Ethics Process

Ethics Application Process

This page explains the essentials of the process by which UCT Electrical Engineering students complete a research ethics application on the UCT eRA system, in addition to explaining the way supervisors assess students’ ethics application on the eRA.

Starting an ethics application

Research ethics provides rules for conducting responsible engineering research. For more information, please read through the EBE EiR handbook available from the EBE Ethics in Research.

For Students: interacting with eRA to make an ethics application

The process of applying for ethics clearance in your research involves the following steps

1. Complete the Pre-screening Questionnaire (PSQ)

Click on 2_EBE PSQ MANUAL JUNE 2022 to open the step-by-step guide for completing the PSQ, which consists of answering "Yes" or "No" to approximately 12 questions (see pages 1 – 17) and uploading a short project proposal in PDF format. The project proposal should only describe the following elements

- Project description: a few paragraphs about the background and significance of the project
- Objectives: approximately 3 concise and meaningful objectives that are linked to the project description (or problem statement)
- Methodology: 
       - What data will be used, and how will this help achieve the objectives? 

- Given that data is always partial and particular, how /why did you choose the sample/dataset?

	- How will data be collected? How will the data be analyzed?

- Are there humans or animals directly involved in the data collection process? If “Yes”, in the case of natural persons, how will you ensure informed consent and anonymity?

 - Motivation: If the topic involves Machine Learning, provide a motivation why your topic does not exceed "minimum risk" to be exempted from a full ethics submission. For more details on ethics and machine learning, please see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/proposed-ai-act-from-eu-engineers-expounding-amit-kumar-mishra-phd/

The PSQ is assessed by both the supervisor and a Department Authority. Once the Department Authority has reviewed the PSQ, an outcome is determined.

If the student answers "No" to all questions, then the student does not need to apply for a full ethics clearance. The student can click on http://wiki.ee.uct.ac.za/images/c/c1/3_Exporting_the_PSQ_outcome_letter.pdf to extract the outcome letter from eRA and the ethics clearance process ends here.

If the student answered “Yes” to any of the 12 questions, then there is a high probability that a full ethics application needs to be completed.

2. For students who need to apply for full ethics clearance

Follow the directions shown in Full Ethics Application for the step-by-step guide (see pages 1 – 25). The full ethics application is reviewed by the student’s supervisor, the Department Reviewer and the chair of the EBE Ethics Committee. After the chair has assessed the application, an outcome letter can be extracted by following the similar steps to extracting the PSQ outcome letter given in the guide 3_Exporting the PSQ outcome letter.

For Supervisors: interacting with eRA to assess students’ ethics application

1. Ethics Pre-screening Questionnaire (PSQ)

Complete the Ethics PSQ, as described in the 2_EBE PSQ MANUAL JUNE 2022 guide on how to assess a student’s Pre-screening Questionnaire (PSQ) application on eRA (see pages 18 – 20).

Note: The Departmental Authority (in 2023) for Electrical Engineering is: Dr Sampath Jayalath Danapathi Arachchige.

2. Full Ethics application

Full ethics: Please refer to procedures described in 4_EBE Ethics Management Full Application Process Manual (Jan 2023) for the instructions to assess a student’s full ethics application (see pages 26 – 28).