Project information for supervisors and markers

Supervision

Supervision sessions will start in Week 13, and your supervisees should have arranged the first meeting in advance.

Supervision is either 30 minutes a week, or an hour a fortnight during term time. Your supervisees should take control of the meeting, bringing you their work for your feedback and questions for you.

Please log your meetings on eVision in Attendance and Engagement -> View all my tutees. You will be assigned as their second tutee and should log the meeting as Tutorial Sesion -> Supervision Meeting.

If your students miss a meeting unexpectedly please log them as absent on eVision and email the School Office so the Education Team can find out what’s going on.

You will be expected to give feedback on 2-3 pages of the student’s draft, if the student arranges this in advance with you.

Students on the Maths & CS Short Project COMS30044 are taking the 20 credit version of the unit and should be doing half the amount of work of the standard project.

Please encourage the students to make and show you their project plan at the start of the project, and to start writing early.

The students have access to example projects from last year, divided into folders for 2:i, Standard Firsts and High Firsts (80+). They can find these by going into the Projects Team General Channel, clicking Files at the top of the page -> Class Materials. There are also report templates in LaTeX and Word, tips on writing and more resources in the Class Materials folder. If you’d ike access to any of this, contact Mike and Sarah.

If your supervisee would like extra support with writing and study skills, we have links to resources on the Writing Your Dissertation page.

If you won’t be able to see your supervisee because you are going to be away or you are sick, please contact Mike and Sarah so they can arrange for cover for you.

Your students will need you to sign off their project ethics status. There is more information in the Ethics page but if you have questions about ethics, contact Oussama Metatla, the School Ethics Lead.

Please do encourage your students to go to the TB2 Library Workshop, writing support activities and especially Poster Day. The dates are on the unit schedule and you can find out more information about the events on the Teaching Block 2 page

Marking the report

You can find which students you are marking, who the other marker is and the status of the marking on markerbot.

You and the other marker will independently mark the project, using the marking scheme. Please note: the BSc pass mark is 40; the MEng pass mark is 50. Please note: while the marking scheme has 4 columns, these are not equally weighted, as each project will be different. A student does not need to hit every bulletpoint in a grade boundary to achieve that grade - some may be above or below.

Please spot check the bibliography to check at least 3 references to make sure they are legitimate.

Please structure your feedback around the 4 headings of the marking scheme:

Challenge & Contribution
Design & Implementation
Testing & Evaluation
Organisation & Communication

and finish with an Overall section. Feedback should justify your mark, and ideally should be written to help them understand what they did well, what they could have done to get more marks, and what to be aware of in future work.

Once you have marked the report, submit your mark and feedback into markerbot. Please do not discuss your mark with the other marker at this point. Once both markers have submitted, you will be sent each other’s marks and feedback, and should meet to agree a final mark. In the very rare cases where you can’t agree after this discussion, contact Mike and Sarah and we will arrange a 3rd marker.

Once the final mark is ageed, the supervisor uploads the mark and final feedback for the student into markerbot and it is sent to the second marker to sign off.

You will receive regular, automated reminders from markerbot until all your marking is completed.

After the marking deadline, at least 10% of the projects will be moderated for consistency at the Moderation Panel.

If your student gets an extension, we will let you know as soon as we hear - but please note, because the students can put in their extension requests up to 24 hours before their due date, we may not know until then. If your supervisees need an extension request, please encourage them to contact the School Office as soon as they can.

If you have any questions about the marking, please contact Mike and Sarah.

Role of the viva

As part of the marking process, the second marker will carry out a viva with the student. The role of the viva is twofold: to check the students have done all the work themselves, to let students demonstrate systems and to enable them to explain things they may have found difficult to explain in the written work.

Vivas will be arranged for you - they are in person and should take place in your office. If you share an office, we will arrange a meeting room for you. If you can’t attend the viva for any reason, contact Mike and Sarah and we will rearrange.

Please record the viva. We will set up a Teams meeting to record it in - please open the meeting on a laptop and check it is recording. You do not need to record video, but we do need the audio, in case of later challenges to the mark.

Vivas should take around 25 minutes with the students starting with a 5 or 10 minute presentation, followed by time for you to ask questions. You should have read the student’s report beforehand, and have an initial mark in mind, which could be improved or reduced by the viva performance.

If the student has a Study Support Plan and feel they didn’t perform well, or couldn’t answer the questions, they have up to 24 hours after the viva to email you with additional information. If this happens, please take it into account in the marking. We will let you know which students have SSPs in advance.

If students cannot describe or are unsure about critical aspects of the project, and you think this is because they have not completed this work, this is rounds to give a fail mark, and you should report to Mike and Sarah so we can start the Academic Misconduct process.

The supervisor is not expected to be at the viva, however if they want to, they can attend as an observer, although they will not ask questions or contribute to the viva. Contact Mike and Sarah for details of suerpvisees’ vivas, if you want to do this.

Plagiarism, academic misconduct and LLMs

Mike and Sarah will run initial plagiarism checks on all reports, looking at the TurnItIn reports and spot-checking the bibliography. If you have any suspicions the student has committed academic misconduct or plagiarism, please contact Mike and Sarah with your suspicions, so they can start the academic misconduct process, and mark the report as usual.

Students are allowed to use ChatGPT, other LLMs and ‘AI’ tools following University and Faculty guidelines. They are not able to use it to write sentences, however they can use it for other cases as long as they include their list of prompts in an Appendix and detail how they have used the tools, in the frontmatter. Using tools in appropriate ways, for example, as part of a suite of debugging tools, is completely appropriate.

Per University policy, students should write their dissertation in English and should not use translation tools for anything other than occasional words. Students can get help writing in English from the University Study Skills team, including 1:1 tutorials.

There is more information about academic integrity and plagiarism, including links to the relevent Unversity policies on the Academic Integrity page. If you have any questions or concerns, contact Mike and Sarah.