SCM Coursework
Coursework
This page gives basic information about the preparation of laboratory report worksheets, the two formal lab reports, and laboratory notebooks.
Recording and reporting laboratory work
Laboratory report worksheets
All your measurements, calculations, graphical work and conclusions for laboratory exercises 1–7 must be entered directly onto the separate lab report worksheets. These worksheets have been designed to accommodate all the graphs, calculations, and answers that you are expected to produce for these exercises. They are also designed to show you how to keep a laboratory log, record data, and present results.
The worksheets should not take too long to complete – two or three hours at most. The deadline for handing them in is your lab session the following week. Just put them into the box labelled "SCM" in the lab. They will be marked and returned as quickly as possible, so you can learn from what you did badly or wrong.
On these worksheets, you should try to record data and do calculations neatly enough to be handed in as is. We are not demanding fanatical neatness, just legibility and clarity, but if you make a complete mess of a worksheet we can provide another copy.
Note that for exercise 5 you must hand in both the worksheet and a formal report.
Formal laboratory reports
The course also requires you to produce two formal reports. The first is for exercise 5 (for which you submit both a report and a worksheet), and the second is for one of exercises 8–12 that you select to do towards the end of the semester. These reports must be typed using a word processor. As a general rule they should contain the following sections:
Title
There is a good example of such a report in exercise 5. Use this as a guide for your own report (but note that yours will be much shorter). Writing reports will be covered in the lectures. It is also useful to read Squires, Chapter 13 ("Writing a Paper") or Silyn-Roberts. The reports must be put into simple plastic binders, available at cost from the technicians..
Laboratory notebooks
As stated above, for exercises 8 to 12 you must hand in a formal report. While doing this exercise, which should take you about three weeks at two afternoons per week, you need a way to keep a record of your work. We recommend that you keep a laboratory notebook. This is the complete record of what you do in the lab, and for preliminary graphs, calculations and observations. You could just use loose sheets of paper, but beware of losing them, not writing things down properly, getting them out of order, etc. The recommended notebook is an A4-size softback notebook of 80 pages, with quadrille rulings (a 5 mm grid) on all pages, available from the college bookshop. The quadrille ruling is ideal for sketching apparatus, writing notes, tabulating readings, and drawing graphs as you go along. Graphs that you need to draw on other graph paper, as well as output from computer programs, can be stuck in with clear tape or an adhesive such as Pritt Stick. Do not spend money on a 'standard' laboratory notebook with alternate ruled and graph pages; these are more expensive but less useful (and a waste of good graph paper).
There is a lot of good sense on notebooks and how to use them in Chapter 10 of the book by Squires. The golden rule is to say what you are doing: write a sentence or two when you make measurements, put labels on graphs, captions on sketches, headings (with units!) on tables, etc. You should be able to reconstruct what happened that day in the lab. Only by writing things down systematically can you hope to do this – do not trust your memory!
Teamwork vs. plagiarism
Worksheets and formal reports that you hand in must be your own work. Do not copy from other students. You will work in pairs for some exercises, and this means that you do the measurements as a team. However, you must write your own laboratory worksheets and reports. Submission of reports that are very similar, or that have parts that look as if they were copied from someone else, will be treated as possible plagiarism and may result in serious disciplinary action. See also the regulations for writing essays and reports in the Student Handbook.
