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This course runs in parallel with IM3501 and will take the fundamental knowledge that you learn there and show how it applies in human health and disease. It investigates how the various mechanisms of innate and adaptive immunity interact to protect against human disease and how immune dysfunction may cause disease. Immune responses to pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites): organ transplantation; immunobiology of cancer; blood groups; development of vaccines and antibody based therapies are covered. Practical classes will reinforce this knowledge as well as teaching immunological and generic laboratory techniques and range of transferable skills.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr Isabel Crane (ext. 53783) i.j.crane@abdn.ac.uk
The course consists of 3 lectures per week and 1 practical session per week. It is examined by continuous assessment of submitted practical assignments and a 2 hour examination with essay-type questions
1. To develop and extend knowledge of how cellular and molecular components of the immune system act together to protect against human disease and how their dysfunction may cause disease.
2. To further develop practical laboratory skills of use in a general laboratory as well as those more specific to immunology.
3. To further develop and practice a range of transferable skills including team working, data analysis, poster preparation, presentation skills and critical literature analysis.
These are available on WebCT. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/webct/login/
Practical work is an important part of this course. The course contains four practical elements which have a marked assignment (1,2,3 and 5). The visit to the Blood Transfusion Service (4) does not have a marked assessment. Each marked assignment is given equal weight.
Details of each practical are given at the end of this booklet. Please read them before you come to the practical. On the day the co-ordinator will give you additional information on the assignment that is to be handed in so listen carefully and ask if you are not sure.
All assignments must be handed in by 4.30 pm on the Monday following the practical on Tuesday. Practical assignments must be handed in to staff in room 2.62.3 IMS. They will also be available for collection from here. We will endeavour to return reports within 1 week of the practicals. Late submissions without a justifiable reason (i.e. illness confirmed by a medical certificate) may be subject to a deduction of up to 25% of the mark for each day, or part of a day that the work is late (if the work is accepted for marking). If you miss a practical class and do not submit an acceptable absence form (see section ‘Absence from Classes on Medical Grounds’) you will be given a zero mark for that assignment. Please inform the course co-ordinator immediately if you have any problems in this respect.
You will need to bring a lab coat to practicals 2 and 3.
Students with special educational needs
The practical work required in this course might present difficulties to students with special educational needs. For such students, alternative arrangements will be made. Any student with special needs should make these known to the Course Co-ordinator when registering for the class, and should then also discuss their needs with the School Disabilities Co-ordinator (Dr Derryck Shewan, 55785, d.shewan@abdn.ac.uk) to ensure that they have the best possible outcome.
The general recommended textbook (Abbas and Lichtman), listed below, provides a lot of information relevant to this course and many of the lectures will use the material in this book. Where appropriate you will also be directed to specific reading material.
Cellular and Molecular Immunology by A.K. Abbas and A.H. Lichtman (Sixth Edition) W.B. Saunders Co. (ISBN: 978-1-4160-3122-2).
Immunobiology 6th Edition Janeway, Travers, Walport and Schlomchik, you may also find useful and is in the library or new Janeway's Immunobiology by Ken Murphy, Paul Travers, and Mark Walport 7th Edition.
The University has strict regulations on plagiarism. If you are unsure about what constitutes plagiarism read the University guide on plagiarism at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing
Copying or plagiarising another person’s work, either from other students or published material in books or papers and submitted as your own for assessment is considered a form of cheating. This is considered by the University to be a serious offence and will be penalised according to the extent involved and whether it is decided there was an attempt at deliberate deception, or whether bad practice was involved. If you do use information or ideas obtained from textbooks or other published material you must give a precise reference to the source both at the appropriate point in your narrative and in a list of references at the end of your work. Direct quotations from published material should be indicated by quotation marks and referenced in the text as above.
There will be a 40% continuous assessment component to this module based upon the 4 practical assignments as above.
There will be a written 2 hour examination at the end of the course (60%). It will consist of a choice of three questions selected from a total of six.
IM3502 is a 15 credit course and to achieve these credits you should put in 150 hours of study including attending lectures, practical classes, completing assignments, reading and revising. Students are expected to attend all lectures, laboratory classes and to complete all class exercises by stated deadlines.
The degree examination is held in May/June, with the re-sit examination in August. If you fail the practical continuous assessment component of the course you may be required to sit an additional practical/oral examination.
If you are very close to the borderlines of Pass/Fail or possibly the Honours entry standard you may be required to attend an oral examination. If so, you will be notified by e-mail 7-14 working days after the written examination and the oral examinations will be held shortly thereafter. Please make sure you are still available for an oral examination in Aberdeen over this period and check your email regularly. If you do not attend the oral examination your original mark will stand. Each oral exam will last for 15-20 minutes and will normally be conducted by the course supervisor and another member of staff who has taught on the course. Any aspect of the course may be discussed. The student will be notified of the outcome of this oral examination the following day.
