The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

Policies and support#

Choosing a specimen#

Your restaurant must have a verifiable closure date, an independently findable address, and at least three sources that don’t all trace back to the same person (a review site, a news mention, a health-inspection record, a delivery-app cache, a “permanently closed” map listing). A restaurant that closed because its parent chain collapsed for unrelated reasons is not eligible — the point is a single location’s failure, not a corporate decision made somewhere else. Once you’ve cleared your specimen with a tutor in week 1, you can’t swap it later in the semester; a mid-semester swap resets your Specimen Dossier mark to zero, because half a semester of compounding evidence is the thing being marked.

Sourcing and citation#

Every claim in your Autopsy Report needs a source a marker can check — a link, a screenshot with its URL and access date, or an archive.org capture. An uncited claim about why the restaurant closed is treated as speculation, not evidence, however plausible it sounds.

Extensions#

Ask before a deadline, not after it. An extension arranged in advance is routine; a submission that simply arrives late is not accepted. Say what happened and how much time you need — a specific request is easy to grant quickly.

Academic integrity#

The specimen must be a real, independently verifiable restaurant. Inventing a restaurant, or inventing evidence about a real one, is not a shortcut through the workload — it’s the one thing this course cannot be about and still be this course. Declare any AI assistance the same way the rest of COMP4020 does: what you asked for, and what you kept.

Getting help#

Stuck on a source that won’t resolve, a lens that isn’t landing on your specimen, or a disagreement with a peer reviewer you can’t settle yourselves? Ask in the week’s Autopsy first — that’s what the time is for — or email a tutor listed on the people page.