IS6335 Chap.12 The Group Project and the Individual Report
The Group Project and the Individual Report
Sixty per cent, in two deliverables
The group project is worth twenty per cent and the individual project forty. Between them they carry more than half the course, and unlike the lab exercises they are marked on what you produce rather than on submitting it.
The group component arrives in three marked pieces spread across the semester, a milestone report and a milestone presentation at two per cent each and a final presentation at sixteen.
The individual report arrives once, at the end, and is the single largest mark in the course.
Both ask you to identify a data source and both accept data from online sources or collected first-hand, so a search done once in week five or six pays twice.
The two are marked separately and the individual report must be your own work, but nothing prevents the same domain, the same acquisition effort and the same cleaning from serving the group analysis and then a narrower question of your own.
Groups that leave the individual report until the revision week usually pay for a second data hunt at the worst possible moment.
The milestone report is a checklist, and it is ungraded
It is two to three pages, single spaced, one per group with every member named, due in week six.
The teaching plan states that it will not be graded and that submitting it with the listed components is sufficient to receive full credit.
Six components are listed and all six have to be present: an identified data source; then a brief data description; then the background, together with the motivation; then which visualization concepts and which tools you expect to use; then the analysis, set out as steps; and finally any initial findings. The qualifier on the last of those is in the published wording, so having none yet at that stage is acceptable.
A short milestone presentation follows in week seven.
The final presentation has a published running order
It runs ten to fifteen minutes including questions from the class, and every member of the team must be present.
The teaching plan says the content should resemble the milestone report with more detail on analysis, findings and visualization techniques, and it names the components: the data and why you chose to analyse it, expected findings given the background and motivation from prior studies, the steps of analysis and how they relate to the course, the main findings with anything surprising highlighted, a summary and conclusion, and future directions.
One published criterion separates a strong talk from a merely competent one.
A successful presentation not only employs visualization techniques properly but leaves the audience understanding why the data was analysed in the way it was, and what the demonstrations let them take away.
Building one slide that states the question and one that states what the audience should now believe, with everything between them as evidence, is a direct response to that sentence.
Where the forty per cent actually sits
The individual project is marked against a rubric of five criteria totalling one hundred points.
Twenty points go to the quality of the research question, judged on the significance of the problem statement and on research and practical contributions. Ten go to the data source description, judged on clarity of variables and features.
Forty go to the visualization analysis, which names four separate things: content quality of the visual analysis, application of visualization concepts, steps of analysis, and description of findings and insights. Twenty go to implications, research and practical. Ten go to quality of writing.
That third criterion is the one to read twice.
It is the only one with four named sub-parts, and one of them is the application of visualization concepts, which is where the framework, the attribute types, the channel choices and the idiom justifications from the first half of the course are marked. A report full of competent charts with no account of why those idioms were chosen is answering one sub-part out of four.
The two twenty point criteria also ask for more than they appear to. The research question criterion is marked on why the question is worth answering rather than on how it is phrased, and the implications criterion names research and practical implications as two separate things.
An implication says what somebody should now do differently or what the next study should test; a report that ends with what the charts showed has answered neither.
The rubric is close to a table of contents
The practical move is to size each section by its points rather than by how interesting it is to write.
The visualization analysis takes the largest share of pages and time, planned as four visible parts to match its four named sub-parts. The research question gets a full section arguing why the problem matters. Implications get their own section rather than a closing paragraph. The data description is compact but complete on variables and features. Writing is earned by editing rather than by adding.
Anything not traceable to one of the five criteria is cut, and so is any figure for which you cannot write the sentence that justifies it.
What this chapter covers
- 01
How the sixty per cent divides between the two projects
- 02
One data search serving both deliverables
- 03
The six components of the milestone report
- 04
The published running order of the final presentation
- 05
The five rubric criteria and their point values
- 06
The four sub-parts inside the largest criterion
- 07
What an implication is, and what it is not
- 08
Sizing each section by its points
Allocate a report against the point split
- 2Size the sections against the point split.
- 2Say how the largest section is structured and why.
- 3Predict the losses in the described draft.
- 1Name the cheapest repair.
Key terms
- Milestone report
- A two to three page ungraded group submission due in week six. Full credit follows from including all six published components rather than from the quality of the analysis.
- Problem statement
- The part of the report naming who is affected and what decision would change. It is what the twenty point research question criterion is actually marked on.
- Practical implication
- A statement of what somebody should now do differently in light of the findings. It is distinct from a research implication, which names what the next study should test.
- Steps of analysis
- The sequence from the raw file to the finished figure, including every derivation. It is a named sub-part of the largest rubric criterion and it appears in the milestone report too.
The Group Project and the Individual Report FAQ
How long should the individual report be?
Two current course documents give different answers and neither is stale, so take the length from the brief posted for your own section on Canvas. The teaching plan describes a final report that takes the form of a short research paper of ten to fifteen pages. The week one lecture slides describe a comprehensive written report of five to ten pages. Both belong to this offering.
What does not vary is the shape: the rubric is the same either way, so the allocation between sections matters more than the total, and a shorter report that gives forty per cent of its space to the visualization analysis will outscore a longer one that gives it a quarter.
How big should the group be?
The teaching plan and the week one deck both state five to eight members, while the week two deck states six to eight. Sign-up happens on Canvas, so the number enforced there governs.
The size matters less than the split of work: the final presentation has six named components and every member must be present, so agreeing early who speaks to which component, in the published running order rather than in the order people volunteered, avoids the most common failure in the last two weeks.
Should we pick the dataset we find interesting or the one with an obvious question?
The one with the question, or the interesting one only once you have found a question inside it. Twenty points depend on the significance of the problem statement and twenty more on implications, and neither can be earned retrospectively from a dataset explored without a purpose.
The course makes the same point structurally in its own tutorial, which asks what question you want to answer and what the goal is before any chart is drawn. An interesting dataset with a question is the best outcome; an interesting dataset without one is the most common way to lose forty of the hundred points.
Assessment move
Print the five criteria and keep them beside you from week six onward, not from the revision week. Every time you finish a figure, write the sentence that justifies it and file it under the visualization analysis heading; every time you read something about the domain, file one line under the research question heading.
By the time the report is due you are assembling material rather than generating it, which is the only reliable way to give the largest criterion the space its forty points deserve.
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