As my eldest son was sick this morning and I have to stay at home to minister unto the malingerer invalid, I could not put off any longer the rather large heap of first year lab reports that have been sitting on my desk since Easter.

This report is on what in my youth was called “Examination of an Artefact”, i.e.the students look at an every day object and then dismantle it and use forensic tests to determine the composition of its component parts, how they were made and to research into why these choices were made in its manufacture. These days we call it a “Transferable Skills Exercise” because they have to write a report and as a team make a poster presentation and an oral presentation of their findings.

The posters and oral presentation (10 minutes) were well done but as usual, spelling was an issue. A number of groups had a Toy car to dismantle and one of its components was its axle. Only one group spelled it correctly! The most popular misspelling was axel and there were even two groups who refered to the “axial”.

The individual project reports are always the most depressing. The class tends to be bimodal in its marks distribution with one group trying hard and another group just ticking the boxes and making sure they hand in something by the deadline to get the basic minimum mark. Again, there has been a certain amount of use of unattributed source material, or plagiarism if you prefer. It always amazes me that people think they can get away with it. We do not use “Turn it in” or other software on lab reports, because they are pretty individual to a specific task. However, it is blindingly obvious when we suddenly get two pages of detailed description of a material in the middle of a report of more basic prose.

There that is enough of a rant. Back to the pile – only 30 more to go.