Liv e rpool John M oore s Univ e rsity
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Guidelines for Final Year Degree Projects
2001/2002
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................. 1
2. THE STAFF....................................................................................................................................................... 1
3. CHOOSING A PROJECT ............................................................................................................................... 1
4. STARTING THE PROJECT ........................................................................................................................... 2
5. WORK PLAN .................................................................................................................................................... 2
6. LOG BOOK ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
7. PROJECT ASSESSMENT ................................................................................................................................ 3
8. INTERIM REPORT ......................................................................................................................................... 3
8.1. ASSESSMENT ..................................................................................................................................................... 3
9. PRESENTATION ............................................................................................................................................ 3
9.1. TIPS FOR PREPARING SLIDES ............................................................................................................................. 3
9.2. ASSESSMENT ..................................................................................................................................................... 4
10. FINAL PROJECT REPORT ......................................................................................................................... 4
10.1 CONVENTIONS ................................................................................................................................................... 4
10. 2. STYLE ............................................................................................................................................................. 5
10. 3. ASSESSMENT .................................................................................................................................................. 5
10. 4. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE ............................................................................................................................... 6
11. IMPORTANT DATES.................................................................................................................................... 6
12. FINAL ADVICE.............................................................................................................................................. 6
1. Introduction
Your project is a 24-credit module and one of the most important components of your final year and thus one of
the most important parts of your whole degree. It is an individual piece of work directed and monitored by a
member of the academic staff, your project supervisor. An important point to understand about projects and
project supervision from the outset is that you are responsible for your project and its progress. Your supervisor
provides help and guidance, but ultimate responsibility for your performance, particularly in terms of ensuring
that you work steadily and sensibly on your project in an organised way over the academic year, rests with you.
2. The Staff
Project Tutor (Mr T. Etchells , e-mail: t.a.etchells@livjm.ac.uk): The project tutor is responsible for the
overall management of projects.
Supervisor: The supervisor is the person who oversees your particular project. You should meet your
supervisor regularly to discuss your progress. The supervisor is there to give advice and help sort out
problems with your project as they arise. The supervisor is the principle assessor of your work. You are
strongly advised to make a regular commitment to see your supervisor on a weekly basis.
Moderator: The moderator is the ‘second marker’ of your project. The moderator ensures that the mark
awarded by the supervisor is an accurate reflection of the quality of the work presented. In the event of
dispute over marks the project tutor will determine, in consultation with the Supervisor and Moderator, a
mark.
3. Choosing a Project
You are required to fill in the Project Proposal Form that can be found at the end of this document. You have the
following options to choose a project.
1. You are encouraged to propose a project of your own within the general areas indicated by members of
staff. It is important that there is some member of staff who can give reasonable guidance in the area chosen.
If you are in any doubt about this, contact the project tutor. To propose a project, you should first work out a
project idea and then discuss it with potential supervisors of relevant academic interests as soon as possible.
Having reached agreement with a potential supervisor, you should provide a project outline, no more than
one A4 page, of what you want to do.
2. If you are unable to propose your own project, you can identify a suitable project or a general area of
interest from the list and contact relevant staff as soon as possible for the agreement to supervise your
project.
3. If you are unable to find a supervisor, you may indicate a general area of interest that should be one of the
staff academic areas. The project tutor will allocate a supervisor to you from the relevant academic field,
who will provide you with the starting point for a project. This option is not recommended.
No matter which option above you choose, you will have to return the project proposal form to the project tutor
by 19th September 2001. If you choose option 1 or 2, the form should be signed by your supervisor. Note that
if you really want a supervisor of your choice, you should contact him/her as soon as possible. Every effort will
be made to keep your preferred supervisor but this can not be guaranteed.
When you are proposing a possible project, please bear in mind that a final year project should include
significant academic content. You will be required to work on a problem which demonstrates your ability to
address, in a coherent and sensible manner, a challenging academic issue of comparable difficulty to your other
4th year academic work. One area in which we need to be particularly careful is that of externally defined
projects, such as for example projects with the company on which a student has been on placement. Whilst it may
well be a potentially valuable learning experience, the simple fact that a project is of use to an external agency is
clearly insufficient in itself for a satisfactory fourth year project. There is a grave danger that the commercial, or
other, imperatives of the externally defined project will lead to a project which is a "job well done" in the
collaborative organisations terms but which does not contain sufficient academic challenge.
This should not discourage you from trying to define such a project, but you should be aware that when the
project is marked, it will be assessed as a part of your final year course. It is perfectly possible to define a
satisfactory project in these circumstances but you should discuss these issues carefully with your supervisor. The
projects will be assessed on a case by case basis but the fact that the major aim of a project is academic and
educational must not be lost.
