1.a) Literature review

In their assessment, supervisors will be looking not only at evidence for thorough scrutiny of the relevant literature, but also for appropriate presentation. Attention should be paid to such things as: linking the author's observations cited and the conclusion drawn with the type of experiment performed; avoidance of undue conciseness on the one hand or verbosity on the other; accuracy, grammar, logical flow of ideas, the discrimination between conflicting points of view, and so on. Figures and tables may be appropriate. Slabs of reviews should not be included verbatim. The review should be a discriminating perusal of what is known, rather than a tedious recounting (without personal appraisal) of simply what has been done. You will be awarded a grade of A,B,C,D,E and a critique summary will be written by your supervisor.

 

 

The learning goal for this assignment is to teach students to extract data from laboratory notebooks and prepare a scientific document. The text of the report should be 2000 words or less. Three or four figures and/or tables must be included. The text should include a brief Introduction. The focus should be on the presentation and discussion of your data. Assessors will expect figures, tables and text to be presented professionally and at the standard of an acceptable scientific journal. Assessors will expect students to present examples of results, NOT all results. This report will be graded A,B,C,D,E by your Assessment Committee. To arrive at this grade your Assessment Committee will meet with you for one hour to discuss your practice thesis. Although the practice thesis forms the basis of this portion of the continuous assessment, the Assessment Committee will review and provide feedback on overall progress to date. To aid this discussion please bring the following to the meeting; (1) a dot point summary of all of your results to date, and (2) your lab notebooks. This meeting will also introduce the student to the format used for the final oral interview. The grade will be submitted to the BABS Student Office (to Kylie Jones)

The grade from the practice thesis should not be used to predict the final outcome of the thesis. The practice thesis is a training activity and it is not meant to contain all results obtained to date. In addition in most cases new results will be added to the final thesis that can alter the previous interpretation of incomplete data.

This assignment serves as a major component of the student’s training for writing the final thesis. Detailed feedback concerning the expectations for preparation of the final thesis needs to be provided at this time.

 

The assessment carried out by the Assessment Committee (your supervisor and two other members of staff) is based on (i) a written report of the project in the form of a short thesis (ii) a subsequent interview. As an encouragement to good practice, laboratory notebooks are required to be submitted with the thesis.

The written report should follow the format for a Masters or Ph.D. thesis, but will be shorter. There must be a title page, a table of contents, a list of figures and tables, and an abstract all preceding the main body of text. The main body of the text must be comprised of sections including an Introduction, Methods and Materials, Results, and Discussion.
Figures, tables, references and abbreviations should follow the general form of a scientific paper written for Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Bacteriology, or the Journal of Immunology. It is difficult to give concise guidelines concerning the length of each section of the thesis because projects vary in complexity and scope. However theses with Introductions of less than 1000 words do not receive high grades. On the other hand if the Introduction exceeded 2500 words the Assessment Committee may query the need for such a long Introduction. Unlike traditional Masters or Ph.D. theses, the Introduction should not be a lengthy literature review, but rather the key background citations should be discussed to define the problem being examined and place it in the context of published work in the area. The Introduction should end with a brief statement of the aims and hypothesis of the current work. The length and content of Methods and Materials, and the Results sections should be consistent with a thesis format. There are a number of past honours theses available from Honours Convenors and individual supervisors often keep collections of past theses. Please remember that in some cases page limitations may not have applied to prior theses. On the rare occasions that material needed for complete understanding or evaluation of the work does not fit well into the thesis it may be included as an Appendix, although this usually should not be necessary.

Terms and concepts used without definition should be such as would be understood by a trained scientist working any topic within the School of BABS. If their use is very specialised, some explanation will be necessary.

 

Interview:
Students will be interviewed by the Assessment Committee to evaluate the extent of the students knowledge and to confirm that the student is fully in possession of the contents of their thesis. Performance will be assessed and incorporated into the final mark.

Assistance in writing thesis
Supervisors will give help without limit at all stages prior to actual writing. This degree of help will depend on student's requests and supervisor's initiative. Supervisors or their designate are allowed to read thesis drafts to make comments on writing style and format.

What to expect for your final Honours grade