11 Submitting coursework, assessments and feedback

Coursework is an integral component of your degree and counts towards the final module mark. It is through writing articles and undertaking projects and presentations that you develop your ideas and assess your own grasp of the teaching and study material. It is both an important part of your continuous assessment and provides feedback from academic staff on your progress. The coursework requirements for each module will be set out in the Module Outline together with a date by which the work must be submitted. You should plan your work in advance to ensure that you allow sufficient time to complete assignments, allowing for unforeseen difficulties.

You must ensure that you understand the requirements of the coursework and if not, resolve any problems or ambiguities with the tutor or lecturer concerned prior to the submission date for the assignment. Submitted work must be well presented, legible and, where appropriate, in good standard English. The use of word processing and spell checking is essential in producing written work. Written work (essays, articles etc) should be presented as follows:

• Times or similar Serif font, 12 pt, double-spaced.
• 2.5 cm margin on either side of the page.
• Student number and module code in the header
• Page number in the footer
• Word Count on the front page of the assignment.

Some modules may have different requirements for the presentational aspects of your coursework, in particular practice-based and broadcast modules. These will be communicated to you during week one of your module. Please check with your module leader if you are unsure about the presentational requirements for your assignments.

Canvas

Canvas is the University’s VLE (virtual learning environment). All assignments should normally be submitted online via Canvas to a dedicated submission point, unless instructed otherwise by the lecturer. It is the official policy of the Discipline not to use paper-based assessments for environmental sustainability reasons. Depending on the nature of the assignment, you may be required to submit your assignment to a Canvas assignment point or to a Turnitin assignment point. Specific requirements may be in place for multimedia based assessment – these will be communicated to you by the module coordinator.

Unless you have been given specific instructions, all written assessments such as essays and reports must be submitted as Word documents (doc or docx) in A4 page size. If you are using other word processing suites (e.g. Pages or Open Office) you must ensure you export your work as a Word document before submission. You can access Canvas here: https://universityofgalway.instructure.com

For FAQs on how to use Canvas, visit:

https://universityofgalway.instructure.com/courses/27585

Word limits

Word limits are set by academic staff with the level, range and depth of the piece of work in mind. Setting a word limit ensures that students are being assessed on the same criteria and ensures that the focus of the assignment is maintained. Where a word limit is identified for an assignment, you must declare the accurate word count on the front page of your assignment. You should not go either above or below the set word limit by more than 10%.

The word limit runs from the introduction to the conclusion of the assignment and will include quotes and footnotes which appear in the body of the assignment. The word limit does not include the following: abstracts, contents page, diagrams, graphs, images, reference list, bibliography or appendices. Exceeding the word limit demonstrates an inability to distil information and make cogent arguments in professional or academic work, and will result in a lower mark being awarded. A penalty may apply for work that excessively exceeds the word limit.

Time limits

Like word limits, time limits for recorded/oral assignments are set with the level, range and depth of the piece of work in mind. However for recorded assignments, time limits are precise and must be adhered to exactly.

Deadlines

Coursework MUST be submitted by the set deadline in order for you to keep up to date with your work and to receive feedback on your performance. You should aim to have your work completed before the deadline in order to allow for any problems such as uploading your work on time. The Discipline follows a policy of allowing a 10 minute grace period on electronic submissions, so long as the timestamp for the submission shows the upload began before the deadline passed. Students who have difficulty uploading an assignment may email it to the lecturer before the deadline, and it will be accepted.

The following sanctions apply to assignments throughout the School of English and Creative Arts submitted after the deadline:

Two percentage points deducted per day including weekends and bank holidays with work not able to be accepted past 14 days late even with a medical certificate or other documentation without a deferral from College Office. 

Deadlines for weekly formative coursework do not carry a formal penalty as this work is not formally graded. However, if you do not submit formative coursework you will not receive any feedback and will you find improving more difficult. Practical class convenors will normally not mark work submitted after the deadline, save for exceptional circumstances.

• Downloadable template for the coursework cover sheet Coursework cover sheet

Assessments and feedback

The University places a great deal of importance on high quality assessment and feedback. These are integral to the provision of high-quality learning and teaching and successful student achievement. Assessment and feedback are managed in accordance with our assessment regulations and feedback policies. We hope that assessment and feedback support your ongoing learning and development and enable you to achieve your programme or module learning outcomes.

