The course-wide rules for conduct, communication, attendance, academic integrity, extensions and appeals.
Policies#
Background expectations#
This course assumes you can already write and read code; it does not teach programming from scratch. What it does teach — reading a system’s incentives from the outside, running your own fieldwork, and arguing a policy position from evidence — gets built up week by week, so the material does not assume you have done anything like it before.
Code of conduct#
Treat everyone in the room — classmates, tutors, guest speakers — the way you would want to be treated in a workplace: no put-downs, no talking over people, no treating a strong opinion about platform labour as licence to be rude about the people who hold the opposite one. Disagreement is the point of a lot of this course’s material; disrespect is not.
Academic integrity#
Your fieldwork must be your own observations of a real app on a real order — do not fabricate an ETA reading or invent a workaround you didn’t document. Quoting or summarising the Trapped in the System case, the Fair Work determinations, or any other source without attribution is treated as a breach, whether or not it was intentional. When in doubt about how to cite something, ask rather than guess.
Communication#
Questions about a week’s content or an assessment brief go to the teaching team listed on the people page. If a question affects more than one person, ask it publicly rather than by email — the answer usually belongs to everyone in the room. Expect a reply within two working days; anything urgent enough to need a faster answer is urgent enough to raise in person at the next tutorial.
Tutorial attendance#
Attendance at your enrolled tutorial isn’t marked on its own, but weeks 2–11 each carry a graded checkpoint that is checked live at the start of that week’s tutorial — miss the tutorial and you miss the checkpoint, with no same-day retake. Turning up prepared is the only way to bank that 2%, so treat attendance as load-bearing even though it isn’t a line item in the marking scheme.
Assignment effort#
Word and page limits in an assessment brief are ceilings, not targets — a shorter answer that meets every spec item outscores a longer one that pads around it. Markers grade what the spec asks for; effort that goes somewhere the spec doesn’t point is effort the rubric can’t reward.
The week 12 redeemable checkpoint#
Week 12’s tutorial carries one optional redeemable checkpoint, open to everyone — no form, no reason required. You respond to any earlier week’s checkpoint prompt you like, not necessarily one you missed, and it’s checked live exactly like an ordinary checkpoint. It replaces your lowest-scoring earlier checkpoint, but only if that checkpoint scored 0%, and only up to its usual 2 percentage points — it cannot push your checkpoint total above 20%. One checkpoint, once: however many you missed or scored zero on, this covers at most one of them. If you already know you’ll miss a week, treat week 12 as where you make it up rather than chasing a same-week swap.
Extensions#
Ask before the due time, not after. A short, specific reason is enough — you do not need to disclose more than you’re comfortable with. Extensions are granted for the assessment as a whole, not per criterion, and only for the three graded assessments — weekly checkpoints are covered by the week 12 redeemable checkpoint above instead.
Special consideration#
If circumstances outside your control — illness, misadventure, caring responsibilities — affect your ability to complete an assessment, tell the teaching team as soon as you reasonably can, ideally before the due date rather than after. Special consideration is assessed case by case; the usual outcome is an extension, but where that isn’t workable an alternative arrangement can be agreed instead.
Appeals#
If you think a mark is wrong, raise it informally with whoever marked it first — most disagreements are a misreading of the rubric on one side or the other, and get resolved in that conversation. If it isn’t resolved that way, escalate in writing to the course convenor within ten working days of the mark being released, citing the specific rubric line you’re disputing.
Getting help#
Beyond the communication channel above, the people page lists who to ask about what, and lectures and tutorials link back to it whenever a specific person owns that week’s material.