General Guidelines
Final Grade

General Guidelines

It is very important to clearly indicate where your words and thoughts end, and where other people's words and thoughts begin.

• I'm generally not interested in copied material. Please use your own language.
• You may (and should) use other people's work as long as you properly reference it.
• If you think you have a good reason to include other people's material in your work:

1. Indicate your source within the text (next to included material), and in the references section.
2. I need to know if you are quoting verbatim (not your words), or adapting (some editing but essentially someone else's words.).

• The simulation study should generally proceed in the following pattern: explore behaviors (careful design or selection of cases), compute & summarize results, discuss findings, show trends, compare with theory (or previous work), and draw conclusions.
• It's OK to briefly repeat the problem statement, and to include selected textbook definitions for background and context. However, this should not be at the expense of the time spent thinking about the experiment, the results, the conclusions, and studying the book for answers.

Conventionally, there are 3 ways to summarize in scientific communication: tables, graphs, and math formulas. In some cases, diagrams may be appropriate.

Project Report Criteria

The basic work of programming the simulation will not receive any weight as this is the main skill of CS students. Everybody is expected to do a good job. It is a pre- requisite and is not related to performance in STAT612.

The exception is programming in Maple. Demonstrating skill with Maple will be rewarded appropriately.

Otherwise there are 3 broad criteria:

1. Designing the experiment: selecting appropriate parameters and test cases.
2. Reporting: a skill under development in STAT 612 therefore relatively little weight will be assigned in projects 1 and 2. In project 3, however, I do expect to see clear progress. Your report should fully reflect whatever guidelines I publish or comments I make about reporting. A significant weight will be assigned in project 3.
3. STAT 612 knowledge: a measure of the quality of study and use of the textbook. The majority of weight is always assigned to this category.

Project Evaluations

Project 1 [top]

1. Quality of experimentation.
2. Quality of discussion and interpretations of shapes.
3. Quality of examples for each shape (basically, generic distribution textbook examples vs. well thought-out examples to explain the probability trend exhibited by each shape).

Project 2 [top]

The detailed criteria:

1. Discussion and (summary) presentation of results.
2. Comparison with theory.
3. Insights: trends, analysis and interpretation (I need to see some probabilistic reasoning which reflects STAT612 knowledge).
4. Conclusions.
5. Report presentation: structure and organization.

Grade guide:

• A: top job, best probabilistic analysis, best link to theory, best reporting.
• B+: mostly good experimentation, very weak probabilistic analysis.
• B: need to work harder.

Project 3 [top]

Please read General Guidelines and the criteria for Project 2 carefully.

Final Grade [top]

Grading (sorting into levels) instead of assigning a mark for projects may be unusual to some, but it is very common. It is the essence of the "grading system" which evaluates to within 5 marks margin. This is more honest than assigning specific marks where evaluation is highly subjective.

The exam was marked against a specific correct (reference) answer.

Where a grade is assigned, 79% of assessment mark was used for C+, 84% for B, 89% for B+, and so on. The mark for each assessment is shown in the corresponding column head. that assessment.

The total was multiplied by a curve factor of 1.067.