School of Engineering and Computer Science Te Kura Mātai Pūkaha, Pūrorohiko

Handbook

The BSc_Honours_Handbook_2024.pdf is your bible for the course. It contains details on what is expected of you and your supervisor, the assessment requirements and process, and other useful information. Read it carefully!

It is written in LaTeX. You can see the source here, which provides examples of how to achieve some formatting and layout in Latex.

Report Templates

LaTeX (preferred!) and Word templates are available here.

Marking Process

Because of the variety of projects, we do not use a specific rubric. You will be assessed across the following areas:

• Introduction
• Context
• Methodology
• Implementation (often)
• Results
• Discussion and Conclusion
• Critical Thinking
• Oral Presentation

Not all of these components contribute equally to your final grade, but you should do well in all of them for a high grade. Please read the handbook and discuss with your supervisor if you have further questions.

Health and Safety Documents

Once you have been allocated a project, you will need to consider the health and safety aspects of your project at the time you are writing your proposal. Please take a look at the following forms and fill them up accordingly once you have clarity about the activities that you would be undertaking during your project:

• ECS Project Information Form
• Project Description and Safety Plan Form
• Project Safety Plan Example

For projects with medium or high risk, please get in touch with the School Safety Officer (Roger Cliffe <roger.cliffe@ecs.vuw.ac.nz>) as soon as possible.

Ethics

The university has a Human Ethics Committee that governs research and teaching with people as participants. If you plan to do any structured work involving people, you need to comply with the policies and guidelines.

Application

Applications are made in ResearchMaster using your VUW credentials (not ECS). If you still do not have access, then download the Access to Ethics Online Applications form (Word), complete the details and email it to ResearchMaster-Help@vuw.ac.nz or ethicsadmin@vuw.ac.nz

Due to the potentially long approval process, you are encouraged to submit your ethics application as early as possible (i.e., at the moment you and your supervisor have agreed about the need to involve human participants in your project.) Note that this process is outside ECS and is at the university level.

Ethics Approval for Software Usability Testing

ECS has approval for Usability Testing across a range of 300- and 400-level courses from 2021 to 2024 inclusive. Any usability testing under this approval must meet all the conditions in the following application, and use the following approved information sheet:

• Software usability testing
• Testing information sheet and consent form templates for individual user tests

If you wish to do more extensive testing, conduct surveys, interact with children, recruit external participants, implant electrodes, or publish your results outside the project, you will need to make your own application to the committee.