By 5 PM on May 16 each of you will turn in a final report on our Lee Vining field project that will be worth 25% of your grade in the class. While we have collectively analyzed the data we obtained, students will be responsible for their own written reports. Each should describe the objectives, previous work, methods, results, and implications of the entire project in 5 to 10 pages of text, plus figures. The class may be able to publish its collected results, so assume that you are writing for a specialty journal in geology or geophysics such as Geophysics, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geology, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, or Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. The Instructions to Authors published each January in the journal Geophysics, and others, is your best guide to the organization and style of your report.
I will accept your report as a paper printout, as an MS-Word document by email or on CD-ROM, or as a folder of HTML text files and GIF, JPEG, and/or PDF figures. Powerpoint presentations and posters are desirable supplements, but are not acceptable since they cannot be submitted to journals. If you make a Word or HTML version of your report, carefully consider the size, resolution, and file format needed for each figure.
I will grade your reports using the following point distribution:
| Writing | Literature | Methods | Results | Integration | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 20 | 20 | 15 | 15 | 100 |
I will base your writing points on the quality of your use of English: spelling; grammar; style; clarity; and conciseness. As for the abstracts, proper use of capitalization, punctuation, and SI units is crucial.
Your literature score I will base on how accurately and completely you search, summarize, and cite previous work that pertains to our project. A frequent error by previous students was not searching for or citing any previous geophysical results or geological models, leading to a literature score of 5 points or less. Minor accidental plagiarism will lower the literature score. Serious plagiarism will result in my returning the report to you ungraded. You should not cite facts or techniques that are considered common knowledge, the same standard as in a journal paper. Use published papers from our reading lists as your guide on what to cite and what is common knowledge.
The methods score will depend on how well you summarize how and where we did our surveys. Try to very briefly summarize just the facts on how we deployed each techniqe, so the experiment could be repeated identically by any knowledgable geophysicist. Each method group should distribute a paragraph or two on their method that you can incorporate into your report verbatim and without attribution, if you feel it is adequate.
Your results score depends on how succinctly you present the facts gathered during our experiments. Usually I consider the proper presentation of errors, uncertainties, and inconsistencies to be worth half of this score. Here also each method group should distribute anlaytical and interpretational figures and a paragraph or two on their results, which you may incorporate into your report verbatim and without attribution, if they are sufficient. One difference that this report has against a submitted journal manuscript is that I want you to present the results of all methods from all our field sites, even if the method failed or its result is irrelevant to the problems we are addressing. So a good explanation of why methods did not work or were not sensitive enough will get you a higher score than if you leave out any explanation of one of our results.
The integration score is based on my judgement of how well you tie the results to the geological or engineering hypotheses we are considering, how well you tie all the methods together, and how well you relate them to previous work and existing hypotheses. Remember that the scientific method is to attempt negative tests of hypotheses. Adopting and defending a hypothesis is not as effective. The best reports will suggest new hypotheses and appropriate negative tests.