In order to write the report, it is recommended that you take notes during a session. I suggest that you bring a small note-pad, or better still, a copy of the template report file for that session. This in any case will help you maintain concentration better than just passive listening.
A final benefit of report submission is that it will give us an opportunity to collect systematic feedback on the sessions.
Thus, you have a commitment to attend each session. For the sessions you are able to attend, your employer wishes for a (succinct) report to be made on the session; this report can concentrate on what elements of the session that you feel may be important to your organization or yourself. If you cannot make a session, or do not submit the required report, for some reason you should at least give an apology to the interest group co-ordinator.
For the cases where a report is submitted but for certain reasons (provided no more than one applies) is not satisfactory, ie:
For combined sessions, it will help the course staff if you also say which course (eg. COMP1800 or COMP2800) you are in, as you present your card (so the appropriate list may be quickly located).
Note that attendance will only be recorded at the beginning of the session. Even if the session has already started, you need to immediately see the course staff, who will normally be near the main entrance of the venue (even though it may not be very polite to everyone else - the point is not to be late in the first place). Note that after a certain point in the session, the attendance rolls will be closed.
You should give an apology to the Course Co-ordinator, which should be within 2 working days of the session. The apology can be in the form of an email or written note, and should include the reason for missing the session (the reason does not have to be a `good' one; this point of this is to practice professional courtesy, see the scenario).
If you miss a session due to unforeseeable circumstances beyond your control (eg. strong illness, family emergencies), also present certification (eg. a Medical Certificate) to the Course Co-ordinator as soon as possible thereafter. In this case, alternate assessment may be offered (eg. at the end of the year) if necessary.
If you miss a session due to foreseeable personal, study or work commitments*, or though merely forgetting or not being aware that a session is on, there will be no way of `catching up'. You should ensure that you do not miss any more.
*An exception to this might be due to an event equivalent in terms of professional development to a COMP*800 session, eg. attending an IT-related conference (in which case, writing up a `catch-up' report on the event might well be negotiated).
The above similarly applies if you attend the session, but for some reason, do not submit a report.
Please check the schedule for your course (COMP1800, COMP2800, COMP3800) at least weekly.
The template files for the corresponding session will be put up by two working days before the session. As it contains instructions on what to write on and how much, it may be useful to have a look at it before the session. They can be accessed from links on each course's respective schedule page.
The following is an example template file for COMP2800 Session 1, 2002.
Note that as well as the feedback, your name and student id should be
inserted into the indicated places when filling out your report.
Report Length, Content and Style
Generally, you are required to write approximately 200 words (not
including words already in the template file!). As a medium length
sentence is about 10 to 15 words, this amounts to 15-20 sentences. The
template file will specify the word length (generally, later years may
be asked to write somewhat more).
The aim of the report is to demonstrate that you attended the session and can identify, and to some extent have understood, a number of points from the talk, such as those you found useful and/or interesting, or those which were central to the talk).
The word count range will be given in the template file. For example, lets say it was between 150 to 250 words. A succinctly worded report with high `information content' of say 150 words is thus acceptable (however, it should never be less than 150). A report with unnecessary verbosity or repetition might not be acceptable, even if it reaches the minimum word count.
Less critical, but still important, is not exceeding the maximum word count. Assume that the reader is your supervisor who is busy and may miss the most important things if presented with too much detail!
There may be more detailed instructions in the report template, which you are required to follow. Basically this is the requirement, plus acceptable spelling, grammar, `structure' and formatting, for a satisfactory grading.
Excessive use of point form, eg. little or no sentences, may not convey your understanding of the seminar's main points, and so should be avoided.
For more information on writing style, see Appendices B.3 and B.4 of the
DCS Student Handbook.
Report Formatting
As the suffix .txt suggests, use plain text only. It is
recommended that you use emacs to fill in the report from the
template files. Do not insert html formatting commands (which
can occur if you use Netscape as an editor).
Please break your text into paragraphs at suitable points (separated by a blank line). For each paragraph, use the Emacs command ESC-Q to format the paragraphs; it does this by inserting appropriate line breaks, so that the lines do not exceed 80 characters and the paragraph looks neat. For more advanced paragraph formatting, including formatting paragraphs that are under `dot-points', copy the following Emacs Text Mode file to your account area and load it with Emacs.
Finally, check your spelling and grammar. You should learn how to use
the Emacs spelling checker, as it is a
useful tool in many situations. The same link tells you how to get
Emacs to give word counts of regions of text.
Report Submission
On the CS student system (eg. iwaki), you should use the
mark command to submit your reports.
The names the assignments will be called s1_rep, s2_rep, ...,
s8_rep, corresponding to each of the 8 sessions over the year.
The reports must be contained in files named Rep1.txt, Rep2.txt,
..., etc. Please ensure that you use
the respective template file.
Thus for example, to submit the report for the second session for COMP1800, open up a Shell Tool or XTerm window and cd to the directory containing your report file. For the above example, the command is mark comp1800 s2_rep Rep2.txt
It is strongly recommended to verify your submission. For the above example, markshow comp1800 s2_rep should list the file Rep2.txt and the date when the above mark command was executed. Furthermore, the command retrieve comp1800 s2_rep Rep2.txt should make a copy of the file you submitted in Rep2.txt_MARKER. Inspect this file to double check your recorded submission is what you think it is. Refer to your copy of the Student Computing Environment: User Guide for further details.
Deadlines: this will be by 6:00pm of the
second working day following the session. Writing the report should not take
long, so there is no reason or virtue in delaying.
In fact, straight after the session is a good time to do it.
You may expect a strict policy on late submissions, which
will not be accepted under normal circumstances.
