Extenuating Circumstances

Word Count

The following penalties apply to those students who exceed the 10% +/‐flexibility limit on essay word count. Word limits do not include referencing, tables andappendices, as is standard Queen Marypractice:

Up to 10% above word limit= no penalty 11%‐20% above word limit= up to 10% penalty taken from gross agreed internal mark, at markers discretion 21%> above word limit= assignment will not be marked and student asked to resubmit, at markers discretion.

There is no fixed penalty for submissions that are under the specified word length. In these cases, students will have displayed skill in covering the material concisely, or else have failed to fully address the material; in either situation the normal marking conventions should take this into account.

Guided Support Sessions

Students are reminded to contact the Teaching Fellow with concerns about the course prior to situations resulting in fails, re-sits, and extenuating circumstances as support is available.

ExtenuatingCircumstances

Extenuating circumstances are defined by Queen Mary as: Circumstances that are outside a student’s control which may have a negative impact on a student’s ability to undertake or complete any assessment so as to cast doubt on the likely validity of the assessment as a measure of the student’s achievement. Extenuating circumstances are usually personal or health problems. Health problems include your emotional wellbeing and mental health, as well as your physical health. Extenuating circumstances do not include computer problems, misreading your exam timetable, planned holidays or events, or local transport delays.

Queen Mary operates a fit to sit policy, which covers all assessments including coursework and exams. If you sit an exam or submit a piece of coursework,you are deemed to be fit to do so. In such instances,a request for extenuating circumstances will not normally be considered.

To submit an extenuating circumstance request you must fill out the relevant from which can be obtained from QMPlus (General course resources) or by emailing traumamasters@qmul.ac.uk. The form should be completed and returned to traumamasters@qmul.ac.ukalong with supporting documentation. All claims must be received by 3 rd September 2021at the latestfor consideration at the September examination boardbut preferably as soon as possible further to the missed assessment.

Your form must be accompanied by relevant supporting evidence (for example medical certification, death certificate, police report and crime number, or other written evidence from a person in authority).Please note that although accompanying documentation can be submitted after the form,claims without any evidence cannot be considered. It is in your best interest to provide evidence and supporting documentation that is as comprehensiveas possible

You are entitled to self-certify on up to three occasions each academic year. This means

completing and submitting the Queen Mary self-certification form in place of independent evidence. Please note that self-certification does not mean automatic approval of a claim –your school/institute will consider it in the normal way and will need to be satisfied of the validity of the claim, and satisfied that it justifies the outcome.

All extenuating circumstances claims are kept confidential until they are considered by a subcommittee of the Institute’s Subject Examination Board. All proceedings of the subcommittee are strictly confidential, and will not normally be discussed at the full examination board meeting.

It is your own responsibility to submit any claims for extenuating circumstances, not that of your supervisor. Please ensure that if you have what you believe is a valid case, you complete the submission process in accordance with the Blizard Institute guidelines and deadlines.

It is not possible to make a retrospective claim for extenuating circumstances, specifically once you know your results. Therefore claimssubmitted after the deadline (3 rd September 2021) will not be considered by the examination board. Please refer to the full guidance notes on extenuating circumstances from the Advice and Counselling service or online at https://www.welfare.qmul.ac.uk/student-advice-guides/.

Interruption & Withdrawal of Studies

Permission to interrupt from your studies on the grounds of illness or another good cause may be granted by your academic school or institute. You may only interrupt for a maximum of two years in total and from the beginning of a particular semester–final Registry deadline is 30 th April2021.You will return to the course at the same point in the following academic year and will be unable to have support from your supervisor in the interim.

Please contact Fees on feesdl@qmul.ac.ukto discuss your tuition fee liability prior to submitting the interruption or withdrawal form.

Information on interruption and withdrawal of studies, including links to the relevant forms, is found here:

http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/students/study/interrupting/index.html

http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/students/study/withdrawing/index.html

Graduation

This takes place in the December after you have completed the programme. Dates are announced in September/October of that year. Please see the website for more information - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/graduation/index.html.

Queen MaryBlizard Institute Plagiarism Information

Queen Mary defines plagiarism as: “Presenting someone else’s work as your own, irrespective of intention. Close paraphrasing, copying from the work of another person, including another student, using the ideas of another person without proper acknowledgement or repeating work you have previously submitted –at Queen Mary or at another institution - without properly referencing yourself (known as ‘self-plagiarism’) also constitute plagiarism.” http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/students/student-appeals/assessment-offences/index.html

Plagiarism is a serious offence and all students suspected of plagiarism will be subject to an investigation. If found guilty, penalties can include failure of the module to suspension or permanent withdrawal from Queen Mary. It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand plagiarism and how to avoid it. The recommendations below can help you in avoiding plagiarism:  Be sure to record your sources when taking notes, and to cite these if you use ideas or, especially, quotations from the original source. Be particularly careful if you are cutting and pasting information between two documents, and ensure that references are not lost in the process.  Be sensible in referencing ideas –commonly held views that are generally accepted do not always require acknowledgment to particular sources. However, it is best to be safe to avoid plagiarism.  Be particularly careful with quotations and paraphrasing.  Be aware that technology, such as Turnitin, is now available at Queen Mary and elsewhere that can automatically detect plagiarism.  Ensure that all works used are referenced appropriately in the text of your work and fully credited in your bibliography.  If in doubt, ask for further guidance from your supervisor.

