Assessment FAQ
This FAQ is intended to clarify the assessment criteria and clear up some common questions about the assessments. If you have further questions about assessments please ask them in the discussion forum.
A good starting point for choosing a topic for the written assessment is to think of an issue that you find interesting; something in your life, something in the news, or something in your area. Similarly for the practical assessment, where you should also think about what practical method(s) you’d most like to practice or try out.
A key point with the assessments is that the are relatively short, so it’s important to pick topics that are specific, concrete and manageable. For example, rather than “What difference has social media made to the pandemic?” (a huge topic!) it would be better to ask something specific like “How was social media used to mobilise recent ant-vaxx protests outside schools?”.
The topic of the written assessment can be completely different to the topic of the practical assessment. However, they could also be the same topic if that works for you.
As third year computing students you are required to show some ‘technical insight’. This simply means that you, as a computing student, have the capacity to understand social media etc at a level that some people would find more difficult because they don’t have the background knowledge. It doesn’t mean having to use code in the practical, although you can if you wish.
written assessment
The written assessment is meant to shown you have done some background reading about a topic of interest to you, thought about it, and come to some kind of conclusion about it.
The ‘research’ in this case is reading and looking for sources of information. Evidence of research comes through references which can be footnotes or endnotes (For a short text like this, footnotes tends to work well). No fixed number of references is required, but a reference should be more than just a url (i.e. it should include at least a page or document title). Remember, references are the main way to evidence your research. I tend to look for a mixture of sources. They could include news articles, academic papers, magazine articles, archive sources – whatever makes sense for your submission.
The evidence of you thinking about things is that you can make an argument about it that is reasoned and readable. You are not required to be neutral or objective – I am interested in hearing what you think – but you are required to provide some backup for your points. Having section headings can help to structure your argument.
The critical perspective simple means trying to look beneath the surface / behind the scenes. This is especially important when it comes to social media (e.g. Facebook says it is about creating community, but we might conclude it is about tracking people on behalf of advertisers). This is also where you can show that you understand both some of the technical aspects (your technical insight) and some of the social aspects.
For the written assessment you do not need to do any practical work. It is basically an essay.
The word count of 1500 words is a guide; you can do more or less. The usual rule of thumb is +/- 10%. I’m not going to be picky about word count but bear in mind I am only allocated a fixed amount of time to mark your assessments. Anything over 2000 is definitely too much, and anything under 1000 is unlikely to be enough.