Students will normally be provided with feedback within one to two weeks of the submission deadline or assessment date. This may include a provisional grade or mark. For end of module examinations or an equivalent significant task (e.g. an end of module project) feedback will normally be provided within three weeks. This will include a provisional grade or mark.

Feed-forward may also be used. This comprises information which is similar to feedback but is provided in advance of an assessment task to support student learning and development prior to completion of the assessment. Feed-forward is considered to be an important mechanism for supporting student learning.

Each module may include assessment components. Your module coordinator will outline what the assessment components for each module are during the first week (usually the first class) of that module. You can expect clear instructions for each module component and grade related criteria to help you understand how you will be graded. For practice-based modules, end of semester summative portfolios are mostly used. These types of modules include a heavy element of formative feedback (or feed-forward) each week. Your learning on these modules is iterative, and while no marks are awarded for individual pieces of work, you will receive feedback that will help you to improve, and you will be able to build on your learning cumulatively across the semester.

Assessment

You will be assessed via a mix of projects, individual and group journalistic assignments, presentations and essays – largely continuous assessment. Assessment Criteria and Grade-Related Criteria will be made available to you to support you in completing assessments. These may be provided in programme handbooks, module specifications, on the virtual learning environment or attached to a specific assessment task. Assessment Criteria are descriptions, based on the intended learning outcomes, of the skills, knowledge or attributes that you need to demonstrate in order to complete an assessment successfully, providing a mechanism by which the quality of an assessment can be measured. Grade-Related Criteria are descriptions of the level of skills, knowledge or attributes that you need to demonstrate in order achieve a certain grade or mark in an assessment, providing a mechanism by which the quality of an assessment can be measured and placed within the overall set of marks.

Feedback

Feedback will be provided in line with our Assessment and Feedback Policy. In particular, you will normally be provided with feedback within one to two weeks for classroom based formative assessment and three weeks after the submission deadline for a summative assessment. This would normally include a provisional grade or mark. For end of module examinations or an equivalent significant task (e.g. an end of module project), feedback will normally be provided within four weeks. The timescale for feedback on final projects and dissertations is six weeks. All grades and provisional until after the Exam Board has approved grades.

Sometimes you may feel that the mark you received does not reflect the work you put into an assignment, or you may disagree with the feedback and marking decisions. We want you all to do well and we try our best to support you to do your best. We do this through the classes, the tutorials, oral feedback, rubrics, one-on-one meetings about your assignments, and written feedback. The more you engage with us, the better you will be quipped to do well in your assignments. When we come to mark your work we mark against that criteria that we introduce to you early on, and we are assessing how well your assignment demonstrates that you met the module’s learning outcomes (these are found in your handbook, as well as discussed in every module).

We are very transparent about the criteria as we want you to do well. However we do not mark you on your effort. Some assignments require more effort to do well, and some require less effort, this is also a part of the variability in abilities. We do mark you on the quality of your work, and we do so against clear criteria. We know how frustrating it is to feel that you put a lot of effort into an assignment and the mark doesn’t reflect that, and we are really conscious of that. So here is some advice:

1. Your final degree mark is not depending on any one module mark – it reflects the work you did throughout the whole degree, so don’t get bogged down by one mark
2. If you are concerned about your performance, first read the feedback you receive – we put a lot of effort in explaining the mark (either through text, rubric, or both), and expect you to review it. We can see when the feedback was accessed.
3. If, after reviewing the feedback you are still not clear with why got the mark you got, we will meet with you to explain that. When you request a meeting you MUST indicate what part of the feedback is unclear.
4. Contacting us to just express your disappointment with the mark and stating that you would like a better mark is not appropriate.
5. If you want us to review the mark, based on the feedback you received (again, specifying what part of the feedback is unclear and or unjust), we can do that. Just remember that when we re-evaluate the marking, marks can go down as much as they can go up, as when there is a dispute, the assignment will be marked independently.
6. All marks are provisional, and will be reviewed by an External Examiner. If you have concerns about your marks, and you can substantiate them, we can ask the External Examiner to review your work. Point 5 applies here too.
7. Lastly, you can appeal marks at the end of the academic year (these will reviewed by an appeal committee outside of the Discipline), however, appeals on the grounds of wishing to have a better grade and without support will not be upheld.