Capstone and Applied Research Writing at Humber Polytechnic: What the Rules Actually Say

Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, recently renamed from Humber College, awards Ontario College certificates and diplomas, advanced diplomas, Ontario Graduate Certificates, honours bachelor's degrees, and now two master's degrees. Nothing in that list is a research doctorate, and nothing in it routinely requires a traditional thesis.

If you came looking for chapter counts, viva preparation or binding specifications, this is the wrong kind of institution for that. What Humber students actually write is a capstone, and it is a different job.

What Humber awards, and where the writing sits

Humber's own Academic Division describes capstone projects as a cornerstone of its polytechnic identity, culminating projects that let students apply the learning outcomes from each course, and it notes that they often involve an industry or community partner.

The two master's degrees are recent. Humber's master's programs page describes the Master of Engineering as a two-year, four-semester program whose final term features an Applied Research Industry Project, with a first cohort starting Fall 2026, and the Master of Computer Science as ending in a real-world capstone project of over 300 hours. Neither is described anywhere public as requiring a dissertation.

Do not plan your master's writing around a dissertation structure you found elsewhere. These programs are new and Humber has published very little about deliverables, word counts or formatting. Ask your program coordinator for the assessment brief in your first term.

A degree capstone, concretely

The clearest published example of degree-level research writing at Humber is the Bachelor of Community Development, which runs a two-course sequence in semesters 7 and 8. It is worth reading even if you are in another program, because it shows the shape Humber expects.

CDEV 4005 Senior Level Thesis Seminar comes first. You work in a group with a community partner to narrow the research focus and research questions, and you produce a comprehensive research proposal containing a literature review, research methods and ethical considerations, developed in consultation with that partner. The proposal is approved by faculty. Teaching happens in small seminar classes.

CDEV 4505 Senior Level Thesis Project follows. The project must be approved by your faculty advisor and by the Ethical Review Board. You collect, analyze and interpret data using participatory methods, and then you produce three separate things:

1. A group final report setting out findings, limitations and recommendations for future community practice.
2. A research poster, with community partners and peers invited to engage with the work.
3. An individual research journal article exploring one finding in depth and discussing how it contributes to theory and practice.

That third item is the one students underestimate. It is individual, it is written to journal conventions, and it is graded separately from the group report. Start it before the group report is finished, not after.

If you are working on that kind of individual article, our research paper support is built around exactly that structure.

Research ethics: the rule that catches capstone students

This is the single most important procedural thing on this page.

Humber's Research Ethics Board reviews all research involving human participants within the Humber community, against the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2). All applications must be reviewed and approved before any research begins.

And then the line that surprises people: the HREB does not accept REB applications from undergraduate students.

That is not a loophole and it is not permission to skip ethics. It means the route is different. Course-based research runs through a course designation application that your instructor submits, after which the instructor acts on behalf of the HREB in making sure students follow TCPS 2 and Humber's own guidelines. Humber advises allowing up to ten business days for a course designation to go through initial review.

The practical consequences:

• If your capstone involves surveys, interviews, focus groups or any data collected from people, tell your instructor in the first weeks, not the week you want to send the survey out.
• If your instructor has not obtained a course designation, you cannot collect that data, and redesigning a capstone around secondary data in week ten is miserable.
• Consent forms, information letters, recruitment and data storage all have published guidelines. Ask for them rather than drafting your own.
• The REB administrator can be reached at [email protected].

Ethics approval has to be in place before you collect anything. Data gathered without it cannot be rescued after the fact, and that is the most common way a capstone loses a term.

Industry and community partners

Because so many Humber capstones run with an external partner, two things become your problem that would not be in a purely academic project.

Confidentiality. Partners routinely share commercially sensitive information. Ask your instructor and your partner, in writing, what you may include in a report that will be read by classmates, shown at a capstone expo, or kept in a portfolio.

What you may keep. If you want to show the work to employers afterwards, establish early whether you can, and in what form. Humber does not publish a standard student research agreement on its open pages, so this is a question for your program coordinator and the partner rather than something to assume.

Academic integrity: section 17.0

Humber's Academic Regulations set out academic misconduct in section 17.0. Several of the listed offences bear directly on capstone work.

Plagiarism is defined broadly: copying, reproducing or paraphrasing significant portions of someone else's published or unpublished material and representing it as your own thinking, whether by not acknowledging the source or by failing to use quotation marks. The regulation is explicit that this includes computer code and designs, not just prose. For a technology or design capstone, that is the sentence to reread.

