The assessment for T185 consists of two parts:

Portfolio and ECA are submitted together at the end of the course, via the electronic TMA (eTMA) system. The absolute deadline is 11.30 pm on 12 July 2004. If you miss the deadline, you will not be able to pass the course.

See: Portfolio and ECA submission for details.

In exceptional circumstances, it is possible to apply for an extension, or for Special Circumstances to be taken into account. However, application must normally be made before the cut-off date. Details of extension and Special Circumstance applications are given in the printed booklet sent as part of your course materials, Information for Students Submitting Examinable Work Electronically.

The overall mark allocation, out of a total of 100 marks, is as follows:

It is obviously helpful to search for relevant material in books and on the Internet, to discuss ECA issues with other students, and to show your work to others to check things like clarity of writing. Academic authors usually regard this as an integral part of writing. But, as access to electronic sources has increased, this has sometimes crossed the boundary between acceptable professional collaboration and unacceptable copyright infringement and plagiarism - a growing concern in many universities. It is important to stay on the right side of this issue.

In your ECA, you are welcome to use short quotes (or paraphrases) from other people provided you clearly indicate that it is a quote and that you say where it came from (see the OU Library's advice on citing references).

All work for the ECA that is not an acknowledged quote must be your own, and in your own words. Ideas you are expressing will often have emerged from discussions, but how you put those ideas into words, and how you incorporate them into your narrative must be entirely your own work.

Even where it is in your own words, if you owe a major debt in your thinking to someone else's ideas, it is a normal academic courtesy to acknowledge the source (e.g.: 'An interesting idea that emerged from a discussion in our self-help group was …' or 'My colleague, John Smith, has suggested to me that …'). Markers will respect and value this kind of open and professional acknowledgement of sources.

If you don't acknowledge other sources, and pass other people's work off as your own, you are, in effect, stealing someone else's ideas, and making it almost impossible to mark your work fairly.

The OU is beginning to use software to search for plagiarism in assignments, so it is becoming easier to detect. If detected, the assignment is reviewed by an independent panel to decide whether to take disciplinary action. This could result in a student being awarded zero for the course and being banned from future OU courses. If another student's work was copied, they, too, may be disciplined. Do not post your ECA up for others to view on FirstClass; if someone copied your ECA, this could lead to both of you failing the course. By all means discuss issues around the ECA, but do not swap answers.

As part of the eTMA submission route, you will be warned of the problem and consequences, and required to state that there is no plagiarism in your work. Consult your printed booklet Information for Students Submitting Examinable Work Electronically for further information.

The rights to material in books or on the Web, and even other students' messages on FirstClass, are almost invariably owned by the author, publisher or so on. They are NOT freely available for anyone to copy, without permission. But for many kinds of material there is a general copyright waiver for student assignments, so you can usually make use of brief excerpts in your ECA without applying for copyright clearance, provided you acknowledge the source (once again, see the OU Library advice on citing references). But if you subsequently use this material for other purposes, the assignment waiver will cease to apply, and you may need to get permission to use it.

A more developed discussion of copyright 'dos and don'ts' can be found in Copyright on the Web.