Attendance

Expectations of attendance.

Programme attendance is compulsory for all students during the semester and throughout the examination period.

Illness or enforced absence

If for any reason your work is affected or attendance is interrupted by illness or enforced absence, you must inform your Programme Director and the Programme Administrator immediately and they will advise you accordingly.

It may be that a Special Circumstances case can be put forward to cover the affected period, but we need to know as and when things happen.

Planned absence

Any planned absences during semester must be approved by the Programme Director.

You should email the Programme Director and the Programme Administrator to request leave.

Programme Administrators and Programme Directors

Programme	Programme Administrator	Programme Director
Animal Breeding and Genetics	qgen@ed.ac.uk	S.Knott@ed.ac.uk
Biochemistry	MScBiochemistry@ed.ac.uk	Janice.Bramham@ed.ac.uk
Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants	btpmsc@ed.ac.uk	Andrew.Hudson@ed.ac.uk
Bioinformatics	bioinfmsc@ed.ac.uk	Al.Ivens@ed.ac.uk
Biotechnology	biotechmsc@ed.ac.uk	Andrew.Free@ed.ac.uk
Data Science for Biology	MScDataSciBio@ed.ac.uk	simon.tomlinson@ed.ac.uk
Drug Discovery and Translational Biology	drugdiscovery@ed.ac.uk	Martin.Wear@ed.ac.uk
Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity	MScEcoEvoBio@ed.ac.uk	aphillim@ed.ac.uk
Evolutionary Genetics	qgen@ed.ac.uk	Jacob.Moorad@ed.ac.uk
Human Complex Trait Genetics	qgen@ed.ac.uk	Jacob.Moorad@ed.ac.uk
Quantitative Genetics and Genome Analysis	qgen@ed.ac.uk	Jacob.Moorad@ed.ac.uk
Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology	MScSyntheticBiotech@ed.ac.uk	Elise.Cachat@ed.ac.uk
Systems and Synthetic Biology	mscssb@ed.ac.uk	Peter.Swain@ed.ac.uk

Attendance Monitoring

Your attendance will be monitored regularly in certain courses by the teaching staff.

If your attendance drops below a certain level you may be contacted by the teaching staff or the Programme Administrator.
All students that fail to attend an exam will have this noted on their student record as a point of non-engagement.

Student visa holders

If you have a Student visa it is your responsibility to comply with the conditions of your visa.

Failure to follow these conditions will result in the university reporting you to the UKVI and could result in the loss of your visa.

If you fail to sign in when necessary you will be contacted via email and asked to engage with the Biology Teaching Organisation (BTO) by a specified date to explain your absence.
If you continually fail to respond to emails and do not attend the BTO in person then you may be excluded from the University. The University will be forced to report your absence to UKVI, which could then result in your visa being revoked and deportation.

Attendance during your Research Project and Dissertation

Project Work

You must maintain regular communication with your supervisor, through email and/or meetings.

Your supervisor will be monitoring your attendance during this period.
Any periods of planned or unplanned absence must be reported to your supervisor and your Programme Director or Programme Administrator immediately.
In addition, all students are required to attend monthly group meetings to review project progress between May and August.

Dissertation

You must complete your research, submit any draft work as agreed between you and supervisor and submit your finished dissertation as specified by the School on the due date.

Students are expected to submit their dissertation on or before the due date.
If students leave early, they must ensure that their project is handed in on time.

This article was published on 2024-06-17