5.5 Looking for the early wobble

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Projects are (usually) conducted over a long period of time and for significant credit. Without mechanisms for tracking progress, there is much scope for things to go wrong - with dire consequences.

This bundle assists students in producing final project reports by requiring them to submit well specified sections of the report at set times during the year, for example after the analysis, design and testing phases.

The way it works is that students submit reports on specific (perhaps negotiated) phases of their work at the end of that phase, rather than at the end of the project. Thus they can be given feedback on their report writing and have a chance to revise their work before it is finally assessed. Students can't leave all the report writing until the end of the project and then be faced with the horrors of a blank sheet of paper. Conversely, if there is a major revision of the aims or requirements late in the project, the fact that earlier work has already been "validated" discourages students from perceiving it as wasted.

A variation of "stage by stage" is to link the staging to interim grades as well. A way to implement this, in situations where everyone does the same project, is to require weekly progress and then to provide "model solutions" at the end of each week so that everyone starts the following week at the same point and no-one's marks are disadvantaged cumulatively. [An example of this is described in: A. G. Sartori-Angus (University of Natal, Durban, S Africa) Object-Oriented Design through Ray-tracing, Proceedings of the 5th Annual Conference on the Teaching of Computing (26 - 29 August 1997) pp 220-222]

It works better with final year, individual projects where the development of the project can be expected to show definite phases and require a substantial written report upon which much of the assessment will be based.

It doesn't work unless the requirement for staged delivery is common to all students and supervisors. The detailed content of the staged reports can be negotiated between the student and supervisor to be appropriate to the project's development method. Project supervisors must have sufficient time to give the necessary feedback; if they don't students may be resentful of the supervisor not keeping their side of an implicit bargain.

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So: institute mechanisms which trap early failure