P12. Full Paper Review
In this exercise you will review your fellow student's full paper.
The assignments will be done in-class; note that you will be doing your fellow student a disfavor if you do not show up, so please try to be present. You will also be doing yourself a disfavor since you will forego feedback form your target audience.
Read the below instructions carefully!
The exercise will proceed as follows:
As an author: Bring a printout of your final complete paper to class or be ready to share a final complete pdf version. A reviewer will be assigned to it randomly. If you bring a printout, make sure there is sufficient space (e.g. on the back of each page), as well as good margins on the front, to write comments. If you bring a pdf the reviewer gets to choose how to provide you with comments (e.g. via email, text file, etc.).
As reviewer: When you receive a printout or a pdf of your assigned paper you can start your review. Do your best as to provide the author with useful, truthful, and appropriately detailed feedback on any and all aspects of the paper that you feel requires his/her attention for improving it. You will give the paper a grade (list this along with your hand-in in MySchool marked 'Grade: x,x'). Make sure this number makes sense in light of / matches your written comments.
If you do a good job you may receive up to 3% “bonus points” for this exercise (as determined by the instructor based on the quality of your review) - over and above the 100% that the other assignments in the class count. Note: Only those who show up for class of course are eligible to receive a bonus.
(Note that while the assignment is listed as 0% in MySchool, I will manually update your grade with the extra points earned for the final score in the class.)
Guidelines for Reviewing Papers
- Typically you lay out the categories that matter in your review, even before you start.
- Categories often used are:
- Clarity and ease of reading (including structure, figures, explanations, etc.)
- Quality of the written English (grammar, spelling, and related)
- Novelty - how much of an advance on current state of the art is the work (this should only play a minor role in your review here, since the assignment does not emphasize this factor)
- Impact - potential for the work to have fundamental impact, both scientific, technological, and business wise
- It is useful to have a category called “minor comments” or “other comments” where you put general points, spelling suggestions, questions about grammar, etc., because it is often easiest for the author to do a pass on these separately from deeper concerns about the content of the paper, structure, and other issues having to do with the content and that generally take much more time to fix.
- Do at least two read-through passes - especially to ensure that your early comments are coherent and consistent with those made later (often you see e.g. a better place to make a comment than the initial place you mentioned it)
- You should take notes while you read, some of which will probably change in a second pass
- Keep these questions in mind at all times: What are the most important things for the author to address, given the title and stated aims of the work? What is the most useful way for me to explain what these issues are?
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