Assessments Format and Submissions

All coursework (not exams) submitted late, without an approved claim of Exceptional Circumstances affecting Assessment (ECA) or self-certification, will have ten percent of the available marks deducted for each day (or part of each day) that the work is late, up to a total of five days, including weekends and bank holidays, e.g. if work is awarded a mark of 30 out of 50, and the work is up to one day late, the final mark is 25.

After five days, the work is marked at zero. The penalty cannot result in a mark less than zero.

Submitted                                             Penalty

Up to 1 hour late                                       5% deducted from available mark

1 day                                                            10% deducted from available mark

2 days                                                          20% deducted from available mark

3 days                                                          30% deducted from available mark

4 days                                                         40% deducted from available mark

5 days                                                          50% deducted from available mark

Over 5 days                                                Work marked at zero

Please note that this penalty is only applicable to first assessments, and does not include reassessment of pass/fail modules, or online exams. If you submit work late for an online exam, beyond 30 minutes (see further details in the section below), you will get a score of 0 marked as a non-submission. 

If you submit a pass/fail assessment late, it will be given a fail mark. However, it is at the discretion of the department that on the first instance of a pass/fail assessment being submitted late, but within a 72-hour period, that a penalty will not be applied.

If you submit an online exam after the deadline, but within 30 minutes, then your work will be accepted with a penalty of 5% deducted from your mark (note, that is 5% of the available marks). 

Remember that you can submit multiple times to help avoid you submitting after the deadline. Also remember to leave yourself enough time to submit in case you have a problem, as internet problems are not usually considered acceptable for an Exceptional Circumstance Affecting Assessment (ECA) unless they have acceptable evidence as outlined in the ECA guide. 

Many of your coursework assignments will have a specified word length (e.g. 1,000 words).  Your submitted assignment must be within +10% of this word limit, unless specified otherwise.  Excluding data tables, all text appearing before the bibliography/reference section will be included in the word count, i.e. the word count includes all elements such as titles, subtitles, acknowledgements, abstracts, executive summaries, formulae, tables, captions and footnotes.

You must display a word count on the cover page of your assignment.  If your assignment is longer than the word limit +10%, you will be penalised by having 5% of the available marks deducted for every extra 5% you are over the word count, according to the table below. This will apply after your assignment has been marked out of 100.

                                                               % of maximum word count                           Penalty points

                          110%                                                                    0

   115%                                                                    5

                                                                                    120%                                                                  10

                                                                                    125%                                                                   15

                                                                                    130%                                                                  20

                                                                                    135%                                                                   25

                                                                                    140%                                                                  30

                                                                                    145%                                                                   35

                                                                                    150%                                                                  40

                                                                                  > 150%                                                 Mark of zero awarded

The Exam Board retains discretion whether to apply penalties for over-length assessments but will normally apply these penalties. 

Please make sure to read the instructions on your assessment brief carefully. These should tell you the word limit and what the minimum/maximum should be. If you are not sure, please ask the tutor who assigned the work.

For speaking assessments it is important that you thoroughly prepare for these, ensuring that your timing is correct. Your assessment brief and teacher will provide you with all the key information, but usually you are given a discretionary +/-10% of time to complete these, but once you reach +10%, the invigilator will likely stop your assessment. For example, if your speaking assessment is six minutes, the +/- covers one minute on either side, meaning you would be stopped at seven minutes if you had not completed your speaking by this time.