CSE3323 The Computer Industry: Historical, Social and Professional Issues
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		Comments on your work for Assignments 1 and 2 2005
			60% of the CSE3323 assessment.

First, a sincere apology for the inordinate delay in getting assignment 1
marked.  I dramatically underestimated the time and effort required to
read and assess all the assignments (over 150 of them).

The good news is that overall it was OK.  Given that many of
you have not written extended essays for many years, I was generally
satisfied with the standard of writing, and encouraged that quite a few
of you put in some effort to seek out reference material.  Given that this
was unfamiliar territory for most of you, I am being generous with
the marks.  That is not to say that I was completely satisfied, and indeed
I will be marking a bit harder for assignment 2.  Those few who receive
over 80% did not actually produce perfect work, but I thought that it was
certainly better than most people's.

Most of you received brief comments on the front of your assignments.
If I thought there were particular areas worthy of praise or criticism I
made an effort to indicate this.  Given that many of my criticisms were of
a common nature I thought it better to summarize them here.

Note that marking such assignments is by necessity rather subjective.  One of
the reasons for the long delay in getting the assignments marked is that I
do all the marking myself.  Given that there are no real right or wrong
answers, it is difficult to let others do marking and be completely fair.
In such assessment there will always be some matters of interpretation and
judgement that makes absolute marking impossible.  It can be extremely
difficult to say whether one assignment is better than another one.  I have
tried my best, but a few marks in either direction in such cases is an
unavoidable uncertainty range.  To compensate I have been generous
with the marks.  It is likely that when all your marks are accumulated at
the end of the semester that your final grade will be fairly determined, and
probably on the generous side.

Let me outline the main areas of difficulty that are apparent.

1.	There were many cases of de-ja-vu.  i.e. I kept on reading the
same things, word-for-word, over and over again in different people's
work.   I did not try to treat this all as plagiarism, although strictly
speaking it was.   What was obvious to me is that the cause of this is
that people were quoting from various common sources, however in the vast
majority of cases, the source of the quotation was not clearly cited next
to the quote.   There is nothing wrong with brief quotations from relevant
sources, but appropriate citation and acknowledgement must be made.  It is
not good enough to just have the source listed in some general references
at the end of the essay.

2.	Related to the first point, is that many people's work seemed to
consist almost entirely of extracts from various sources.  While it is good
to see that you have indeed looked at a variety of source material, I also
expected you to provide some input of your own, even if only some commentary
that linked together the quoted source material.  The aim is to demonstrate
some thinking about the subject matter, not just that you have found
something that appears to be relevant.

3.	I was always impressed where I found some evidence of more extensive
searching for useful material.  In general in your professional careers you
will not be given everything you need, but will have to seek it out for
yourselves.   The Monash library and the Internet contain much useful
material.  They also contain a lot of junk.  It is important to make some
evaluation of the quality of the material you are using.   In many cases it
consisted of other people's opinions without much factual evidence behind it.
There is nothing wrong with saying that someone said or thought something,
but such opinion should be clearly distinguished from objective facts.

4.	The standard of English expression was in general quite satisfactory
but in some cases it was evident that English language skills were not very
good.  This became obvious when there were parts of the assignment that were
very clearly expressed and other parts that were very sloppily expressed.
In such cases it was obvious where extracts from other sources had been
copied verbatim without due acknowledgement whereas the connecting text was
probably your own.  If your English is not very good, it would be prudent
to seek assistance with some proof reading.  In any case it would be better
if you made the effort to correct simple spelling and grammatical mistakes.
In most of your assignments I found errors in spelling and grammar.  In some
cases I marked them in red ink, but in most cases I did not bother due to
time pressure and that I was more interested in the content.

5.	A common problem with the assignments was that they often appeared
to be a list of events without clear links between them.  The idea is to 
use the evidence you have uncovered to answer the questions, to demonstrate
links between events, how things may have or may not have influenced other
things, etc.   That is what I really want to have you do.

6.	There was too much reliance on secondary or tertiary sources,
i.e. someone else's compendium of material or even someone's summary
of other secondary sources.  The topics allowed you the opportunity to
seek out primary sources written by those who actually did the work
or were actually involved at the time.  Not many of you made the effort
to seek out Babbage's own writing, or Turing's etc.  The reliance on
Wikipedia was most concerning since there is no real indication of the
quality of information contained therein, or the quality of its authors.

In conclusion, a good attempt by most of you, but plenty of room for
improvement.  I will be marking assignment 2 harder, but my objective is to
encourage you to think about things, to discover new things, and to get
experience in communicating your thoughts and discoveries.

I have produced a handout giving examples of good assignments from 2004
on the same topics.  Not that there were not good ones this year, but the
approach last year seemed a bit different for some reason and I thought you
might benefit from seeing them.

Assignment 2.
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Assignment 2 was for most of you a considerable improvement.  In some ways
this indicated that you learned a great deal from doing assignment 1.
I think also that the topics for assignment 2 fitted in better with your
personal experiences.  There were still problems along the lines of those
of assignmentn 1, but for most of you they were much reduced.

Many of you will have an enormous improvement in your mark compared with
your first assignment.  Some people did slightly worse, but generally those
people had done quite well in the first assignment and there wasn't the
scope for such dramatic improvement, and given I was marking a bit harder,
a slightly lower mark did not mean your work was any worse, simply that
there was no significant improvement.

As with the first assignment I have produced a handout containing examples
of good assignments for each of the topics.  They are not necessarily the
best assignments I received, but they demonstrate a variety of different
styles of writing.  Each of them has its weaknesses, but tends to bring out
something in the topic that showed thoroughness, some insight, or an
interesting observation.  Please read them and learn from them.  They may
well be of use in studying for the examination.

I apologise for not having time to write comments on most of your second
assignments.  Nights and weekends spend reading all your assignments
didn't provide enough time for this.  As with assignment 1, I am happy to
discuss your work with you individually.  In most cases the improvement
in your marks indicates my general satisfaction.  Comparison with the sample
assignments in the handout will normally make it obvious why yours may have
been marked lower.  The sample assignments all received marks over 80.
Very few people received over 85.

Overall I believe most of you have learned a great deal in doing this unit.
It may not be obvious to you how this material is going to be relevant in
your professional lives, but I am confident that this will become evident
over your careers.

Ronald Pose (Lecturer CSE3323)
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Dr. Ronald Pose 
School of Computer Science & Software Engineering
Monash University                                phone:  +61 3 9905 5203
Clayton, Victoria 3168                           fax:    +61 3 9905 5146
AUSTRALIA                                        e-mail: rdp@cs.monash.edu.au
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