IS 333 Lab Reports Style Guidelines

Your lab reports must be labeled with your name, your group, and the course number. Each lab report must contain all of the sections below. Each section is to be clearly labeled with a section-heading.

1. Abstract. A short (100 words or less) summary of what you did during the exercise, and your major results or conclusions.
2. Introduction. This section provides any background information necessary for the reader to understand what follows, particularly the motivation for the exercise: what are we trying to accomplish and why? If there is a particular question you are trying to answer, or a problem you are trying to solve, it should be described here, along with its significance. Similarly, if you have a hypothesis you are testing, it should be given here.
3. Procedure. This section describes what you did (and why) in sufficient detail that someone else with your same level of experience could repeat what you did. You should be as specific as possible in this section; including things like specific tools you used and how they were used, configuration files you edited and how you changed them, experiments you performed to test a hypothesis, etc. Whenever possible, identify any assumptions you are making.
4. Results. This section lists the outcomes of your procedure: what you observed, learned or concluded. If your procedure involved data collection, your data should be presented here in an organized manner -- both the raw data in a table, and a figure containing a graph or other appropriate graphical representation of your data, to simplify its interpretation. Tables should have clearly labeled row and column headings. Tables and figures should be numbered with ascending numbers.
5. Discussion. This section presents the interpretation of your data, and explains its significance for the reader. For example, if your intuition or "theory" led you to expect one result but you observed another, then this is the place to indicate this. If your results raise further questions that will require further study or investigation, this is the place to list such questions.
6. Conclusions. This is a brief summary of the main conclusions you reached in performing this lab exercise.
7. References. If you consulted any references (including a lab handout) during the course of the exercise, you must list them here as bibliographic sources. Include on-line references, man pages, etc. (This section is only optional if you used no external sources of information.)
8. Appendix (optional). If you collected sufficient data that its inclusion in the Results section would obfuscate the results in that section, give the complete data in this section, summarize that data in the Results section, and in that section refer the reader to this Appendix.

Other Considerations

Lab reports are different from English compositions or other writings that discourage the use of the "passive voice". Feel free to use the "passive voice" in your lab reports.

You should use the past tense to describe your procedure (what you did); but use the present tense to describe your results.

Given the plethora of spelling and grammar checkers, your lab report should use proper grammar and correct spelling. Reports that do not do so will be marked down at least 10% (a letter grade). To see how these lab reports will be graded, consult the lab report grade sheet.

Hand In:A hard copy of the lab report grade sheet, attached to a hard copy of your report. This can be handed in to Prof. Adams in class on Friday, at the beginning of class on Monday, or slipped under his door. Make sure you've read Adams' policy on late work.