COSC 91/191 Research Paper
Draft due in class, Monday, May 13
Final version due at 6:00 pm Wednesday, May 29
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. For example, if you don't have research to write up, one
option would be to write a survey paper.
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, with my comments,
back to you by May 20, if not before. When I give you back the draft,
it will be hardcopy with written comments. Save the draft,
because you will be submitting it with your final paper.
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 eight pages with a
font size of at least 10 points. 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 the LaTeX source must include commands
to incorporate them.
- 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 this course.
Moreover, you are required to indicate on your hardcopy
submission exactly 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.
- To submit your paper, send me an email containing a PDF of your
paper and the URL or file name for your source. If you need to
annotate which passages of your paper came from previous
papers, 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 PDF
document. Also give me the hardcopy of your draft, with my marks, so
that I can see how well you responded to my comments.
The draft counts for 20% of your course grade, and the final version
counts for 40%.
Thomas H. Cormen <thc@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Last modified: Tue Mar 26 14:58:21 2019