Policies and support
The course-wide rules on late work, extensions, integrity and tool use, plus where to go when something has gone wrong.
Everything here applies to all four assessments, so the individual briefs link back to this page rather than restating it.
Late work and extensions#
Work submitted without an extension loses 5% of the available marks per working day or part thereof, and is not accepted after ten working days past the due date.
Request an extension on or before the due date, by email to the convenor. You do not need to explain a medical or personal circumstance in detail; a sentence saying an extension is needed and roughly why is enough. Requests made after the deadline has passed are harder to grant, not because the rule is punitive but because the marking is usually underway.
The week 2 position statement is the exception. It cannot be extended past the end of week 3, because its whole function is to record what you thought before the course changed your mind. A position statement written in week 8 is not late — it’s a different document, and it can’t do the job the week 11 revision needs it to do.
Academic integrity#
The usual rule holds: the work you submit is yours, and anything that isn’t is cited. The University’s policy governs and this page does not soften it.
One thing is specific to this course. You are responsible for every evidence grade you assign. If you mark a claim as established and it turns out the literature is split, that is an error in your work, in the same way a miscalculation would be — not a matter of opinion. This applies however you arrived at the grade.
Tools#
Use whatever tools you like, including language models, and you do not need to declare it.
That permission comes with a constraint that is not a formality. The course assesses whether you can tell a supported claim from a satisfying one. A tool that produces fluent, plausible, uncited prose is very good at generating exactly the failure this course is about, and it cannot grade evidence for you — it can only report that something sounds right, which is the thing we spend twelve weeks learning not to trust.
Two assessments are built with this in mind. The revision memo asks what changed your mind about your own earlier writing, against a document timestamped in week 2. The cognitive profile asks for claims about a real organism that must survive being checked against the papers you cite. Neither is impossible to fake. Both are more work to fake than to do.
Getting help#
Ask the person closest to the problem first.
- Organism choice, the comparative weeks, the profile — Rosalind Achebe
- The quizzes, the certainty scale, reading methods sections — Tuyet Nabarro
- Assessment, extensions, marks, evidence grades — Halvard Emms
If that does not resolve it, or if the problem is with one of us, the School office is the next step, and the University’s student assistance services sit behind that. Nothing in this course is worth a semester of your health.
If you think the site is wrong#
This course publishes evidence grades on contested claims, and some of them will age badly or are already arguable. If you think one is wrong, tell the convenor. Corrections get made and attributed, and finding one is a better demonstration of what the course teaches than any assessment on this page.