ask first about what. For anything about marks, extensions or the safety of a protocol, go straight to the convenor.