Plagiarism and Citation Issues
As in submissions for any CS (for that matter ANU) subjects, any report
that you submit must be your own work, and not
that of another student. Any report that is suspected of either being
copied or used as a copy will be rejected.
Furthermore, text originating from sources other than the speaker, eg. relevant web pages, should be cited properly, or your report may lose partial or total marks. In any case, such text should be used sparingly.
Finally, although material from the speaker's talk and slides can be used
without explicit citation, you should express it in your own words (eg.
parts of your report should not resemble parts of the speaker's slides).
If you would like to quote some of the speaker's words verbatim,
quotation marks should be used to indicate this.
Feedback
The StReAMS utility gives you feedback on the recording of your
attendance and the assessment of your reports.
Attendance is recorded in the s*_att marks; y means you are recorded as having attended the corresponding session, n means you are recorded as having not attended (blank means that session has not yet been entered. Generally, they should appear within 48 hours of the session).
Report submission is recorded in the s*_rep marks; 1 means the submitted report was satisfactory, 0.5 means the submitted report was partially satisfactory (see above), 0 means the submitted report was unsatisfactory (blank means either no report was submitted, or the reports for that session have yet to be processed).
We will try to give back reports with markers comments emailed back within a week of the deadline.
For general feedback on the session, please see the links to
the respective course session feedback page from the
main page.
So is there any reward for excellence in the reports?
The short answer is `not a lot', and for a 0-unit pass/fail course, it can
be argued that this is quite appropriate, and indeed it would be hardly
possible to be otherwise. Furthermore, it should be noted that the
report writing skills are a `means to an end', and not a primary goal,
of the Series.
I would also be concerned if many students feel obliged to spend too much time on the report writing, once they get the `hang of it' (one hour per report would seem to be a reasonable time target to reach the required standards).
Nonetheless, a small encouragement for high standards is the VERY GOOD feedback category in the marked reports, which you will have noted has no effect on the mark. (note that is hard to be very consistent with the giving out VERY GOOD ratings for attributes like `content' and `structure', so please dont feel discouraged if you tried hard in a particular report and only got a GOOD rating).
A further small encouragement, will be the sending of an
Open Letter of Commendation to any student attaining the full score of
8.0 at the end of the year (in 2002, 9 students from COMP1800 and 4 students
from COMP2800 received such letters; in 2003, there were 10, 6 and 9
such students over the 3 respective courses, with 2 of the COMP3800
graduates having got full scores all the way though).
From 2004 onwards, the extra condition that most reports must also
be of a high (i.e. better than merely 1acceptable') standard will be added.
Example Reports
Some (high-quality, in terms of content, structure and/or style)
example reports may be found here:
1800 s4 02,
2800 s7 01,
2800 s4 02,
3800 s5 02.
Enrolment, Grades and Student21
As the software system Student21, which controls enrolments and grades,
is unable to cope with annual courses, enrolment and result reporting
must be done in terms of a semester 1 and a semester 2 (pseudo-)course,
eg. in the case of COMP1800, COMP1800A and COMP1800B.
You must enrol in the COMP*800A and in the COMP*800B courses simultaneously by early semester 1. If you neglect to enrol in the B course, you will get no result for COMP*800B even if you attend the semester 2 seminars!.
Similarly, if you wish to withdraw from COMP*800, you should withdraw from both COMP*800A and COMP*800B simultaneously, even if this occurs in semester 2. Note that if you have the intention of re-enrolling in the same COMP*800 course in a later year, you must re-enrol in both the COMP*800A and COMP*800B courses at that time (and you must attend the semester 1 seminars, even if you withdrew in semester 2).
An IP result will always get reported for the COMP*800A course.
This has no significance; the result that matters is that for
the COMP*800B course, which is either CRS (pass) or
NCN(fail).
(Timetable) Clashes with COMP*800 Sessions
It is inevitable that there will be clashes of some kind with the
timeslots in the COMP*800 sessions for some (hopefully a only few)
students. As its not unexpected that a one-off clash with something
important to you may occur once or twice a year (see the section on missed sessions) the assessment scheme
permits you to miss up to 2 sessions and still pass.
More serious are clashes that involve more than 2 sessions. The policy for such clashes is based on the following 2 principles: (1) COMP*800 are core courses in the BSEng degree, and (2) attendance at these sessions is assessable in a strong sense. Thus, the policy is that COMP*800 sessions take clear precedence over any timetable clash except those involving assessable sessions (eg. mid-semester exams) in core courses in a BSEng degree. This applies just as much if not more for clashes arising from other kinds of regular commitments, whether work, sport or even family related.
While this sounds rather harsh, on the other hand it is not
reasonable to expect alternate seminars be arranged for each student
with such a clash. The advice for someone with such a clash is likely
to be: `try to fix it from the other end', or `do the other course
next year', or `do COMP*800 next year' or even `transfer to a BIT
degree if this other commitment is more important to you'.
COMP*800 and the BSEng Degree
While 0-unit courses, all COMP*800 courses (including COMP4800)
are required for the BSEng degree.
COMP2800 has COMP1800(B) as a prerequisite; similarly COMP3800 has COMP2800(B) as a prerequisite. This means that simultaneous enrolment in two of these courses is excluded, except under very exceptional circumstances .
The main reason for this is the fact that having combined sessions is fundamental to the Series (speakers and/or seminar topics are often only available for one year, so combining two or more groups can take the best advantage of this). The prerequisite structure thus avoids the problem of overlap in the assessment of the courses (in a technical sense, this violates the University Rules).
Note that as COMP4800 has no prerequisite, one can `slip behind' one year in COMP1800/2800/3800 (due to transferring into the BSEng in year 1 or 2, or from failing in one year) and still complete the BSEng within 4 years.