- Preliminary Notes
- Your Report Files
- Report Grading Criteria
- Formatting Your Report
- Writing Quality
- Daily Entries
- Discussion Questions
- Examples of Reports
Preliminary Notes
- You may see phrases like "lab reports" and "admin log" used (seemingly) interchangeably.
- You may also see these called by different names, such as "labs" vs. "projects". Either way, it is a hands-on assignment designed to give you concrete experience with the knowledge and principles you are learning in class.
- Basically, your admin log consists of...
- project-by-project reports, each of which contains...
- daily entries, followed by...
- answers to project-specific questions.
The Project/Lab Report Files
- Each team member must create and maintain their own administrator's log. The log itself is an individual endeavor, and no student's log should copy another's verbatim. The same text in two or more students' logs will be regarded as academic dishonesty -- and treated accordingly.
- The files must be plain text files, containing only characters within the ASCII or Latin-1/ISO-8859-1 character sets. As such, you should create these files in a standard plain-text editor.
- The file text should use proper Unix-style line endings and be easily readable in a standard Unix/Linux command line environment. To check this, you can try reading your files, while logged into a Linux shell, using the less utility.
- The file name must meet the following format exactly:
Examples: report_04.txt or report_11.txt
- Starts with report_
- Followed by the project/lab number (prefixed with a zero if the number is a single digit)
- Followed by the extension .txt
- The file must be located in your it246/reports or it341/reports directory, depending on which class you are in.
- I have a script that looks at these files, which I run shortly after the due dates/times
- If your file has the wrong name -- or is in the wrong directory -- I will not see it. In terms of the grade, this is the same as not submitting it at all!
Report Grading Criteria
Each lab report will be graded based on four criteria. Each criterion will be named here, with more detailed explanations to follow in the sections below.
- Formatting Quality: 1.5 / 10
- Writing Quality: 1.5 / 10
- Log Content: 5.0 / 10
- Questions Content: 2.0 / 10
Formatting Your Report
- Plain text files -- ASCII or Latin-1/ISO-8859-1
- Limit each line to 80 chars long
- Daily entries should be clearly marked with headers that include the date.
- Set off commands typed and output received
- Match capitalization of commands and names
- Indentation:
- Use indentation to make your lab reports look neater
- Levels of indentation help organize ideas.
- Do not make indentations too wide. 2-4 spaces per indentation level should be sufficient
- Skipping lines:
Skip enough lines throughout to improve readability
Do not skip lines excessively or gratuitously.
- Formatting Example: Text Only
- Formatting Example: With Annotations
Writing Quality
- Always write in complete sentences that have a proper subject and predicate.
- You need to have a coherent narrative structure where ideas logically flow from one thing to another
- A general sense of underlying organization should characterize your writing about a thing.
- Use punctuation properly. Examples include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Commas: Before coordinating conjunction joining two sentences into one, used to set off introductory phrases and appositive phrases, etc.
- Combining two independent clauses into one sentence: Either a comma and coordinating conjunction or a semi-colon
- Em-dashes and parentheses for setting off things within a sentence
- Using homonyms, homophones, and other similar words correctly:
- "to" vs. "too" vs. "two"
- "there" vs. "there" vs. "they're"
- "its" vs. "it's"
- "well" vs. "we'll"
- "accept" vs. "except"
- Spelling - Both what the spell checker catches...and what it does not; spell checkers are not perfect, so you should double check.
- This should be more refined than your rough notes, which you might write on the spot while doing project work. Rough notes help with recall, but log entries should be more polished.
- Do not use confusing wording; I need to be able to understand what you mean. This includes using language that is grammatical.
Contents of the Log Entries
- You must make an entry for each class meeting, within the appropriate project report files.
- The entry for each day must start with the date on a line of its own
- Your entry for each day should be broken up into topics
- Each topic should be a specific bit of work
- Topics should be separated from each other by a blank line
- Any time you supply a value while working on a project, you should record it in your lab report for that project
- Do not "gloss over" too much of the detail. For example, "we followed the instructions" is entirely too vague.
- At the same time, merely paraphrasing (or practically copying) the instructions is also bad because it does not demonstrate any understanding of what you are doing or why. If I see this, then I will likely suspect that...
Instead, make sure your logs read like they are written by a student who is actively engaged in the work.
- At best, you do not understand what you are doing or why you are doing it.
- At worst, you are not doing the work at all! (Rest assured, it is quite obvious when you do this.)
- Describe steps in context of a process (installation, testing, configuring, etc). Every project has a purpose and a goal, and the individual projects are part of an even larger process.
- In addition to knowing what you did, I also want to know how and why...towards what end? It helps if I can know the context for the decisions you make.
- Always provide absolute file paths when referring to specific configuration files
- Be precise in your use of terms; don't mix up terms, use them too generally, too specifically, etc.
- Qualify terms that should be qualified
- Don't always need entire file contents!
- When you solve a problem...
- What was the problem? First sign there was a problem?
- What steps were taken to identify cause?
- Test commands used
- Search phrases employed (e.g., when using Google)
- Specific links consulted
- Specific files examined -- with absolute pathnames
- Describe any experiments or tests undertaken
- What solution stuck and why?
- When you test your installation...
- What was the specific test command, utility, data, etc.?
- What was the result? (If output is long, then there are ways to summarize without losing too much detail.)
- Installing packages via apt-get - The specific package(s)?
- Content Example: Text Only
- Content Example: With Annotations
Answers to Discussion Questions
- As you work on the projects you will occasionally see questions, with a note to answer this in your lab report
- Some of these may be things to address within the narrations of your daily entries
- Others will be answered at the end of the report
- You must answer these questions. If you don't you will lose points
- Discussion questions belong at the end of the lab report, after your entries.
- These should be placed in proper numerical order.
- Please include the question -- both the number and the texts.
- Skip a line between the question and your answer.
- Skip line between the answer and the next question
- Any works consulted must be cited properly, regardless of whether you use the actual words. If you take a quote directly from a source, it must be surrounded by quotation marks and properly cited!
- As with your log entries, your answers should be in the form of complete sentences.
- Your answers to the questions should be: Accurate, complete, and concise.
- Usually, a good answer to a discussion question will be at least 75-100 words, unless the question is only asking for a specific piece of information.
Working on Your Reports
- You must make an entry for each class meeting, on a per-project basis...
...as well as any time you work on project-related or lab-related material.
- even if you don't accomplish anything
- even if you are absent
- You should not include your class notes in this -- though you may include specific parts of your notes, inasmuch as they related to lab/project work!
- You should think of it as a regular part of your class work
- If you can't connect to users for some reason, you can make the entry on your laptop (or even a paper notebook)...but you must eventually transfer the information to the relevant lab report.
- I will be checking for daily entries
- Be timely about making these entries. The longer you wait, the more you will forget about what happened. And...you will forget much more quickly than you think you will!
- This is another reason I advise you to have note-taking supplies on hand. By documenting things as they happen, you will be much better able to recall things when you are ready to make log entries.
- Although you and your partner will be working together and thus covering much of the same ground, you should be writing your logs individually. Duplicated, verbatim content (other than command-line output) between two or more students' logs is academic dishonesty!
Examples of Lab Reports
The following examples are from IT341, Project 1. Although the reports may have had some minor flaws, they also earned good grades!