Assessment

Four components, none of which wants a late night. What is marked, what it is worth, when it is due, and why it is due then.

Why the dates look like that#

A course about not adding to your own mental load should not add to your mental load. So the assessment calendar is built around the rest of your degree rather than around this course’s own convenience.

Most courses put their heaviest assessment at the end, which means weeks 10 to 13 are where every deadline you have arrives at once, immediately before exams. This course deliberately gets out of the way of that.

• The forum post lands in the mid-semester break, the one week with no classes and, usually, no other deadlines. It is a two-hour job placed where a two-hour job fits.
• The capstone is due in week 9, before anyone else’s crunch starts.
• The last three teaching weeks carry no deadline at all. Those are the weeks you will be under most pressure from everything else, so the teaching turns to what actually helps under load.
• The log is due 24 hours after the last exam in the cohort, not after yours, after everybody’s. And it is a log, kept as you go, so there is nothing to write at the end beyond tidying the file. Nobody should ever be doing this course’s work while revising for something else.

Put plainly, this course would rather be useful in week 11 than assessed in week 11.

Being honest about the evidence for that#

The rest of this site holds itself to naming a real study for every claim, so this page has to do the same, and here the answer is thinner than we would like.

There is good institutional practice behind avoiding “assignment bunching”. Several universities publish programme-level assessment calendars for exactly this reason. There is a plausible mechanism too, since student effort concentrates sharply just before a deadline, so clustered deadlines stack those spikes on top of each other. There is also decent evidence that flexibility helps. A study across four terms and two universities found that giving students extension coupons improved both mental health and engagement.

What we could not find is a study isolating clustered against spread deadlines and measuring wellbeing properly. So this calendar is design reasoning, not a finding. It is the course practising what it preaches rather than a result we can point at, and if you think it is wrong, the capstone is a reasonable place to argue so.

One more thing about AI, since it comes up here first. You may use it for grammar and presentation, and to research techniques. You may not use it to write any of this. Policies has the detail and the reasoning.

The anonymous thread

Assignment 1, due in the mid-semester break. Post one small thing you overthought and what stopped it, anonymously, then reply to the people whose post could have been yours.

Due 9 April 2027 · Weight: 20%

Design your own intervention

The capstone. Design, and if you can arrange it run, a new crit-style activity that catches overthinking somewhere the course hasn't already looked

Due 7 May 2027 · Weight: 35%

Showing up

Attendance at lectures and participation in crits, worth 20%. These are techniques and techniques need practice, with the absences and the silence both accounted for.

Due 28 May 2027 · Weight: 20%

The log

Assignment 2. A running note of every time you caught yourself overthinking and what you did about it, kept all semester and handed in after everyone's exams are over.

Due 19 June 2027 · Weight: 25%