LUBS5996M  Understanding Data for Decision Making Resit ACW Auguest 2024/2025

LUBS5996M Assignment:

This assignment has been designed to enable you to evidence your ability to prepare, understand, and analyse data for informed decision making in a managerial capacity. The coursework will be assessed against the criteria mentioned at the end of this brief. 
Imagine that you are working for a consultancy firm, called Vision, which is working on a project related to effective use of UK police force. You are asked to provide insights into severity, frequency and types of crimes happening around the UK. Based on these insights, you are asked to prepare recommendations for policy makers on how much they should be spending on policing crime.

The big question to investigate is:

• How would you distribute £20 billion for policing in the UK?
  You are provided with an open dataset containing information on crimes in the UK. You can access their data on data police uk/data/ which covers past crime incidents. It is your choice to see how deep you want to investigate it, however, as a guidance, investigate at least for the last three years.
  As a part of this assessment, it is expected that students will also identify other data sources that can help improve the decision-making process. To answer this big question, you must demonstrate your skills in the following areas:
• Data Understanding: Inspect the data provided with the case study. To demonstrate your critical thinking, identify and suggest additional sources of data that are not provided but can help investigate this big question. 
• Data Preparation: Perform operations like filtering, sorting, transformation, and enrichment to make data more useful and information-rich before analysing them.
• Exploratory Analysis: Calculate basic statistics, create visualisations (charts, graphs) to represent key trends, seasonal variations, and to identify any outliers. 
• Managerial Insights: Provide insights derived from your analysis. For example, structured analysis of each county and each type of crime; and comparing different areas for their liveability.
• Recommendations: Formulate actionable recommendations for distributing moneys to each region (and/or types of crime).

You MAY use GenAI (if you wish) for help with the elements of searching and reading the literature, and improving your expression in English. These tasks are necessary to complete the assignment, but are not specifically part of the marking. Past students have noted that the extensive reading and/or complex expression, is onerous for some people but easier for others. If you would find it helpful, you may use GenAI to (1) summarise research papers, enabling you to target your full-length reading to the most relevant ones, and (2) tidy up your English, after you have written the content [for example, write it in your own voice and then ask Co-Pilot to render it into a more academic tone, or, ask it to check the grammar/spelling]. Note you may NOT ask Co-Pilot to create content or write things for you, or for anything other than the two tasks specified above. Also remember that you retain responsibility for what you hand in; Co-Pilot is susceptible to errors and biases, so always check over anything that you’ve used GenAI on. 
Finally, please note that these instructions are particular to this assignment. Other assignments will have different instructions for which parts you may and may not use GenAI for. Not all Amber assignments will be the same. 

All coursework assignments that contribute to the assessment of a module are subject to a word limit, as specified on the assessment brief.  The word limit is an extremely important aspect of good academic practice and must be adhered to.  Unless stated otherwise in the relevant module handbook (if one has been provided), the word count includes EVERYTHING (i.e. all text in the main body of the assignment including summaries, subtitles, contents pages, tables, supportive material whether in footnotes or in-text references) except the main title, reference list and/or bibliography and any appendices.  It is not acceptable to present matters of substance, which should be included in the main body of the text, in the appendices (“appendix abuse”).  It is not acceptable to attempt to hide words in graphs and diagrams; only text which is strictly necessary should be included in graphs and diagrams.

You are required to adhere to the word limit specified and state an accurate word count on the cover page of your assignment brief.  Your declared word count must be accurate, and should not mislead. Making a fraudulent statement concerning the work submitted for assessment could be considered academic malpractice and investigated as such.  If the amount of work submitted is higher than that specified by the word limit or that declared on your word count, this may be reflected in the mark awarded and noted through individual feedback given to you.

The deadline date for this assignment is 12:00:00 noon on Thursday 14th August 2025.

An electronic copy of the assignment must be submitted to the Assignment Submission area within the module resource on the Blackboard MINERVA website no later than 12:00:00 noon prompt on the deadline date. 

Emailed copies of the assignment will not be accepted.  

Failure to meet this initial deadline will result in a reduction of marks, details of which can be found at the following place:
LUBS Student Guide/assessment/code-of-practice-on-assessment/

MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES

If you are affected by circumstances that will have a short-term impact on your ability to complete coursework assessments (for example a minor illness), you can make an application for an extension to a coursework deadline. Please note, all extension requests must be made prior to the original assessment deadline.

SUBMISSION

Please ensure that you leave sufficient time to complete the online submission process, as upload times can vary. Accessing the submission link before the deadline does NOT constitute completion of submission.  You MUST click the ‘CONFIRM’ button before 12:00:00 noon for your assignment to be classed as submitted on time, if not your assignment will be marked as late.  It is your responsibility to ensure you upload the correct file to the MINERVA, and that it has uploaded successfully.

It is important that any file submitted follows the conventions stated below: 

FILE NAME

The name of the file that you upload must be your student ID only.

ASSIGNMENT TITLE

During the submission process the system will ask you to enter the title of your submission. This should also be your student ID only.

FRONT COVER

The first page of your assignment should always be the Assessed Coursework Coversheet (individual), which is available to download from the following location:

LUBS Student Guide/forms-guidance-and-coversheets/

STUDENT NAME

You should NOT include your name anywhere on your assignment

LUBS5996M Module-specific criteria (rubric)