Advanced Lab Oral Reports

Introduction

All advanced lab students must present one of the first three labs as an oral report. The fourth and final lab cannot be an oral report. You do not choose which one: each pair will be assigned which of their first three labs is to be presented orally, and you will be told your assigned lab before sign-ups open.

Oral exams are taken in lab partner pairs. You present with the partner you did the experiment with, and the two of you sign up for a single slot together. The data and analysis you present must come from your own work in the lab.

Once your lab has been assigned, you sign up for a slot. The dates, times, and locations will be posted approximately the week before oral reports are due, and you must sign up in advance. Use the online spreadsheet to select a time and place for your exam with one of the course professors. If you don't show up at your sign-up time, you will receive 0 points for the oral report. One point will be deducted for every minute of lateness. Once you sign up for an oral time slot you cannot change it without approval of the professor.

Format and timing

Each pair is allotted up to 30 minutes: a 10 to 15 minute presentation with slides, followed by 10 to 15 minutes of questions. Anything longer than 15 minutes of talking will be cut off, so plan your time carefully and focus on the important concepts.

Prepare the slides in APS style, meaning the format of a contributed talk at an APS meeting:

• A title slide with the experiment, both of your names, and the date.
• Motivation, then physics, then apparatus and method, then results, then a summary slide with your numbers on it.
• Roughly one slide per minute. Large fonts, few words, one idea per slide.
• Every plot labelled: axes, units, and uncertainties on the data points.
• Cite the source of any figure you did not make yourself.

Other expectations:

• Both partners must speak, and for roughly equal amounts of time. Decide in advance who presents which parts.
• Both partners are responsible for the whole report. Expect questions on any part of it, including sections your partner presented. Each of you answers for yourself; your partner cannot answer on your behalf.
• Expect the professor to ask questions during the talk as well as after it. Build the talk so that an interruption doesn't derail the rest of it.
• Ten to fifteen minutes is short. You can't possibly tell everything you know, so pick and choose carefully what to include and what to leave out. Details you have to cut are not wasted: have them ready for the question period.

A rough guide to the talk:

Purpose

An oral report is a form of show-and-tell. The purpose is to give you experience in presenting the contents of an experiment in a manner understandable to one of your classmates, someone who has taken the same courses, studied the same topics, but who has not yet done the experiment.

The exams this semester are being given via Zoom. You will want to use presentation software such as Powerpoint or Keynote to prepare and present your report, following the APS style described above. The report should show that you did something, that you understand what you did, and that you are familiar enough with the experiment to answer questions that your classmates might ask. You are expected to present the necessary diagrams and the useful equations as you speak. You need to present your results along with their uncertainties. The atmosphere is informal and you may use your notes, but do not read your report.

It helps to practice your talk ahead of time, and with two speakers a run-through together is essential: check the handover points and check that you finish inside the 15 minutes. Do not assume that the listener has read over the laboratory information sheets. Start at a low level, and build up to the essentials of the subject. You are telling a story. Make it coherent and interesting. We want to see how you think about physics. It will not be the same as the way we would put things, so don't copy anyone else, either student or faculty. It's your talk. Tell it like it is, as you see it. Below is a suggested order in which to tell the story, but it is certainly not the only way.

It pays to practice, and if you still feel uncomfortable after practicing, ask a GSI to help you by listening to your talk and offering suggestions. You may even go so far as to ask someone to coach you. We are here to help you learn, and we want everyone's report to be outstanding.

Your report should include

1. An overview of what the experiment is all about, and its significance. Why should anyone want to do it? How does it fit into the big picture of physics?
2. A description of the basic physics necessary to understand the experiment. Don't derive any of the mathematical details, but be prepared to say where each relevant equation comes from, if it will help the listener understand the physics (say how you would do the derivation, but don't actually do it). It is important to write down the equations that are used to interpret the experimental results, to state the assumptions made in obtaining the equations, and to explain in qualitative terms what these equations mean. The audience, like you, prefers to visualise what is happening in terms of tangible and familiar models.
3. A description of the equipment and the experimental procedure. A block diagram is essential, and sometimes a more detailed schematic diagram. These should be your own, not just copied from a book, another write-up, or a GenAI tool. Be sure that you understand in general terms what each piece of equipment does, and that you have some idea of how it works: what's inside the black boxes?
4. Experimental results. Present the results in the form of a table or a graph. Do not present the raw data, but have them available for discussion if the professor so desires. Compare the experiment with theory by presenting the theoretically calculated values along with the experimental values, if appropriate. Some discussion of errors is appropriate, and will be different for each experiment. Statistical and systematic uncertainties are a central part of the report, not an afterthought, and they are a favourite subject for questions.
5. Be prepared to answer questions. With up to 15 minutes set aside for them, the question period carries real weight in your grade. (For example: how accurately can you set the frequency? Does the amplitude of the modulation affect the accuracy?)

Plagiarism

Both the University and the 111 Lab staff take the subject of plagiarism very seriously. Please make sure you understand completely the following and ask questions if ever in doubt:

"All data that you present in your reports must be your own. All written work that you submit, except for acknowledged quotations, is to be in your own words. Figures from books, papers, or online sources are fine so long as the source is cited. Work copied from another student's report, or from any other source without attribution, under University rules, earn the student a grade of 'F' for the semester, and possible disciplinary action by the Student Conduct Committee."

Course policy on GenAI tools (e.g. chatGPT)

The full policy is on the bCourses syllabus. Read it. The short version, as it applies to oral reports:

• Limited use is allowed, such as background research, grammar and spelling correction, translation for consultation, and help writing code. Any use that would count as plagiarism if the output had been written by a human is not allowed, and neither is pasting text from a lab or homework problem into a GenAI tool.
• The analysis, the figures, the block diagram, and the slides must be your own work.
• GenAI tools do a poor job of describing and quantifying systematic errors, and over-reliance on them produces poor reports and poor grades. An oral exam exposes this quickly: you will be asked where a number, a figure, or an uncertainty came from, and you are expected to be able to explain everything on your slides.
• Acknowledge any GenAI use, on a slide at the end of your talk. The suggested format is: I acknowledge the use of [insert AI system(s) and link] to [specific use of GenAI].
• If unauthorized use is suspected on any assessment, the instructors may require a short in-person examination, orally or on paper, on the content and skills of the original assessment.