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.
Poor IT practice e.g. no back up of electronic documents, 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 descriptor.
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.
Reports should normally be written in LaTeX using the Department's standard template:
Reports prepared using other packages, such as Microsoft Word, must conform to the style and layout illustrated by the 'Example Report'.
The module instructor will give more-specific instructions, but all submitted work must have its pages bound together in any manner that survives normal handling. Simply stapling the pages together will suffice in most cases. The pages must be numbered and in the right order! Some students prefer to give their work a more 'finished' look by spiral- or comb-binding their report. The going rate for comb-binding is currently (2018) about £2.50 per copy, e.g.
Being able to write clearly and concisely within constraints such as formatting instructions and word-count limits is one of the skills that will be assessed. Word-counts specified on module descriptor are the maximums and 'maximum' should be taken literally. Material in excess of the specified word-count will not attract marks and may loose marks (for poor structure). The word-count should
Appendices must not be used as a mechanism for exceeding word-count limits; material in appendices will not normally contribute to the marks awarded for a piece of work.
Citing and referencing using a standard scheme, e.g.:
as specified by the module instructor is an important part of any academic or scientific work. Unless the module instuctor gives explicit instructions otherwise, the Vancouver (numeric) scheme should normally be used. Material published on the WWW needs to be cited accurately, just like any other source.
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:
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 Education Support Office (Physics Reception) 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:
For information about how to submit work to BART via online upload 'eBART' refer to:
In particular, note the advice given there:
Submission to Turnitin will NOT be accepted as the final submission. If a piece of work is to be submitted to both Turnitin and either eBART or ELE the definitive subbmission is eBART or ELE time-stamp and so must be submitted to this system again BEFORE the specified deadline.
Unless otherwise specified/agreed by the module instructor, work submitted via the Exeter Learning Environment must be in one of the following formats:
Most exercises involving essays and reports will require the student to generate a Turnitin Originality Report as part of the submission process.
The University has procedures covering the Late Submission of Coursework. Those rules refer to "coursework" and "short duration coursework". The department defines the former as single pieces of work contributing a substantial proportion of marks, i.e. 20% or more of the assessment of a 15 credit module or 10% of a 30 credit module, etc.. Pieces of work contributing less than this to a module as covered under the rules for "short duration coursework".
Work that is late or missed for bona fide reasons (e.g. illness) will be dealt with under the Procedures for Handling Missing Marks.
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 full Code of Good Practice on Managing Academic Misconduct, on which this section is based, is published on the University website.
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 Department 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: