Policies and support

Course-wide rules on submission, extensions, academic integrity, the use of generative tools, patch discipline, and where to get help.

These rules apply to every piece of assessment in SLOP8223 and SLOP4223. The assessment briefs describe what to submit; this page describes the conditions under which it is accepted and marked. Where a brief and this page disagree, this page governs, and the disagreement is a mistake worth emailing about.

Submission

All work is submitted through the university’s submission system by the time stated on the brief. Times are Canberra time. A submission is complete when the file is uploaded, not when it is written.

Resubmission is permitted up to the deadline; the last version received is the one marked. After the deadline nothing further is accepted for that piece.

Late work

Work submitted after the deadline loses 5% of the available marks per calendar day, counted from the first minute late, for up to ten days. After ten days the piece is not marked and receives zero.

The penalty is arithmetic and applies to the mark, not the argument. A late submission is read in full and marked as it stands; the deduction is then applied to the result.

Extensions

Extensions of up to five days are granted by the convener on request, in advance where the circumstances allow it, with a brief statement of the reason. No documentation is required at this length. Longer extensions follow the university’s process for deferred assessment and need the evidence that process asks for.

Two things do not constitute grounds, because they describe the assessment rather than an interruption to it: not having drawn an interesting game state, and not having reached a conclusion you are confident in. Both are the assessment. See the patch and dataset rule and the marking criteria on each brief.

What is marked

All three assessments are marked on the same four criteria, in the same proportions: quality of reasoning under uncertainty 40, identification of the real trade-off 30, use of evidence 20, clarity of the account 10.

The course marks the argument for a decision and not the outcome of the game it was made in. A defended decision that lost is not penalised for losing. A decision that happened to win, defended only by the fact that it won, has not met the first criterion.

There is no participation mark, no attendance mark, no quiz, and no component that is not on the assessment page. If a mark appears to come from somewhere else, it is an error.

Academic integrity

The work you submit must be yours: your reasoning, your account of the game state, your reading of the evidence. Quoting, paraphrasing or reproducing an argument from a guide, a video, a forum post, a classmate or a language model without attribution is plagiarism, and is dealt with under the university’s academic integrity procedures.

Collaboration on understanding is expected and encouraged. Two students may watch the same replay, argue about the same augment tier, and reach opposite conclusions; both accounts are then original. Two students who submit the same trade-off, in the same order, with the same example, have not collaborated on understanding.

Generative tools

You may use language models and statistical tools in this course, on three conditions.

Declare them. Every submission carries a short note saying which tools were used and for what — drafting, structuring, checking numbers, translating, nothing. The declaration is not marked, and its absence is an integrity matter.

Own the claims. A model’s output is a source like any other, and a lower-quality one for this subject than the sources named below: it will reproduce the population-level advice this course exists to complicate. If it asserts a win rate, a modifier or a patch change, verify it before it appears in your submission. Unverifiable numbers in a submission are treated as fabricated numbers.

Do not outsource the reasoning. Forty of the hundred marks are for reasoning under uncertainty. Work in which the reasoning is the model’s earns the marks the reasoning deserves, which in practice is few: models are confident, and the first criterion rewards being right about what you do not know.

The patch and dataset rule

Each assessment names the patch it is set in, and where it uses statistics, the dated snapshot they come from. Use the patch and the snapshot the brief names. Do not substitute live data.

This is a deliberate constraint rather than an administrative one. A live figure changes between the day you write and the day the work is marked, which makes the argument unreproducible and the marking unfair. It also invites the failure the course spends twelve weeks on: reaching for the current number instead of reasoning about the decision.

Citing a current figure in addition, to argue that the named patch has since changed something, is legitimate and occasionally earns credit under use of evidence. Silently replacing the named figure with a current one does not.

Every statistic in a submission carries its source and its patch. A number without both is not evidence, and is marked as though it were absent.

Sources

Four sources are approved for factual claims:

Where a statistical dataset and Riot first-party material disagree, Riot governs the rules and the configuration, and the dataset remains observational. Other sources — guides, videos, wikis, forum threads — may be cited as positions to argue with, and are not evidence for a factual claim.

Accessibility and support

Students with an access plan should send it to the convener in the first two weeks of semester, or as soon as it is issued. Adjustments are arranged without further discussion of the reason for them.

The site is built to be read with a keyboard and a screen reader, and the material is text-first for that reason. If a page, a diagram or the week 1 deck is unusable with your setup, report it; that is a defect in the course, and it will be fixed rather than worked around.

Riot Games assets appear on this site where they aid comprehension. League of Legends is © Riot Games, Inc. This course is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or produced by Riot Games.

Getting help

Email spike@slop.edu.au. Consultation is the hour after each lecture, in the lecture room. The most useful thing you can bring is a specific game state and the decision you could not resolve inside it.