Research Report Expectations and Guidelines - Student Guide

Materials Access

All learning materials are provided in the form of a module kit and can be accessed from the Learning Management system (LMS)

Students need to be aware of their commitment requirements in regard to study time. In order to give you an indication of that, we have based the following information on the United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency guidelines.  “The notional learning hours associated with qualifications, programmes and individual units of study are based on a broad agreement across institutions that students can expect to spend 10 hours learning on average in order to gain one academic credit unit” (QAA 2006).

If you do not secure a pass, please read closely the feedback and speak with your Course leader(s) or faculty. After consulting the feedback, close attention is essential to rework on the areas of weakness, and then resubmit the work at the next opportunity. As per the QAA requirements, only one REDO is allowed where the marks will be capped at a Pass.

All forms of plagiarism are taken seriously, and any suspected cases will be investigated thoroughly. If a case is found proven, then the work will be graded as a fail and the case will be reviewed by the academic committee.

There are no re-evaluations as the marks are graded and internally verified before release. However, as per our appeals policy, a student can make an appeal to the course leader which will be then reviewed by the academic committee (please check our academic policies and procedures manual for more information)

Students can apply for extensions via the LMS based on extenuating circumstances (if any) with evidence (proof) as per our extensions policy.

1. Complete the ‘To be filled by the student section’ in the cover page.

2. All assignments must be submitted as an electronic document in MS word via the LMS (Use 12 Times New Roman script with 1.5 spacing between lines)

3. The results are declared only if the student has met the mandatory attendance requirement of 75% and/or minimum 50 % under extenuating circumstances approved and ratified by the academic committee and the examination board.

4. The assignment should not contain any contents with references cited from websites such as ukessays.com, styudymode.com, slideshare.net, scribd.com, Wikipedia but should contain references/citations from credible academic journal and articles.

Note: The Research Proposal will be the foundation of the project research work being undertaken by the student. The Proposal will be written of maximum 1500 words; the distribution of word count for each section is given below against each section title. The research plan timelines and the references will not be included in the word count.   

-Provide a concise and clear title of the research project work being undertaken by you.

-Provide a brief introduction to your research topic, giving out the business company/ industry overview, including the issues/ problems prevalent in the organization/ concerned industry/ sector.

-Give out the aim of the research project, objectives and the research questions of your project work.

-Show how your research work fits into the literature available on your subject matter. Also, show how your research objectives/ questions intend to fill in the gaps and/ or extend knowledge after going through the available literature.

-You must refer to at least 8-10 good sources of literature, out of which at least 6-8 or more should be references from recognized academic publications found in peer reviewed articles/ journals.

-Give out your research philosophy, research approaches and the methodology you will follow to conduct the research.

-Give out the methods of collecting your primary data, discuss the population and sampling methods you will use, by justifying the same.

-Please provide a plan of stages of your research development and thesis writing, with a timeline of proposed goals for your program.

-Your timelines should include your plan right from the preparatory stage, to writing the various chapters of the dissertation, to the final write up and submission of the project.

-The timelines can be put in a tabular form and a Gantt chart made for the same thereafter.

6. References and Bibliography of planned reading

-Please provide references/ bibliography as per the Harvard Referencing System format.

-It must contain good quality references from journals/ articles and other good sources.