Submission of Work, Cheating and Plagiarism

Submission of Work

The module instructor will arrange and publicise a mechanism for recording the submission of assessed work to provide unambiguous evidence of the date on which such work was submitted. Normally BART (see below) will be used. In the event that the assignment is not recognised by the BART system, a manual Work Submission Form must be completed.

Failure of IT equipment, e.g. last minute printer-failure, will not be accepted as an excuse for missing a deadline.

Students should be notified of the submission date for assessed work at the start of the module. It is good practice to include such information in the module description.

Students may use the Mitigating Circumstances Procedures to apply for an extension of the submission date for assessed work or reduction in the University penalties. The decision will be taken on the basis of: (i) advice received from a medical practitioner or the University Counselling service, or (ii) evidence that serious and unpredictable circumstances (e.g. a bereavement) affected the students ability to complete the work on time.

Individual staff members do not have the power to grant extensions.

Using BART for Submission of Assessed Work

BART is a web-based system which provides each student with an electronic list of their assessments, bar-coded cover sheets for each assessment and receipts for work handed-in. For each piece of assessed work, the student must download and print a cover-sheet from the BART website and note the dead-line for submission. Cover-sheets are personalised with the student number (to preserve anonymity) and the module/assessment code. The cover-sheet must be stapled to the front of the work and then handed-in at the Student Services Office (room PHY/605) by the deadline specified. The barcode on the cover-sheet will be scanned and a receipt issued.

Cover-sheets should be downloaded at the time they are needed because changes to deadlines are sometime necessary, in which cover-sheets downloaded a long time in advance will become 'stale'. Also note that:

• Work may be submitted earlier than the deadline.
• The deadline for all work is 1430hrs on the given due date. Work scanned after the deadline will be subject to late penalty (see below).
• It will not be possible to submit work without a BART cover sheet.
• The BART system does not process electronic submission of work via the Exeter Learning Environment. The module instructor will provide information about the e-submission process where necessary.
• There will be queues around 1430hrs. All work scanned after exactly 1430hrs will be marked 'late' by BART.
• Queues build up for the School printers prior to the deadline, so allow extra time if you intend to use these printers for your submission. Contact the School Computer Support Staff to replace paper and report printer faults.
• Marked work will normally be returned to students via their tutor.
• A printed receipt is issued for each piece of work submitted. Students must keep these receipts in a safe place until the end of the academic year, as proof of submission may be required at a later date.

Using ELE for Submission of Assessed Work

Unless otherwise specified/agreed by the module instructor, work submitted via the Exeter Learning Environment must be in one of the following formats:

• .RTF (Rich Text Format, can be exported by most word-prcessors)
• .PDF (It must be possible to copy and paste the text, i.e. no scanned documents.)
• .HTML (Valid HTML 3 or 4)
• .TXT (Plain ASCII text)

Most exercises involving essays and reports will require the student to generate a Turnitin Originality Report as part of the submission process.

Penalties for Late Submission of Work

The School's policy is based on the University procedures covering Late Submission of Coursework.

The following rules apply to all single pieces of work contributing a substantial proportion of marks, i.e. 20% or more of the assessment of a 15 credit module (equivalent to 30% of a 10 credit module, or 15% of a 20 credit module, etc.):

1. The penalty for assessed work that is submitted up to two weeks late is to be awarded the actual mark up to a maximum mark which equates with the module pass mark, 40% for an undergraduate module and 50% for a postgraduate module.
2. Assessed work submitted more than two weeks beyond a submission date receives a mark of zero.
3. External examiners should be informed where student work shown to them has had marks reduced because of late submission.

1. The penalty for assessed work that is submitted up to three days late is to be awarded the actual mark up to a maximum mark which equates with the module pass mark, 40% for an undergraduate module and 50% for a postgraduate module.
2. Assessed work submitted more than three days beyond a submission date should receive a mark of zero.
3. Some modules rely on rapid distribution of model answers and/or other feedback and in these cases work submitted after this has occurred should receive a mark of zero. Such modules have an appropriate notice on their module descriptions.
4. The appropriate Student Co-ordinator should be notified immediately when student work has had marks reduced because of late submission.
5. Work that is late or missed for bona fide reasons (e.g. illness) will be dealt with under the Procedures for Handling Missing Marks

Penalties for Cheating and Plagiarism

The University has strict rules about what constitutes cheating and plagiarism, and harsh penalties (including expulsion from the University) to punish it. The University's definition is:

"Cheating is defined as any illegitimate behaviour designed to deceive those setting, administering and marking the assessment."

Cheating can take a number of forms, including:

• The use of unauthorised books, notes, electronic aids or other materials in an examination;
• Obtaining an examination paper ahead of its authorised release;
• Collusion, i.e. the representation of another's work or ideas as one's own without appropriate acknowledgement or referencing, where the owner of the work knows of the situation and both work towards the deceit of a third party. This differs from plagiarism where the owner of the work does not knowingly allow the use of his or her work;
• Acting dishonestly in any way including fabrication of data, whether before, during or after an examination or other assessment so as to either obtain or offer to others an unfair advantage in that examination or assessment;
• Plagiarism, i.e. the act of representing another's work or ideas as one's own without appropriate acknowledgement or referencing. There are three main types of plagiarism, which could occur within all modes of assessment (including examination):
  • Direct copying of text or images from a book, article, essay, computer program, handout, thesis, web page or other source without proper acknowledgement.
  • Claiming individual ideas derived from a book, article, etc. as one's own, and incorporating them into one's work without acknowledging the source of these ideas.
  • Overly depending on the work of one or more others without proper acknowledgement of the source, by constructing an essay, project etc. by extracting large sections of text from another source, and merely linking these together with a few of one's own sentences or using 'essay bank' material.

The full Code of Good Practice on Managing Academic Misconduct, on which this section is based, is published on the University website.

Avoiding Plagiarism

All physics and medical imaging students are required to complete the University's online Academic Honesty and Plagiarism training course early in their first term.

Students are expected to keep systematic written notes of the sources they use at the time they refer to the sources. Without such notes, it is almost impossible to avoid committing plagiarism. These notes should be kept carefully as they show how the student approached and developed their work and are therefore a robust defence in the event that one of the plagiarism detection systems used by the School casts doubt on the integrity of a piece of submitted work.

Under the Common Guidelines for Tutorials plagiarism is a topic that should be discussed each year with tutors. In addition, there are many articles on the Internet that explain the issues. A good example is: How to Avoid Plagiarism. Citing and referencing using a standard numeric or Harvard scheme as specified by the module instructor is an important part of this. Material published on the WWW needs to be cited, just the same as any other source.