Reports will normally be handed in on or before the due date, to the course instructor in class, or at the undergraduate office CSEB1003. Reports are to be handed in during normal Departmental business hours and are due by date and time given in the class schedule. It is recommended that you hand in the reports at the class. Missing classes while working on a report is a poor learning strategy.
If for any reason a report is incomplete, then you should submit, on or before the due date, all work done to date (organization counts) along with a note describing:
A report is a description, either oral or written, of something seen or done. Oral reports tend to be informal in style, structure and language while written reports tend to be formal in style, structure and language. In a report you are trying to tell the reader all or some of the following things; depending upon the objectives of the report.
Writing a report is very similar to writing a program. The former is in English, the latter in a formal programming language but both require carefully designed logical and physical structures.
There is no single way of organizing a report but there are general guidelines in that you have an introduction, body and conclusion for the work as a whole, for each section, subsection, etc. At the lower levels the introduction and conclusion become briefer with more emphasis on the body. Often a top down structure is used with lower level sections being more detailed descriptions of more general upper level secitons. Logically related sections are physically close.
You have to make decisions based on what you are trying to describe in your report. What is important needs to be emphasized and described at greater length. What is unimportant is described briefly, if at all.
In courses you are asked to do assignments -- the instructor assigns a task for you to do. You do not submit an assignment in response to the task -- you are not asking the instructor to do the task -- you submit a report of what you did in doing the task you were assigned.
Reports must be customized to the task. You have to think about what is important to describe and what is unimportant. A report describing the design of a program will have different sections and different emphasis than the following: a report describing how you proved a program correct; or how you tested a program; or a comparison of similar but different data structures. For a design you describe the problem (specifications) what data structures you selected, how you refined the problem into abstract data types, procedures and functions, modules, files. For testing you describe tests plans, how you generated the test data, what you observed, what conclusions you drew, how an initial test plan led to a more refined test plan. For data structure comparison you describe the properties of each data structure, how they are similar, how they differ, give an opinion as to which is better under what circumstances.
For assignments it makes sense to structure your report based on the tasks you have been assigned on which you will report what you have done. If given multiple tasks then, generally your report would have specific sections for each task and the sections would appear in the order they were assigned. The first part consists the body of the report, the second part consists of the supporting documents such as program listings, test input files, demonstration output scripts, etc.
I expect professional looking reports. Use single line spacing and normal size type with reasonable amount of white space separating different items in the report; for example, diagrams, lists, paragraphs, etc. Reports in computer science are technical in nature, consequently they are partitioned into sections, sub-sections, etc. The report specifications are examples of report format, as well as the structure of chapters in the textbook.
Here is a generic overview of the structure of a report and what a report contains. For short reports, as in this course you can replace the title page with a "title section" at the top of the first page of the report.
Here is a more detailed description of report format.
You can google "report format" if you want more examples.
A copy of specifications is useless. I already have a copy. For readers of your reports they are uninteresting. Instead summarize, in your introduction, what you have done. Think of your reports as something you could take along to a job interview to show the kind of work you do. Similar to artists of all kinds, you need to collect a portfolio of your work. When someone asks what you have done you can give them example reports.
Do not use point format, except for the occasional list, or unless explicitly asked for. Use correct, grammatical sentences and paragraphs. Word processors and GNU emacs have spell checkers. There is a stand alone program, spell, on Prism. Use them.
Judicious use of external sources of material makes for better reports. In your reports be sure to cite the source of any material that you did not create yourself (no citation implicitly implies the work is yours). All information taken from external sources (everything which is not your own work) must be clearly indicated (verbatim items are quoted) and correctly referenced. If you cite references, there should be a reference list at the end of the report.
Even in the "real world" you are expected to cite where and how you obtained the answer so those people needing the report know how much trust to place in it.
Familiarize yourself with the rules and regulations regarding plagiarism. Be sure to read the section "Senate Policy on Academic Honesty", and "Faculty of Arts Policy on Academic Dishonesty" of the York University Calendar. Also see On Academic Honesty.