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Please note that any arrangement entered into by individual members of staff and students prior to the start of the
academic session should be regarded as provisional. Arrangements will be finalised subject to resource
availability.
However, given a written commitment from a student to a project supervisor that the student will undertake a
certain project, the school will endeavour to honour an informal agreement by a member of staff to the student to
supervise that project.
4. Starting the Project
At the start of the first semester go and see your supervisor as soon as possible. At this preliminary meeting, you
will finalise a project, and set up regular appointments, with your supervisor. You are required to hand in the
specification for your project to your supervisor by 21st September 2001.
This document should give a title, module code and an outline description of the project, and summarise the
work to be done. As a minimum requirement each of the following topics must be satisfactorily covered.
Subjects to be studied.
A brief description of the background.
Problems to be addressed.
Aims, milestones and initial ideas.
Software and hardware constraints.
An outline plan of action and a time table.
Upon submission of the Project Specification the supervisor will use the following criteria to decide whether or
not the project be allowed to proceed further.
The title is consistent with the supervisor’s understanding of the project.
The proposed aims of the project are worthy of a final year project.
The outline plan of action and the timetable are feasible for the student to implement.
Upon approval the supervisor and the student must sign the Project Specification, which is then returned to the
Project Tutor by 28th September 2001. A copy of the Project Specification should be handed in with the
Final Project Report (see section 10.1).
Changing the project in anyway from this agreed specification may only be done with the written permission of
your supervisor. This written permission should take the form of an amended specification signed by you and
your supervisor. Doing your own thing without talking to your supervisor can be very dangerous! Always, always
keep in touch with your supervisor and keep him/her informed of what you are doing. As a rough guide, bear in
mind that the project is a final year course, and its academic content should be equivalent to your other final year
courses. Hence, for example, writing a computer program, however big and complicated, is unlikely to be enough
to earn a good project mark.
5. Work Plan
The project will run from September 2001 to April 2002. This period may seem like a long time but is actually a
short period of time to produce the significant piece of work which is your project. Consider the competition for
your time from all your other work that your project will be under. The time you will be able to allocate for your
project will be limited. It is vital that you work steadily at your project over the year. There is great temptation to
feel that you can leave your project work until later. Doing this will inevitably cause grave problems which it is
unlikely you will be able to overcome in the time available to you. Start on top of your project, stay on top of it
and finish on top of it! Always remember that your project is a large chunk of the marks that are available to you
in your final year and thus represents a major contributing component to your final degree mark.
All of the technical work should be completed by the end of week nine of the second semester (approximately the
end of March). The rest of the second semester until the date on which you are due to hand in the project should
be a period during which you are writing up the project in your final report. During the period of the project you
will have approximately one day per week allocated to your project. This works out at around 30 days of effort
you can spend on your project or approximately five working weeks. This is not much time. It cannot be
emphasised enough how important it is that this time is well used! Many students are known to commit well in
excess of 180 hours, but this can only be achieved if your time is well planned.
Remember your project carries about the same weight as two twelve credit core modules - never neglect it in
favour of other coursework.
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6. Log Book
Log books should be kept during the project, in support of the practice initiated during the placement year, and
as evidence of industrial 'good practice'. It could also help with supervision, since it encourages students to keep
a written record of their progress and difficulties. The better informed the supervisor is by the student the better
will be the advice and guidance which they have to offer. A student who only feeds back comments of the form
“Well I suppose it’s going OK thanks ...” to their supervisor is providing them with precious little information
upon which they can provide much needed input to the project.
7. Project Assessment
Marks for the project break down as follows:
Content Mark
Interim Report 5%
Final Project Report 85%
Oral Presentation 10%
8. Interim Report
This document is a short report for summarising progress to date, reporting preliminary results and stating
changes to the initial plan if any. The report should be handed in to your supervisor at one of your regular
meetings by the end of semester 1. The document may include the following topics:
A literature survey: background research related to the problem.
Main scientific questions (to be) considered.
Main methods and tools (to be) employed.
Preliminary results: problems mathematically formulated, solutions found, algorithms designed and parts of
the system. Formally specified or implemented.
A revised project plan and timetable.
A copy of the Interim Report should be handed in with the Final Project Report (see section 10.1).
8.1. Assessment
The mark allocated to the Interim Report is 5%. This mark is a measure of the extent to which the content and
objectives of the project have been understood, and the extent to which competent progress has been made in
planning and design work towards achieving the project objectives.
9. Presentation
You will be given a 10 minute time slot to describe your project. The presentation is an opportunity to tell a
small group of staff (normally your supervisor, moderator and another member of staff) and students about
your project. It can be delivered by the use of visual aids include OHP slides, power point and the white
board. At the end of your presentation you will be asked questions about the presentation.
The presentations are scheduled in the week commencing 14th January 2002, and the timetable will be given
to you in due course.
