Policies and support

The rules this course actually runs on — integrity, consent, extensions, late work, AI, privacy, attendance, and how to raise a problem.

Read this before you need it

A course about performing a professional identity collapses the moment its rules go vague, so these are short and plain. If you are reading this the night before something is due, the heading you want is “Extensions and special consideration” or “Late work”.

Academic integrity

Framing, not fabrication

The course teaches framing, not fabrication. That single line is the boundary everything else sits inside.

Framing is selecting, ordering and presenting things that are true so a reader can see them: which three projects go on a CV, a README that says what the thing does, a case study that opens on the problem. All taught here.

Fabrication is asserting something untrue, or letting a reader believe it. Inventing a role, a grade, a date, a client or a technology. Inflating a title. Claiming a team’s output as yours, including by the careful use of “we” where “I contributed to” is accurate.

Fabrication in course work is academic misconduct and goes to the university’s misconduct procedure. Misrepresenting facts about yourself to an employer — real or practice pool — is treated identically, because a course that ruled otherwise would be teaching fraud with a syllabus attached.

If you cannot tell which side something falls on, ask before you send it. Asking is never held against you, and the answer is usually “say the true version, it is stronger”.

Consent

The interview pool and outreach

Nobody outside this course is conscripted into it.

  • Practice Interview Partner Pool. Every pool interviewer has given signed written consent, knowing they are conducting a SlopU practice interview for a course in which the interview is a teaching exercise. Nobody is deceived, and nobody unconsenting is approached. Margot Tse coordinates the pool and holds the paperwork.
  • You may not recruit your own pool interviewer under a pretext. If you know a willing practitioner, send them to Margot to be consented properly.
  • Outreach (week 7). Drafting the three messages is compulsory; sending them is your choice, and the Outreach Log is graded identically either way. Never misrepresent who you are or why you are writing, and do not contact someone twice about the same thing for the sake of a log entry.

If you have no interview and no offers

Nothing happens to your mark

Nothing at all.

The capstone is graded on process artefacts only — never on outcome, never on whether you got an offer, never on the prestige of the organisation. With no confirmed real interview by week 9 you opt into the practice pool, the debrief is graded identically, and no marker sees which route you took. A semester of rejections, documented honestly, is a strong capstone. That is not encouragement; it is the rubric.

Extensions and special consideration

Ask before the due date wherever you can

Ask late if you could not.

  • Up to five days: email Margot Tse with a sentence about why. Routine, and granted without documentation.
  • Longer, or special consideration: apply through the university’s process; Margot will help you lodge it.
  • Illness, caring responsibilities, changed shifts and the ordinary collapse of a bad fortnight are all normal grounds. So is an application process that is making you unwell.

Late work

Five per cent a day

Work submitted without an approved extension loses 5% of that assessment’s available marks per calendar day from the deadline. After seven days it is not accepted and the assessment is recorded as incomplete. With an approved extension there is no penalty. Submitting something incomplete on time beats submitting nothing.

Generative AI

A drafting tool, not a source of facts about you

Permitted as a drafting and critique tool. Not permitted as a source of facts about you.

  • Fine: rewriting your own sentences, pressure-testing a criteria response, generating interview questions to practise against.
  • Not fine: generating experience, projects, metrics or anecdotes you did not have; generating a peer critique and submitting it as one you wrote; a reflection entry for a week you did not attend.
  • Declare it. Each submission carries a two-line note on where you used a model and for what. The declaration is not marked.

An AI-written claim about your own history is fabrication, regardless of who typed it.

Privacy

The Dossier and peer critiques

Your Dossier is coursework, not a public document. It is read by your marker and, where you swap or submit it, by the specific peers involved — never circulated, published, or used as a teaching example without your written permission each time.

Peer critiques are visible to their author, their recipient and the marker. Critiques you received are yours alone and are never assessed. Redact salaries, client names and referees’ contact details before submitting materials as sent; a redaction never costs marks.

Attendance

Tutorials are not attendance-marked

No assessment here awards marks for attending or for speaking in a room — including A3, which is graded on written critiques only. You will still lose a great deal by not turning up, because four weeks produce evidence you cannot manufacture alone.

Cross-stream attendance is encouraged and never assessed; tell the convenor you are coming so the room has a chair. Weeks 6 and 12 open the stream walls for everyone.

Raising a problem

Who to tell

  • A specific session, or something taught badly: tell that stream’s convenor. The week-1 promise stands — if a session seems to be teaching fabrication, you have misread it or we taught it badly, and either way we want to know.
  • Something a convenor said or did, or anything escalated: Dr Wren Halloway, course convenor.
  • Anything involving your wellbeing, the pool, or a process you would rather not discuss with your marker: Margot Tse.
  • Anything you would rather not raise with course staff at all: the university’s student advocacy service. Nobody on the teaching team is told you went.