Turnitin is a web-based plagiarism prevention system used by most universities in the UK. This statement describes how Turnitin is used within the school and the data it creates about your work.

1 How Turnitin works

1.1 A Turnitin assignment is set up by a member of staff on QMPlus. You then access this assignment online and upload your work before the due date. Turnitin will analyse the submitted work to identify text matches with other sources and will compare the work against: o the current and archived web; o previously submitted work; o books and journals.

1.2 For each piece of submitted work Turnitin provides two things: o A similarity index, which indicates the percentage of the submitted paper that Turnitin has identified as matching other sources. o An originality report,which shows each of these matches in more detail, including the source(s) that Turnitin has found.

2

2.1

How we use the information provided by Turnitin

Only academic staff will make a judgement on whether plagiarism has occurred in a piece of work. An academic may interpret the originality report to help but Turnitin itself does

2.2

2.3

2.4 not make this judgement. We do not use a threshold percentage to identify whether plagiarism has occurred and may review any originality report in detail. Turnitin will highlight matching text such as references, quotations, common phrases and data tables within work that has no plagiarism issues at all. Those interpreting Turnitin reports will discount such matches and so initial percentages are often irrelevant. Where it is suspected that plagiarism has occurred ina piece of work, the originality report may be submitted to the Head of School and possibly to an Assessment Offences Panel for further investigation.

3 3.1

3.2 3.3

3.4

3.5

How you can use the information provided by Turnitin

There will be an opportunity for you to see aTurnitin report on your work before Turnitin is used on your assessed work. You will be able to see the report almost immediately after initially submitting (this can take up to 24 hours during busy periods).

No other student will be able to see an originality report on your work.

To help you understand what the report is telling you, please ensure you have followed the guidance on the E-Learning Unit’s website (http://www.elearning.capd.qmul.ac.uk/guide/interpreting-your-originality-report/).

You may find it helpful to resubmit your work after reviewing the originality report –you are given repeat opportunities to do this up to an assignment deadline. Where this is the case, the idea is to use the report to help you identify any potential issues you may not have spotted before, and not to change individual words to avoid a match.

If you have a question about your originality report that is not answered by thematerial linked to in 3.3 above, please direct these to your supervisor in the first instance.

Try the plagiarism quiz athttp://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/ilrb/resource/is-it-plagiarism-quiz/.

4 Other things you should know

4.1 Turnitin stores a copy of most work submitted to it in its repository. This does not affect the ownership of or any copyright in the original work. 4.2 Staff may configure a Turnitin assignment such that copies of submissions are not stored in its database. This will be done for all test-runs or any ‘dummy’ assignments used for training or demonstration purposes. 4.3 Staff on your course will ensure that no commercially or otherwise sensitive documents are stored in Turnitin’s repository.

Learning Development

Learning Development works in a number of ways with students at any level, undergraduate or postgraduate, from any subject discipline, to develop the skills and practices they need to become more effective in their academic work. Areas covered include writing for academic purposes, effective reading, presentation skills, time-management, critical thinking and avoiding plagiarism. Writing & Study Guidance is offered by Learning Development Advisors in the form of one-to-one tutorials, workshops, drop-ins, retreats and downloadable resources. We also offer a programme of PhD writing development events. In addition, tutorials on writing are offered by the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellows, who are hosted by Learning Development.

Writing & Study Guidance and RLF tutorials are based in the Library on the Mile End Campus. 26

For more information on the range of services we offer, and to book a tutorial or workshop, check www.learningdevelopment.qmul.ac.uk.

Further information on referencing and plagiarism can be found on the library website: http://www.learningdevelopment.qmul.ac.uk/sources-referencing

Note that any copying from a source text, without acknowledging the source or indicating the copied section by placing it in inverted commas, constitutes plagiarism. The following pages show an actual example of plagiarism, taken from a student essay. The student has copied a number ofblocks of textfrom a New Zealand university thesis, without attribution.

Please also note that using your Project Plan again within your dissertation would constitute selfplagiarism so do ensure that information is re-worded from one assessment to the other.

See next pages for illustration as to how plagiarism is detected in Turnitin.

See below for an example of how plagiarism is detected in Turnitin.

Trauma System ComponentsAssignment Excerpt

The Sultanate of Oman islocated on the south-eastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula occupying an area of 309,500 km2(12.77% of GCC), the second largest of the GCC countries after Saudi Arabia. It shares borders with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the west, the Omani Gulf and Arabian Sea to the east, the United Arab Emirates to the north and the republic of Yemento the south(2).The population of Oman being 2,782,435(World Bank 2011 data).(3).

According to the latest census which was carried out by the National Center for Statistics and Information, in 2010 Oman had a population of 2.77 million people, a density of 9.0 persons per square kilometre. However, 816,143 residents, nearly 30% of the population were expatriates. Males exceeded females at a ratio of 138 males to every 100 females, compared with 128 males to every 100 females in 2004.(4).