9.1. Tips for Preparing Slides
The principal use of slides to the audience is to help it assimilate the talk by presenting in a visual format each
key point and concept.
The principal use of slides to the speaker is to serve as their notes for the talk. To use in addition either cue
cards or written notes gives an impression of lack of confidence to the audience. Ironically, using cue cards or
notes in addition to slides can make the talk more difficult as the former have to be synchronised with the
latter.
It is a common misconception among students that a high density of information upon each slide will impress
the audience. Actually, the audience will become disinterested and perhaps even hostile if it cannot digest one
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slide after another. An audience is only impressed by slides it can understand, slides that contain only key
words, phrases, pictures and diagrams essential to the talk.
9.2. Assessment
The presentation is an exercise in communication, persuasion, information delivery and demonstrating
competent management of a project. Proportion of mark for the presentation is 10%. Marks will be awarded
for the quality of the presentation. A detailed and tedious description of the technical minutiae of your work
will be marked lower than an interesting discussion of how your project has developed, the interesting
problems you looked at and how you might develop the work further. Assessment will be made against the
following criteria.
Visual aids: clarity of layout, explanation, use and handling.
Delivery: clarity, linguistic structure, appropriate vocabulary, rhythm and intonation of speech, speed of
delivery, use of pauses, enthusiasm and interest of speaker and appropriate body language including eye
contact.
Questions: clarity and conciseness of response, appropriate use of examples, response to alternative ideas,
manner and conviction of response.
10. Final Project Report
This document is a comprehensive and self-contained report on the work done on the project. It is important to
note that 85% of the marks are allocated to the Final Project Report. Your report is thus very important. In
particular, whilst your supervisor will know what a good job you have done during the year, the moderator(s) and
external examiner of your project will only have your report with which to work.
Do not leave your report writing until the last minute. A hastily written report will not reflect well on your work
and will mean that however good your technical work the marks you receive will be significantly fewer than they
might otherwise be. As with all aspects of your project you should allocate time for writing up and make sure you
stick to your plans. A good approach is to have a log book during the year so that when you come to the time for
completing your report you have a body of work on which to draw.
10.1 Conventions
The Final Report is a valuable document for inspection by appraisers and future cohorts of students. To facilitate
such inspection it is necessary to impose a few conventions upon all reports.
The Final Report should consist of a main text of about 12 - 18, 000 words together with appendices when
appropriate. It is difficult to be more specific about the number of words as some subjects will lead to more
verbose reports than the others. Whatever the case it should be just the right length needed to fully documented
the project without unnecessary verbosity. The main text should be arranged as a set of well defined chapters. In
order to ease the reader’s access to the Report all source code, manual entries, manufacture’s data, etc. should be
relegated to the appendices. Such detail must not be allowed to obscure or distract from the important arguments
and messages of the main text.
Although the subject area of a project will dictate some of the structure of the report (e.g. analysis, specification,
design), each Final Report MUST contain the following.
The Report must have a Title, Author, Course, Module Code, Student Number, Supervisor and Year of
Study (2000-2001).
The Report should have an Abstract of not more than about 100 words. Though it is placed at the beginning
of the report, it is written after the main body of the report, which it summarises, has been completed. It
gives the potential reader a framework showing the main features of each section of the report, including any
conclusions reached. It is therefore both self-contained and self-explanatory.
The Report should have a Keyword List of about 6-8 words. This is to help us with future plans for filing
reports.
The Report should have a Contents Page listing, by Chapter and Section, the logical structure of the report.
The Report should contain an Acknowledgements section. Here the student must make full declaration of
all contributions made by others to the project as, unless stated, the project is assumed to be entirely the
student’s own work.
The Report should have Introductory, Background and Motivational material early on. This may include
discussion of the subject area and its background, a literature survey and some reference to course material
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that relates to the project or, if appropriate, that the material discussed in the project is entirely novel and
what is the closest course material to it.
The Report should have a chapter or two describing Design and Development of the project. These may
include formulation of scientific questions and the answers to them, appropriate theoretical background,
technical problems considered, methods used to solve them (methodologies and tools employed e.g. case
tools), discussion of issues arising in specifying, designing and implementing the system (e.g. requirements
analysis, user interface, system architecture, algorithms, major data structure, etc.) and evaluation of results
(e.g. complexity, efficiency, user-friendliness, reliability, etc.).
The report should have a section on Project Management. This section will contain projected time scales in
the Interim Report, and progress charts against the projected time scales
The Report should have a section to contain the Conclusions, this being summary discussion/critique of the
project’s goals, achievements, difficulties, lessons learnt, etc. Similarly, there should be a section on
Further Work for the project, this being a discussion on how the work in the project could be further
continued and directed. A dead end project with no possibility for further development is not a good one.