Reusing your own work is an offence. Submitting the same coursework, research or assignment for credit on more than one occasion in two or more courses requires the prior written permission of the faculty members in all courses involved. Capstones often build on earlier assignments. Get that permission in writing.

Misrepresenting your contribution to a group assignment is listed as misconduct. Humber capstones are frequently group work. Keep an honest record of who did what.

Commercial services are named directly. Possession or use of an unauthorized aid includes "commercial services (such as writing, editorial, software, or research survey services)." Whether any outside help is permitted, and in what form, is a question for your instructor before you use it, not after.

Fabrication covers reference to resources that are known not to exist. Invented citations are an explicit offence, which matters given how easily AI tools produce them.

Sanctions in section 17.4 run from resubmission and loss of marks through a transcript notation, suspension of between two and six consecutive terms, a recommendation for expulsion, and a recommendation that a credential already conferred be rescinded.

AI: Humber has published a position

Unlike many institutions, Humber has a public Statement on Artificial Intelligence. It is a seven-point statement, and two points do the practical work.

Humber "acknowledges that professors have discretion to decide how AI can be applied in a particular course," including giving explicit guidance in assessment instructions on how AI tools are to be used and cited. And it "contends that un-cited and/or other unauthorized use of AI in assessments and assignments constitutes academic misconduct."

The regulations then make that concrete with two distinct offences:

• Submitting content generated in part or in whole by an AI application not approved by your course instructor, or failing to fully disclose through citation or acknowledgment that content was AI-generated.
• Submitting content generated or enhanced by AI to the point that it does not reasonably represent your abilities or cannot be considered your original work.

Read those as two different tests. Permission is not the same as sufficiency. Even where your instructor allows AI use, work that no longer represents your own capability is still listed as misrepresentation of personal performance. Humber also reserves the right to use authentication and plagiarism detection software.

Because permission is set course by course, the rule for your capstone is whatever your course outline says.

Citation and formatting

Humber does not impose a single institution-wide citation style. The Library publishes resources for APA 7th and MLA 9th, and notes that some courses and programs use Chicago, AJP or legal citation formats. Print copies of the APA Publication Manual and the MLA Handbook are held at the Library research desk.

Humber does not publish a general formatting specification for capstone reports covering margins, fonts, spacing, title pages or length. That is genuinely set by your program, and often by the partner's expectations for a professional deliverable. Ask for the assessment brief and any template your program uses.

The Writing Centre offers free tutoring to Humber and University of Guelph-Humber students at North and Lakeshore campuses and virtually, including a written-feedback option where you submit an assignment and a tutor returns suggestions for revision.

Graduation time limits

Worth knowing before you defer a capstone term.

Degree students also need a 65% weighted cumulative program grade point average to graduate; certificate, diploma and Ontario Graduate Certificate students need 60%.

Pre-submission checklist

• I have the assessment brief for my capstone from my program, not a generic template
• Ethics: my instructor has a course designation in place, obtained before any data collection
• Consent forms, information letters and data storage follow the REB guidelines I asked for
• Confidentiality with my industry or community partner agreed in writing
• Agreed what I may show employers or keep in a portfolio afterwards
• Any reuse of my own earlier coursework has written permission from every instructor involved
• Group contribution recorded honestly, with no overstated share
• AI use falls within what my course outline permits, and is disclosed by citation or acknowledgment
• Every citation checked against a real, locatable source
• One citation style applied consistently, as named in my course outline
• Individual deliverables (article, reflection, presentation) started before the group report is finished
• Poster or presentation materials prepared to the format the expo or showcase requires

What this guide could not confirm

Humber publishes a lot about integrity and ethics and comparatively little about the mechanics of capstone writing. These are open questions to put to your program coordinator:

• No published word count or page length for any capstone, at any credential level.
• No published formatting specification for capstone reports: no margins, font, spacing, title page or binding requirements.
• No published institution-wide citation style.
• No published deliverable specification for the Master of Engineering Applied Research Industry Project or the Master of Computer Science capstone.
• No publicly published standard student research agreement for industry-partnered capstones.
• No published route by which an undergraduate could seek individual REB review outside a course designation.

Each of those is a short email to your program coordinator now, and a crisis in your final term if you leave it.

Where to get help

Your program coordinator and capstone instructor own everything about scope, deliverables and format. The Research Ethics Board ([email protected]) handles anything involving human participants, through your instructor. The Library handles citation and source finding. The Writing Centre handles the writing itself, free, and will give written feedback on a draft.

If the difficulty is structuring a long applied report or an individual journal-style article rather than the rules around it, our essay writing support works at that level too.