The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.
Policies and support#
The rules below apply across both assessments and every teaching week. An assessment brief may link here rather than restate them.
Late work#
Written work submitted after its deadline loses 5 percentage points of the available mark for each day, or part of a day, it is late. Work submitted more than seven days after the deadline is not marked and receives zero, unless an extension was granted in advance. The penalty is calculated on the mark the work would otherwise have received.
Extensions#
An extension is a change to a deadline agreed before that deadline passes. To request one, contact the teaching team in writing before the due date and state the new date you are asking for; a request submitted after the deadline is treated as a late-work case instead, not an extension. Extensions are granted for circumstances outside your control — illness, bereavement, a documented emergency — and are not granted for workload or time management alone, in keeping with the course’s own argument that time is a pressure to be planned against, not an excuse. Where circumstances are ongoing rather than a single event, ask for accommodation as early as possible rather than at the deadline.
Academic integrity#
Both assessments ask for your own account of a dish you invented and your own preparation of it. Submitting a recipe, a nutritional breakdown or a written account substantially produced by someone else, by an AI tool, or copied from a published source, and presenting it as your own reasoning, is treated as fabrication. Group discussion of technique is expected — this course teaches shared, checkable methods, not secret ones — but the written account and the practical execution must be your own. Cite any source you draw a specific figure or method from, the same way the teaching material cites its sources.
Allergies and dietary requirements#
Because the final assessment involves cooking and eating in front of others, declare any food allergy, intolerance or dietary requirement to the teaching team before week 6, when ingredient lists for the practical weeks are confirmed. Where an allergen is present in a shared teaching kitchen, equipment and preparation surfaces used for that ingredient are kept separate from other stations for the remainder of the session, and the ingredient is listed before tasting is offered to anyone. No student is required to taste or handle an ingredient they have declared a reaction to; an alternative ingredient or a written substitute is arranged instead. Declaring a requirement does not affect marking — the assessment examines preparation decisions, not which ingredients you were assigned.
Kitchen safety#
The teaching kitchen is a shared workspace and its rules apply to everyone in the room regardless of experience:
- Closed-toe, closed-heel shoes and hair tied back at all times; no loose sleeves, scarves or hanging jewellery near a blade, a flame or a machine with moving parts.
- A knife is carried point-down, at your side, and announced (“knife”) when passed or when moving behind someone. It is never left blade-up in a sink or under water where the next hand to find it can’t see it.
- Raw poultry, raw red meat and produce eaten raw are kept on separate boards and never share a knife between uses without washing in between — the same cross-contamination rule week 10 covers as course content.
- Report a cut, a burn or a near-miss to the teaching team immediately, however minor; first aid supplies and a fire extinguisher are located at the kitchen entrance and their location is pointed out in week 1.
- Follow the teaching team’s instruction to stop immediately if asked — this overrides any instruction elsewhere in the course material.
Missing the week 12 live test#
Week 12 is an assessed practical performed in front of an audience under time constraint and cannot be re-created informally, so non-attendance is handled as a deferral rather than a late submission. If you cannot attend for a documented reason (illness, bereavement, a clash you could not have avoided), contact the teaching team before the session where possible, or as soon as you are able to afterward, and supporting documentation will be requested. A deferred assessment is scheduled at the next practical session available and examines the same thing the original does: whether your preparation decisions, set out in your written account, held up once you cooked. Non-attendance without contact or documentation is treated as a non-submission for that 60% of the final assessment.