Prior to the establishment of thecurrent government in 1970, the main health care providers were the British Embassy Hospital and a few missionary hospitals in Muscat with no existing national health care system (6).This government made major investments in improving the health care system which resulted in Oman being the first in the world in regard to the WHO Health System Attainment and Performance Estimates [40].

These health institutions are divided into extended (primary) health care centres which are situated in villages and small local communities, secondary care hospitals which are located in cities and, finally, tertiary care hospitals mainly in the capital Muscat, but there are a few in major cities within each region (e.g. Sohar).

The extensive growth in the global economy in the last century has changed many aspects of people’s lives including their use of various means of transportation.(8). Continuous expansion in road network construction has accompanied a rapid increase in the population, with a corresponding increase in vehicle numbers (9). The growth in motor vehicles that follows economic growth usually results in an increase in RTC and consequent injuries and deaths (10). As a consequence, road traffic injuries have become a major public health problem globally with a large increase in the number of casualties and fatalities(9).

According to WHO data, road traffic crashes caused about 25% of all deaths from injury worldwide in 2004 (11).

The main victims of road traffic crashes are young adults. More than 50% of all deaths due to RTCs are among young adults within the age range of 15-44 years(12).

The year 2010 witnessed one million more deaths from injuries than 1990;this 24% rise was attributed to the increase in RTCs by almost 420,600 crashes claiming the lives of 1.3 million people (13,14).

Road traffic crashes are recognized as a major cause of mortality and morbidity in the GCC countries and many developing countries. The large number of traffic crashes has caused these countries a substantial wastage of life and national resources(16).

Oman has the highest ratesof mortality and injury compared with the neighbouring Gulf countries.(15)

There is a relatively new system of emergency care which follows the Anglo-American system of Emergency Medicine Services (EMS). It is only a land based system and does not include aeromedical services (6). During 2012, a plan was set in place by the Royal Oman Police for the EMS services to cover the whole country and to incorporate aeromedical services. The EMS currently does not cover all cities and responds mainly to trauma cases with limited coverage of other emergency cases. Under a joint provision from the ROP and the Ministry of Health committee for the development of a modern EMS system, It officially started to provide its services in April 2004, covering approximately 70% of the population with 23 permanent ambulance units. Over a period of four years, the service attendedto 5,501 cases of which 83% were trauma cases and the rest were medical emergencies (17%) (6).

New Zealand Student Thesis Excerpt

1.6 Overview of the Sultanate ofOman

Table 3: Overview of the Sultanate of Oman:

Information

Total Area of the Sultanate of Oman

Total length of Roads

Statistics

309,500 km2

59363 km

Note: Data obtained from Ministry of Tourism, Oman [37].

Arabian Sea to the east, the United Arab Emirates to the north and the republic of Yemen to

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[37]. The country is divided into ten governorates as follows (numbered from 1-11

according to the map above):

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. Muscat Governorate which contains the capital city Muscat.

MusandamGovernorate

Al BuraimiGovernorate

Al DakhilyaGovernorate

Al Batinahnorth Governorate which contains the prospective study citySohar.

Al Batinah southGovernorate

Al Sharqiyah northGovernorate

8.

9. Al Sharqiya southGovernorate

Al DhahiraGovernorate

10. Al WostaGovernorate

11. DhofarGovernorate

Note: Data obtained from Ministry of Tourism, Oman [37].

Figure 1 below describes the distribution of the population within the different governorates in

Oman. It can be seen that most of the population resides in the governorates of Muscat and Al

Batinah. This is markedly different from the 2003 governorates percentages of the total population

where most people resided in Al Batinah

{31.7%) followed by Muscat (21.4%) [38].

10 I Page

Figure 1: Total Population of Oman by Governorate:

25.00%

20.00%

28.00%

10.00%

5.00%

0.00% 7

1.10%

27.90%

11.80%

2.60% 12.60%

5.50%

1.50% 9.00%

Note: Data obtained from 2010 National Census, National Centre for Statistics.

Oman has been ruled by Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said since 23 July 1970; His Majesty also heads the

Defence Council, the Financial Affairs and Energy Resources Council and the Supreme Judicial Council

[39].

1.6.1.

Health care inOman

There has been a major change in health care provision in Oman in the past four decades.

[40] . Providing free health care which is available to the

whole population was the main objective for the new government that came into power in 1970

under his Majesty Sultan Qaboos (Sultan of Oman).

[40]. The Ministry of Health provides free health care to all Omani citizens through multiple

11 1 P a ge

institutions situated throughout the country.

(e.g. Sohar). In addition, alongside the Ministry of Health, many government organisations and private

institutions provide medical care to their employees.

1.6.2. Emergency care inOman

system of Emergency Medicine Services (EMS). It is only a land based system and does not include aeromedical services [40] . During 2012, a plan was set in place by the Royal Oman

services. The EMS currently does not cover all cities and responds mainly to trauma cases

with 23 permanent ambulance units. Over a periodof four years, the service attended to5,501 cases of

which 83% were trauma cases and the rest were medical emergencies (17%)[40]

12 I Page