[NOTE: On March 13 the electronic deadline of
this assignment was changed from a fixed deadline of Mar.23 for all students to
a floating deadline of the 6th lab session, which differs for different
sections. This seems more fair.]
The Formal Report should be a brief, but concise summary of one of the free choice experiments you have already completed in the Spring Term, using the information you have recorded in your Lab Notebook. It is meant to be written in the style of a scientific journal article. It should be no more than 800 words, (approximately 3 pages of double spaced type) and 2 pages of graphs and/or diagrams (marks will be deducted if the report is longer than this!). You are reminded that a formal report is an abbreviated way of presenting results. Many of the details and descriptions of day-to-day activities that are included in your notebook are not appropriate for the formal report. There is a more or less uniform agreement on the general style in which scientific results are presented. The A.I.P. has issued a Style Manual and a copy of this is available in the laboratory or can be found at http://www.aip.org/pubservs/style/4thed/toc.html.
The Formal
Report will be primarily evaluated on writing style and on the organization and
presentation of the material. Good
English structure, spelling and grammar are expected, and graphs and diagrams
should be clearly labelled.
Your name,
Student Number, Lab Group and Lab Demonstrator Name must appear clearly on the
front of your Formal Report.
Students
may take their lab notebooks home between the 5th and 6th lab sessions in order
to help prepare formal reports.
The formal
report must be submitted in electronic format (Word, PDF and several other
formats are acceptable) to www.turnitin.com by 11:59 PM on the day of your
final lab session Mar.24-Apr.3. An identical paper copy must also be submitted
to your demonstrator at the beginning of your lab that day. Your Notebook must also be turned back to
your demonstrator during your final lab session Mar.24-Apr.3. The paper copy may be turned in early if you
wish, as can the electronic version.
The
turnitin.com version will be treated as your official submission, and the
marker may download your report from the turnitin.com web site. The marker will also have access to an
“originality report”, which is a comparison of the text-portion of your report
to millions of other documents, including all the manuals for this course, all
the reports previously submitted to turnitin.com, and many documents which were
available at some time on the world-wide-web.
The originality report will not be used in the marking unless there is
some evidence that an unusually large amount of your unquoted text is identical
to some other source. If you do wish to
quote a source, be careful to reference it and include the copied words in
quotation marks, so it is clear to the reader that you did not write them.
Students agree that by taking this course your formal report may be
subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the
detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source
documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of
detecting plagiarism of such papers. The terms that apply to the University’s
use of the Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com web site.
To submit your
assignment you should follow these steps:
·
To login visit www.turnitin.com
and enter your email address and password in the space provided in
the top right hand corner of the web site.
·
Click the Log in button to
enter your personal Turnitin homepage.
·
From your homepage click the Enroll
in a class button.
·
For First Year Physics Laboratory
the Turnitin class I.D. is 2155336 and the Turnitin enrollment password is friction . The name of the class
should be First Year Physics Laboratory.
·
Click Submit to enroll in the
class and add it to your homepage. Each class that you have enrolled in will
appear on your homepage. Click on “First Year Physics Laboratory” and you will see
the one assignment for this course: Formal Report.
·
From your Turnitin homepage select
“First Year Physics Laboratory”
·
Click on the Submit button and
select File Upload from the pulldown menu.
·
Enter a submission title for your
paper, which should be your last name followed by your initials followed by the
words “formal report” Use spaces, not
commas. Use the Browse button to
select the file that you would like to submit. Click Submit.
·
You will be asked to confirm your
selection. Click Yes, submit to finalize your submission.
·
Once you have submitted your paper
you will receive a digital receipt.
·
Submitted papers will appear in your
class portfolio next to the relevant assignment.
If you
prefer, you may choose to submit only a hard-copy of your report, but in this
case you must also provide a photocopy of the relevant pages in you lab
notebook, with numbered references linking the text in your formal report to
the original lab notebook entries. Please
speak with the lab coordinator at least one week before the report deadline if
you prefer to submit a hard-copy only.
The marking
scheme will be approximately as follows: Title and Abstract: 10%, Introduction,
Physics and Background: 25%, Analysis, Presentation, Errors, Figures: 25%,
Conclusions, Discussion and References: 15%, technical issues such as grammar,
spelling, etc: 15%, Overall style and Length: 10%. Note that word-counts outside the 800±200 word limit range will lose marks
proportional to how far outside the range they fall. Also the total number of letter-size page
sides must be in the range 2 to 5.
Page-counts outside this range will lose marks.
Writing Hints
To begin,
jot down on a piece of paper the structure of the paper along with the points
you wish to make in each section. The structure usually includes Abstract,
Introduction, Apparatus, Technique, Observations, Discussion and Conclusion.
Note that rarely do all these titles of sections appear in an actual paper
although it probably would be beneficial to you to explicitly include them, at
least in your outline.
Look at
what you have jotted down to determine if it is complete and in the correct
order. The following paragraphs indicate the contents you might expect in each
section. Obviously the relevant weight you give to each of the specific points
depends critically on the particular experiment, so a lot of judgement is
required on your part.
This sets the scene by giving some background
and what it is that you are actually doing in this experiment. This should be
short. This section should include formulae that you will need to analyze your
data. You may refer to other work either to contrast your experiment (it being
a new style of experiment) or to compare your experiment with that of others.
Describe briefly the apparatus or technique
used, giving important, relevant parameters. You are trying to establish for
the readers the level and quality of your experiment and give sufficient detail
so that if one wished, one could duplicate your experiment to verify or
disprove your results.
Try to give at least one sample of your
observations, not too far removed from your raw data, e.g. “Fig. 1 shows the
change in length ΔL plotted versus Temperature as measured with the mercury thermometer”.
An explanation of the figure should follow.
Tell how you analysed your data. For example,
“Using a least squares fit with Equation 3, the parameters R and µ were determined”. Equation 3 will
have been given explicitly in the Introduction section. Don't give all the
numbers or step by step disclosure of the actual computation. A good technique
is to ask yourself if you have given enough information so that a reasonably
intelligent person could repeat your calculations to see if you had made a
mistake.
Give a short table of your final results if
that is appropriate.
As part of your report you should have a
discussion of your results or analyses to compare or contrast with other
observations.
Note that separate sections for “Apparatus”,
“Observations”, “Discussion”, and “Results” are rarely necessary. Often, one
can combine one or all of these into one section so that the discussion of the
data and observations follow naturally.
This is a very brief overview of the major
points of your paper. It should always
be a separate, labelled section near the very end of the paper.
Finally you should decide on an abstract and
title for your paper. The abstract is presented immediately after the title as
a separate paragraph in a different font or type-setting than the main body of
the paper. The abstract is usually a few
concise sentences that summarise what you did and your results.
• Put a space between the value and
the units (ie 100 km and not 100km.) • Please use page numbers. • Make references to any sources you use, including the authors’ name,
web-link if appropriate, and the date the information was published and
retrieved by you. • If you borrow a figure, for example, that is not your own work, you must
at the very least acknowledge that fact by saying where you obtained that
figure. For a figure or diagram, this is most easily accomplished in the
caption.