Excuses

Naturally, exceptions to the above rules are allowed for reasonable excuses:

• The students may be excused attendance, in which case they automatically get the extension.
• They can be excused for not asking for an extension, if (retrospectively of course) they tell you why they did not. E.g., they may have genuinely forgotten, or rushed off ill at the end of the session etc..
• They can be excused for not completing by the extended deadline, e.g. through illness, or other personal or specific circumstances. However, the excuse that laboratory staff can give here usually only lasts for one extra session. Any additional allowed time can only be allocated by the year Laboratory Manager
  John Latham (email: jtl@cs.man.ac.uk) or
  Alan Williams (email: alaw@cs.man.ac.uk)).

When you give excuses, you must mark them on the sheet in the appropriate place (see below), and give the brief reason for the excuse (e.g. in the margin or at the bottom of the sheet). The system stores excuses in the database and collates them for each student. This helps immensely when students come to sort out their problems in the laboratories. It also helps identify the people who try to exploit the fragmented laboratories by telling fibs to different Laboratory Supervisors. If you do not record excuses properly, then the system will continue to hassle the student, and the student will continue to hassle you, or in the worst case, go off into a corner and cry. So please take care to record excuses properly.