The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

Policies and support#

These rules apply across all three assessments and every Queue Lab. Where an assessment task needs one of them, it links here rather than restating it.

Accessibility of the course#

Lecture pages and Queue Lab pages use text and structured headings to support screen readers and translation tools. Report any access barrier to the convenor; automated checks do not guarantee compatibility with every tool. Slide decks (see the week 1 deck) carry the same content as their lecture page in prose form, so nothing in the course depends on being able to see a slide. If a Queue Lab activity assumes a sense or a physical action you cannot use — the observation exercises in weeks 1 through 3 in particular ask you to watch a system in person — contact the convenor before the relevant week to arrange an alternative source of observation data, such as a written account from someone else or a recorded log. This is a standing offer, not a special favour, because the assessments care about the analysis, not about how the observation was physically made.

Teaching and consolidation dates#

The twelve dated teaching weeks run from 22 February to 14 May 2027, including the final written assessment on 14 May. From 17 to 28 May, the course remains open for feedback and consolidation of your case file. There are no additional lectures, Queue Labs, examinations or assessed submissions in that period.

Observing public systems without collecting personal data#

The Queue Autopsy and its supporting Queue Labs (weeks 1 through 3) ask you to watch a real, public waiting system. You may record timing, counts, and what you observe about the system’s behaviour. You may not record anything that identifies a specific person — no names, no photographs, no recognisable descriptions of individuals, and no recording of what anyone says. If a system cannot be observed this way (because, for instance, distinguishing individual cases requires identifying who they are), pick a different system rather than working around this rule.

Synthetic data only, for anything about the Office of Everything#

Every dataset, memo, incident report and complaint attributed to the SlopU Office of Everything in this course is invented for teaching purposes. When an assessment or Queue Lab asks you to build on that material — extending a ticket log, constructing a comparable dataset for the Policy Trial — your addition must be clearly constructed data, declared as such, not data presented as if it were observed. Do not attribute invented Office of Everything material to any real organisation, and do not import real queueing datasets into the fiction; the two are kept separate throughout this course, and mixing them undermines both.

Respectful critique#

Several Queue Labs and both the Policy Trial and The Honest Queue ask you to argue that one design choice is better than another, and to say who a choice disadvantages. Direct that critique at the design, not at whoever might have made it — in your own work, in a classmate’s work if it comes up in discussion, or in the fictional Office of Everything’s decisions. “This policy starves long requests under sustained short-request arrivals” is the kind of claim this course wants; claims about the competence or character of whoever chose a policy are not, and add nothing a marker can check.

Extensions and late work#

If you need more time on an assessment, ask the convenor before the deadline where possible, or as soon as you reasonably can afterwards. State what you need and why; a short, specific request is easier to grant quickly than a general one. This page describes how extensions work for SLOP2516 specifically — it is not a statement of university-wide policy, and nothing here should be read as describing rules that apply outside this course.

Using and citing sources#

You may use verified external sources where they are genuinely relevant — to interpret an observation, check a definition, or understand a method — and where you do, cite them. This course does not require you to have read academic literature on queueing, and does not reward pretending to have.

Two limits apply to how a source can be used. An external source cannot substitute for direct evidence about a real queue you personally observed: if a Queue Lab or the Queue Autopsy asks what happened in the system you watched, that answer has to come from your observation or the approved accessible observation record, not from a general source describing queues in general. And anything drawn from the SlopU Office of Everything is synthetic case material, not real-world evidence — cite or identify it as course material when you build on it, and never present it as data about a real organisation.

If you make a specific, contestable claim about the real world in your own writing, it needs a source. An ordinary calculation from data this course has declared — a mean, a percentage, a comparison — doesn’t need one; show your working instead.

Accessibility of what you submit#

Where an assessment or Queue Lab asks for a written document, plain structured text (headings, ordered steps, a table where a table is the clearest way to show numbers) is sufficient and preferred over a heavily designed layout. If you build any interactive artefact for The Honest Queue, it must be operable by keyboard alone and must not rely on colour as the only way of distinguishing information — the same standard this site itself is built to.