Report Marking Scheme

You can use this scheme to mark reports in your discipline, and to inform students what you expect of them in their written reports.

Awarding a basic mark for a report

Use the following table to establish the basic mark for a report.

The following are some expectations you might have relating to each element; you can adjust this text to suit your purposes and circulate it to your students to clarify how they should write their reports, and your marking staff to indicate how they should award marks.

Introduction. This section should identify to the reader the aim and purpose of the report that you are writing (why you are writing the report), with perhaps a short summary of the contents and findings. The broad aims of the project should also go here.

Background. Here, you put the requirements of the project, especially those that affect this particular report. Some requirements may derive directly from the module or from some externally-defined standard or specification. Make sure to include references for all the sources of your requirements. You may wish (alternatively you could put this in the main body) to put some of the background theory relating to the project here.

Main body. This varies from report to report and from project to project. However, some common headings are:

• Project management—team responsibilities, budgets and timetable.
• System design—selection of configuration (as opposed to individual components)
• Hardware design (often broken down into subsystems)—explain your component selection and design decisions. Clear schematics should be presented.
• Software design—often diagrams (e.g. flowcharts) are more useful than the code itself. Especially where assembler is concerned, commenting is essential in code fragments.
• Wherever you make a design decision, you should back up your decision with reasoning or calculations.

Conclusions. Here you can summarise your findings (what you have decided and what you have learned), draw any conclusions from them that are appropriate, e.g. how you might do things differently next time, and look at the job remaining.

Your report must be an effective means of communicating the results of your project.

• Language should be clear and correct.
• Presentation (clear fonts, diagrams, use of space etc.) should aid in comprehension of the material.
• The information should be structured to sensibly progress from requirements to conclusions in clear sections.

Deducting penalties

Use the following table as a basis for deciding how you will deduct marks for incorrect report presentation or referencing, and compile the final mark.

For a fuller consideration of marking and responding to students' work, see the following pages:

• Marking tips
• Reducing plagiarism
• Giving assessment feedback