CS 110 Research Paper
Draft due in class, Friday, February 19
Final version due Friday, March 12
The paper you write will form a substantial part of your final grade
in the course. Normally, it should be a research paper, written in
the style of a conference paper, but other types of papers are
possible.
You should discuss with me in advance what you intend to write about.
The purpose of the draft is to get you feedback before you submit the
final version. To make sure that you take it seriously, I will grade
the draft. I will try to get the draft back to you by March 1, if not
before.
Requirements
Your paper must adhere to the following requirements:
- The paper need not be written just for this course. It can be
something that you're writing for some other purpose, such as a
conference submission or a part of your thesis. But it must
represent new writing. Merely submitting something that you
wrote in the past is not allowed. I want you to be able to put
into practice what you've learned in this course.
- For a research paper, you are limited to 12 pages. You might
want to write more, but you have to learn how to adhere to page
limits. For other types of papers, we will have to agree in
advance on your maximum allowed length.
- Your paper must be produced using LaTeX. If it contains
figures—and it probably should—they must be
computer generated and included in the LaTeX source.
- I recognize that you might be compelled to reuse text from a
previous paper that you wrote, either alone or with others.
You must limit text that you have taken from previous
papers, even those that you have authored or coauthored, to be
at most 20% of the paper that you submit for CS 110. Moreover,
you are required to indicate on your hardcopy submission which
passages you have taken from your previous papers.
- I will want electronic read access to the LaTeX source of your
paper. You can send me a URL or file name so that I can see
the LaTeX source. If you send a file name, please make sure
that I have read access to the files and directory.
- I will need a hardcopy of your paper. You can give me a
hardcopy, printed double sided, or you can send me a
PDF, which I am happy to print. If you need to annotate which
passages of your paper came from previous papers, you may do so
either by giving me hardcopy that you mark up by hand, or you
may include marginal notes that I'll see in the PDF.
Grading
I will grade your paper based on the following criteria:
- Organization
- How well organized is your paper? Does it tell a story? Can I
determine easily the important points? Have you chosen a good
order in which to present information? Have you broken it into
sections in a logical manner?
- Style and usage
- Are your paragraphs well formed? Does each section and
subsection (even if unnumbered) have a topic paragraph? Does
each paragraph have a topic sentence? Are your sentences well
written? Do they follow the style ideas and usage rules that
we've gone over in class?
- Formatting
- Have you used LaTeX correctly?
- Overall
- My overall impression of your paper.
Along with the final version, you must submit a discussion of how your
final version takes into account the comments you received from me on
your draft. Submit this discussion as a separate document. (Either
a PDF or hardcopy is fine. I don't need to see the LaTeX source of the
discussion document.)
The grade for the final version grade will count twice as much as the
grade for the draft.
Thomas H. Cormen <thc@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Last modified: Tue Feb 23 12:45:33 2010