Entry into Honours
The criteria for entering the School of Medical Sciences Honours classes 2007/08 are:
• achievement of a CAS mark of 12 or more for all four 30 credit courses at Level 3; and
• no outstanding courses at Levels 1 and 2.
The Honours Entry Committee try to welcome as many students as possible into the Honours year, but it must be recognised that it will only benefit the more able students. In addition to the general rules for Honours entry published in the University Calendar, a CAS mark of 12 or better in each 3rd year module is taken as a reasonable sign that the student has reached an appropriate standard for acceptance into the Honours year. Exceptions can be made if there is a good reason, and a mixture of excellent results and one or two lightly poorer ones may sometimes be acceptable.
Dr Isobel Crane, Course Co-ordinator Dr Heather Wilson, Deputy Course Co-ordinator Other Staff: Dr Sylvia Armstrong-Fisher Prof Robert Barker Dr Allison Carrington Dr Philip Cash Dr Andrew Hall Dr Denise Kelly Prof Janet Liversidge Dr Donna MacCallum Dr Shahida Shahana Dr Jerry Sternberg Dr Keith Stewart Course Administration, Lyndsay McEwan
If students have difficulties with any part of the course that they cannot cope with alone they should notify someone immediately. If the problem relates to the subject matter you may be best advised to contact the member of staff who is teaching that part of the course. Students with registered disabilities should contact either the IMS based Departmental Office (Miss L McEwan l.mcewan@abdn.ac.uk) or the Old Aberdeen office associated with the teaching laboratories (Mrs S.Jones s.jones@abdn.ac.uk ) to ensure that the appropriate facilities have been made available. Otherwise, you are strongly encouraged to contact any of the following as you see appropriate:
Course Co-ordinator (IJC).
Course student representatives.
Convenor of the SMS Student-Staff Liaison Committee (Dr G.T.A. McEwan, 55701, g.t.a.mcewan@abdn.ac.uk).
Adviser of Studies.
School Disabilities Co-ordinator (Dr Derryck Shewan, 55785, d.shewan@abdn.ac.uk)
Staff are based at Zoology and Foresterhill (IMS, Polwarth and BTS) and we strongly encourage that you use email or telephone the SMS office as a means of establishing contact. You may be wasting your time to travel to Foresterhill only to find staff unavailable.
Support Available to Students
The University is keen to help you successfully complete your studies. If at any time you feel you need assistance, there is a range of support services available to help you. These include support to assist with unexpected and/or exceptional financial difficulty, support for disabled students and academic learning support through the Student Learning Service. Further details about all these services are available at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/studenthelpguide/.
University Counselling Service Tel: 01224 27-2139
William Guild Building, Old Aberdeen
Money Advice Centre for Students Tel: 01224 27-2965
c/o SRC Office, Room 23 Luthuli House,
50/52 College Bounds, Old Aberdeen
The students within each course, year, or programme elect representatives by the end of the fourth week of teaching within each half-session. In this school we operate a system of course representatives. Any student registered within a course or programme who wishes to represent a given group of students can stand for election as a class representative. You will be informed when the elections for class representative will take place.
What will it involve?
It will involve speaking to your fellow students about the course you represent. This can include any comments that they may have. You will attend a Staff Student Liaison Committee and you should represent the views and concerns of the students within this meeting. As a representative you will also be able to contribute to the agenda. You then feedback to the students after this meeting with any actions that are being taken.
Training
Training for class representatives will be run by the Students Association in conjunction with SPARQS (Student Participation in Quality Scotland). Training will take place in the fourth or fifth week of teaching each semester. For more information about the Class representative system visit www.ausa.org.uk or email the VP Education & Employability vped@abdn.ac.uk. For further information on class representation and student involvement in Quality visit www.sparqs.org.uk
The University operates a system for monitoring students' progress to identify students who may be experiencing difficulties in a particular course and who may be at risk of losing their class certificate. If the Course Co-ordinator has concerns about your attendance and/or performance, the Registry will be informed. The Registry will then write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to ask you to contact their office in the first instance. Depending on your reason for absence the Registry will either deal directly with your case or will refer you to your Adviser of Studies or a relevant support service. This system is operated to provide support for students who may be experiencing difficulties with their studies. Students are required to attend such meetings with their Adviser of Studies in accordance with General Regulation 8.
Set criteria are used to determine when a student should be reported in the monitoring system. You will be asked to meet your Adviser if any of the following criteria apply for this course:-
either (i) if you are absent for a continuous period of two weeks or 25% of the course (whichever is less) without good cause being reported;
or (ii) if you are absent from two small group teaching sessions e.g. (laboratory/tutorial classes) without good cause;
or (iii) if you fail to submit a piece of summative or a substantial piece of formative in-course assessment by the stated deadline
If you fail to respond within the prescribed timescale (as set out in the e-mail or letter) you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course concerned and will accordingly be ineligible to take the end of course assessment or to enter for the resit. The Registry will write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to inform you of this decision. If you wish consideration to be given to reinstating you in the course you will be required to meet the Convener of the Students' Progress Committee.
