Assessment

Marking Criteria

You may find it helpful to consider the Department’s marking criteria and the Assessment Guidelines.  Examining the criteria for the higher marks will provide an indication of what your dissertation should contain. The descriptions for the lower marks will provide you with indicators of what to avoid.  

Plagiarism including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and translation tools

It is important that you reference your work correctly to avoid plagiarism.  Please consult the Academic Integrity section of your handbook for full details and the academic integrity tutorial for further details, available at the Yorkshare VLE.

There is also guidance from the University around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and translation tools.  It is important you are aware of how to use AI, translation and proofreading services to ensure your work does not lead to ‘false authorship’, which is considered as an academic misconduct offence under University policy.  We do not recommend you use AI software to assist with undertaking a review, as it is important that you learn how to search and screen the literature manually to ensure you fully understand the process. The only tools we recommend that you use to assist with your review are university supported ones such as  Endnote, Covidence.    

To protect yourself against a false accusation of academic misconduct we would recommend that you use version history whilst drafting your dissertation to show your work's evolution and include up to five screenshots in the appendix to show you have undertaken the work yourself, for example:

• If you are undertaking a review consider including screenshots from your saved search strategy from the database(s) you are using (e.g. PubMed, Medline and Covidence (if you are using this tool) to demonstrate how the review process has been undertaken.       

• For a project where you are undertaking an analysis (quantitative/qualitative) take screenshots of the analysis from your software (e.g. Stata,NVivo) or a copy of the log files.  

Submission requirements

You are required to submit an electronic copy of your dissertation to the submission point on the VLE - full guidance on how to submit  is provided.

Please make sure that you do not mention anyone by name in the acknowledgements section as this is considered a breach of confidentiality.  

Additional Academic Support

 The Department’s Academic Skills Advisor will be running sessions providing support on the following: 

• Expectations and conventions of UK Master’s-level dissertations

• Reporting, citing and commenting on others’ work

• Creating cohesive and coherent texts

• Search skills

• Bringing an authorial voice into writing to demonstrate critical evaluation

• Articulating ideas logically

• Understanding and acting upon feedback

The University also offers resources on study skills including writing and maths skills.