Academic governance

Who decides what this tool asks students, and what holds them to it.

A tool that tells a student their methodology does not fit their question is making an academic judgement. Somebody has to be answerable for that judgement, and it cannot be a model.

So two things are held outside the software and outside the AI: the structure of each document type — what sections it has, in what order, which are required — and the rubric each critique is made against. Both are reviewed and signed off by the Academic Supervisor Board before they can be used, and the sign-off is recorded with a name and a date.

How the sign-off is enforced

Sign-off governs what a project starts from

A project can only be started on a structure that has been signed off. That is refused by the database, not merely hidden in the interface, and withdrawing a sign-off takes the document type out of service immediately.

What the sign-off fixes is the starting point, not the finished shape. Inside a project the student can add the sections their school or their supervisor expects and the standard structure does not carry, and can remove one only while it is still empty and unused — never one holding writing, an acceptance, a revision or an AI record, and never the last one. So a structure adapts to a school without the sign-off, or the evidence of how the work grew, being weakened.

Critique runs against the approved rubric only

The dimensions a piece of work is judged on are read from the approved rubric at the moment of the request. They are not written into the code, and they are not left to the model to decide.

Every sign-off is on the record

Approvals are stored with the approver's name and timestamp. The register below is read directly from that record — it is not a list we maintain by hand.

Register of approvals

The briefs themselves — what each section of each document type is judged against, and the literature they rest on — are published in full at /governance/section-briefs.md.

What	Type	Version	Signed off by	Date
Journal Article	Document structure	article-v2	Academic Supervisor Board	3 Oct 2026
Paper Review	Document structure	paper_review-v1-draft	Academic Supervisor Board	31 Aug 2026
Research Proposal	Document structure	proposal-v2	Academic Supervisor Board	3 Sept 2026
Term Paper	Document structure	term_paper-v1-draft	Academic Supervisor Board	31 Aug 2026
Full Thesis / Dissertation / Project Work	Document structure	thesis-v2	Academic Supervisor Board	3 Sept 2026
Critique — every document type	Critique rubric	generic-adaptive-v2	Academic Supervisor Board	18 Sept 2026
work_review	Critique rubric	completed-work-v1-draft	Academic Supervisor Board	4 Sept 2026

What the Board holds it to

No text a student could submit. Critique is returned as strengths, weaknesses, omissions and questions. Anything that comes back as ordinary prose is rejected before the student sees it.
No sources. The AI Supervisor never names a reference, because AI systems invent citations that look correct. Students record their own reading and it is reviewed against them.
Structure before argument. Sections unlock in order, so a methodology cannot be written before a research question is settled.
Disagreement is recorded, not overruled. A student may acknowledge a concern and keep their own position; that choice is kept in the record rather than hidden.
Supervision is complemented, never replaced. Supervisor access is read-only by design — nobody but the student can change the student's words.

Questions How it works