Students who attend and complete the work required for a course are considered to have been awarded a ‘Class Certificate’. Being in possession of a valid Class Certificate for a course entitles a student to sit degree examinations for that course. From 2010/11 class certificates will be valid for two years and permit a total of three attempts at the required assessment within that two year period i.e. the first attempt plus up to two resits.
You will receive a University e-mail account when you register with the University Computing Centre. The University will normally use e-mail to communicate with you during term-time.
It is your responsibility to check your e-mail on a regular (at least weekly) basis and to tidy the contents of your e-mail inbox to ensure that it does not go over quota (see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/email/mailquota.hti for guidance on managing your e-mail quota). It is recommended that you use your University e-mail account to read and respond to University communications. If you already have a non-University e-mail account that you use for personal correspondence, it is possible to set up automatic forwarding of messages from your University e-mail account to your personal e-mail address (see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/local/mail.forward/) but, should you do so, it is your responsibility to ensure that this is done correctly. The University takes no responsibility for delivery of e-mails to non-University accounts.
You should note that failure to check your e-mail or failure to receive e-mail due to being over quota or due to non-delivery of an e-mail forwarded to a non-University e-mail account would not be accepted as a ground for appeal (for further information on appeals procedures, please refer to http://www.abdn.ac.uk/registry/quality/appendix5x17.hti).
Guide to Citing and Referencing
This guide should be used to assist you when completing any work for disciplines in the School of Medical Sciences. All work should include citations at appropriate places in the text, with a complete reference list at the end of the assignment. If diagrams/ graphs/ tables are copied or adapted from other publications/ websites, the sources must also be cited in the legend for that item, and included in your reference list.
Good citing and referencing not only improves the quality of your work, but it gives credit to the authors of original work, and makes it less likely that you can be accused of plagiarism. Further guidance on writing and plagiarism may be found at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing/. When you submit work for marking, you are declaring that YOU are the author, that you have not copied it or plagiarised any material from other sources, AND that all sources of information have been acknowledged in your text. Students may be penalised by the University if found guilty of plagiarism.
Students are warned to be careful if using websites as sources of information. These may be inaccurate and are often not peer-reviewed. You are strongly encouraged to use advanced textbooks, peer-reviewed papers or reviews as the sources of your information in your work. Students are also advised to avoid quoting chunks of text in their work. Just because you put quotation marks around some text does not mean that you have not plagiarised it. Try and explain ideas and concepts in your own words.
The referencing style used here is Harvard, similar to that recommended by the University Library (see their factsheet for further information on referencing). Students must use this style of citing and referencing for all work. Other styles are not acceptable. Marks may be deducted if students do not cite or reference properly (see specific marking schemes for details).
Citing references within the text
You must provide citations in the text at the appropriate places by putting the author’s surname and year of publication in round brackets immediately after the relevant text (author, date method).
Author, date method
Jones et al. (1999) has argued that….
Studies have produced conflicting results…..(Bloggs, 2000; MacDuff et al., 1993)
Smith stated (1990)…..and then later work confirmed this (2003)…..
Bloggs (2001) investigated…..
One author (Bloggs, 2000)
Two authors (Smith & Jones, 1982)
Three or more authors (Chesterfield et al., 1995)
If the same author(s) wrote two or more papers in the same year Thwaites et al. stated (1990a)…..and then provided further evidence (1990b)…..
N.B. “et al.” should be in italics, as should all other Latin words/phrases in your text (e.g. in vitro). There is also a full stop after “et al.”, since it is an abbreviation of “et alia” (“and others”).
Listing your references at the end of your work
Your list of references must place the surnames of the first authors in alphabetical order. List all authors of a piece of work unless there are a large number.
Format of references at the end of your work
Book - whole Rang, H.P., Dale, M.M., Ritter, J.M. & Flower, R.J. (2007) Pharmacology. 6th Ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.
Book – article or chapter within Johnson, D. & Smart, J.S. (1983) Advanced techniques in measuring athletic performance. In: S. Roberts, ed., Sports Science in the Laboratory. London: Macmillan, pp. 3-28.
Journal – article within Furchgott, R.F., Zawadzki, J.V. (1980) The obligatory role of endothelial cells in the relaxation of arterial smooth muscle by acetylcholine. Nature. 288(5789), 373-6.
Website Department for Education and Employment (2000). Student loans: guidance on terms and conditions from April 2000. [online]. Available from: http://www.dfee.gov.uk/loan2000/index.html [Accessed 23rd March 2006]
