CS50IP: Information for Current Students General While you are on placement, you will mostly be interacting with the placement company, but Aberdeen University would also like to keep an eye on you and help you get the most out of your placement year. This is particularly important if the placement starts going wrong. If you feel unhappy, exploited, or otherwise do not think your placement is working out, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR PLACEMENT ORGANISER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE We will do our best to help you, but we cannot help you if we do not know there is a problem! Most placements are wonderful experiences with no major problems; but if a problem does arise, you need to let us know sooner rather than later. Monitoring Placement students should send their contact details to your placement organiser as soon as possible (email, telephone, post), and let him know if these change during the year. Placement students should email the Placement Oraganiser a short report every month describing their current and planned activities; this is so we can verify that what you are doing is consistent with a CS placement year. Your report should also list any problems you have encountered and any issues you wish to raise. An email with a few paragraphs of text is fine, you don't need a formal document. We try to visit UK placement students on site. This usually happens about halfway through the year. Students who are outwith the UK (e.g. on SunStart) may be telephoned instead of visited. Assessment If a student does not pass CS50IP, his or her degree will not be with industrial placement. Students on a CS4016 placement (starting before 2009): Students were asked to write one or two short interim reports during their placement, and soon after returning they write a final dissertation (5000 words) and to make a 20-minute oral presentation about their placement. The mark for CS50IP will be determined by the interim reports (20%), the dissertation (75%), and the oral presentation (5%). Students who started under CS4016 but continued under CS50IP (starting in 2009): As above. Students on a CS50IP placement (starting after 2009): As above, but with the following changes: there will be just one final report (75%), oral presentation (10%, plus a short Viva (15%). Instead of the old interim reports, students are asked to produce an (unassessed) web page containing information concerning the work that they do. The final report should normally be 20-40 pages long, in PS, PDF, or DOC format. It should normally contain 2 sections: A summary of all your activities during your placement year An in-depth description of one of these activities (ideally the one you spent the most time on). This will often be useful to structure this as a software-engineering report, including the following sections Background: The context of your work. For example, if your work was part of a larger project, you should describe the larger project. Requirements analysis: Description of users of your system; functional and non-functional requirements; structure of inputs and outputs. Design: Explanation of key decisions about technology, algorithms, user-interfaces, database structures, and so forth. Implementation: Summary of what you actually implemented, including if possible examples of real inputs and outputs. Testing and evaluation: Summary of testing performed, including structure (what you did) and results (what you discovered). If you worked as part of a team, and it would be difficult for you to separate your activities from what other people did, its OK to describe what the team as a whole did. If you believe that it would be difficult to write a report along the above lines because of type of work you did in your placement, please contact your Placement Organiser to discuss this. Please also check with your placement company to ensure that your report does not contain commercially confidential information. Again if this will be a problem, please contact your Placement Organiser. The Presentation will normally have a duration of 15-30 minutes and will often include prospective placement students in the audience, to allow the latter to profit from your experience. The Viva will be arranged by the placement coordinator. It will normally involve a 30-minute discussion on your experiences and on the work that you have done during your placement. The placement coordinator will select one other member of staff to be present during the Viva. The student is responsable for sending the final report to those present at the Viva. Your mark on CS50IP does not affect your overall degree classification. However, you will not be awared a degree with industrial placement if you do not pass CS4016.