Suggestions for how future projects could develop the current theme would be a good way of describing
further work.
The project must be conducted in the context of related work, and so the Report should contain a section for
References to such work. The main text will refer to such work, explain both its relevance and how it has
affected the course of the project. Make sure that all of the references listed are actually referred to in the
main text. Note that it is usually the work which others have or have not done which motivates and justifies
the project.
The reference list is usually numbered so that the reader can quickly find a particular entry. The following
are examples of references to an article in a journal ([1]) and a paper given at a conference ([2]):
(1) S. Ravindran, A.M. Gibbons and M.S. Paterson, “Dense edge-disjoint embedding of complete
binary tree in interconnection network”, Theoretical Computer Science (Vol. 249), pp325 –342,
2000.
(2) T. Berry, S. Ravindran, “String matching in a compressed DNA text”, Proceedings of the 10th
Australian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (AWOCA’99), pp 53-62, 1999.
The Report should have a section on Bibliography to contain a list of books and articles which, although not
essential to understanding your project report, will provide the reader with useful background information.
The format of the entries in the bibliography is the same as that used in the reference section but with the
addition of a sentence or two explaining why you included in the project report.
The Report should have the following Appendices.
(1) User and System manual (where applicable).
(2) Listing of Programs manual (where applicable).
(3) Log Book.
(4) Project Specification.
(5) Interim Report.
Every project that includes software should carry a certified virus-free copy of the code, on disc, with the Report.
10. 2. Style
The Report must be on A4 size paper, and must be word-processed. The principal font should be Times New
Roman 12. The number of lines per page should not exceed 30. In order to save both space and printing costs
the Report should be double sided, although this is not a requirement.
10. 3. Assessment
The Final Report will be marked by the supervisor and the moderator, and further assessed by a small group of
academic staff. Assessment will be made against the following criteria.
Overall quality of presentation: conformance to report-writing standards, spelling, grammar, punctuation and
ease of reading.
Analysis of the problem domain: level of detailed knowledge, use of analysis method, use of abstraction and
creativity, evaluation and statement of specification of problem.
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Proposal of a suitable solution: depth of treatment, synthesis, creativity, use of methods and evaluation.
Effective use of suitable tools/techniques: appropriate use of one or more of the following to support the
analysis and design methods and, if appropriate, the implementation of mathematical techniques, statistical
techniques, packages and software development tools.
Testing or Feedback: development of criteria, development strategy, critical review of evidences, evaluation
of significance, identification and resolution of contradictions.
Conclusions: critical review against specification, recommendations and their support, proposals for future
development.
Effective use of references: comprehensive coverage of domain, use of material in the report,
evaluation/critique, up to date and/or relevant. (note : references may include papers, manuals, commercial
documents and other relevant evidence)
10. 4. Submission Procedure
You must hand in two bound copies of the report. The most common type of binding is the spiroflex system.
Placing your work in a ring binder is not acceptable. Both copies handed in will be kept by the University. If you
require a copy for your own personal use (for example to show potential employers) this must be produced as an
additional copy.
The submission deadline for your project is:
4.00 p.m. 1st May 2002
******This deadline is absolute******
A late submission is technically a failure and will prevent the award of an honours degree. If you find difficulty in
meeting the deadline, it is vital that you consult your supervisor or the project tutor at the earliest possible time.
11. Important Dates
Content Deadline
Project Proposal Form to the Project Tutor 19 September 2001
Project Specification to the Supervisor 21 September 2001
Signed Project Specification to the Project Tutor 28 September 2001
Interim Report End of Semester 1
Project Presentation 14 - 18 January 2002
Final Project Report 1 May 2002
12. Final Advice
Have fun. This may seem a strange thing to say after all the dire predictions of doom that are contained in this
note, but you should have few problems, provided you work sensibly and in an organised way. The project is a
chance for you to work on something that interests you; take the opportunity to enjoy the work.
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Liv e rpool John M oore s Univ e rsity
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Project Proposal Form
This form should be returned to the office 703B by 19th September 2001.
To be filled in by everyone
Name:
Student Number:
Course: Mode of Study: Full Time / Part Time*
Fill in this section if you choose Option 1
Project Title:
Project Area:
Member of Staff:
Fill in this section if you choose Option 2
Project Title/Area:
Member of Staff:
Fill in this section if you choose Option 3 (i.e. You unable to find a project supervisor)
Project Area:
Special Requirements (i.e. Software, hardware or space which are not available in UNIX/PC Labs in 6th or 7th Floor):
Attach a brief description of your project to justify the special requirements. Arrangements will be
finalised subject to resource availability.
If you choose option 1 or 2, the member of staff who agreed to supervise your project should sign below.
Student Supervisor
Date Date
Delete as appropriate
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