Psych W1001y, The Science of Psychology, Spring 1999

Please read these instructions carefully when you first receive them, and then read them a second time when you are finishing up your paper. If you have questions, contact one of us as soon as possible (see earlier office-hour handout #3 for all our addresses, etc.).

If you collaborate, you may submit one "co-authored" paper, or you may work together but then each independently write up your work and submit separate papers. (You can collaborate on only one part, or on all of the assignment.)

Each person must do as much work in the collaboration as he or she would if working on their own. If you turn in a joint paper, it must be better than an individual person's. Basically, the amount of intellectual material turned in for a two-person group should be twice that for a one-person group ("Amount of material" refers to intellectual content, however, not quantity of words or pieces of paper.)

Further, each person in the collaboration must participate in the intellectual content of every subpart. The collaboration may not be used to excuse one person from doing some part of the work entirely. For example, if an assignment required graphing some data and then discussing its implications, each collaborator would have to work on both parts at least to some extent. However, one collaborator could do the actual graphs as long as the other collaborator understood them and could have done them. Both collaborators should edit the final version of the paper.

You should submit a note saying with whom you collaborated and how the collaboration worked. For example, if one person did all the drawings (but again make sure the other person understood them) say so. If one person wrote the first draft of question one, and then the other person edited it, say so.

*** Both people involved in a collaboration must turn in a signed note

For your information: A note describing the terms of co-authorship is not yet common practice for scientific papers. However, many people are beginning to include such a note as collaborations get more and more frequent and also more and more complex.

We will not insist absolutely strictly on the page limits for single people or for collaborations, but we do not wish to receive papers that are far over the page limit (even if they are well organized and well written) because we will not have time to read them carefully. And we certainly do not want to receive papers with redundancy and disorganized quantity (see 3).

Remember to use a reasonable font size, for example, Times 12.

However, I know that some of you may end up with a great deal more you wish to say . If so, would you please do the following: you should summarize your points in the main essay keeping within the page limits, but you may include a longer description as an "Appendix". The T.A.s will look through any submitted appendices but may not have time to read them carefully.

we do not want to see redundancy and disorganized quantity. What we want to see is concise statement of the main points. Disorganized or unnecessary quantity will count against you. Clarity not beauty -- and certainly not quantity -- is the primary issue in scientific writing. (Of course, beauty can and does help produce clarity, if the beauty is of the right sort. And creative organization and presentation can and does help communication, which is the point of scientific writing, as of all writing.)

Hand-written essays are all right if written VERY NEATLY. Typing or word-processing (using reasonable font sizes of course, e.g. Times 12) is much preferred. If not easy to read, papers can't be read thoroughly in the time available, and will thus receive reduced credit.

When you use material from the book or the lecture, reference the material by putting either "(Gray, p. xxxxx)", or "(Lecture, date)" at the end of the sentence or sentences referring to the material. (If you don't know the date of the lecture, that's fine, you can just say "(lecture)". )

You are NOT expected to use material from outside the lecture or textbook. And you should not mindlessly paraphrase sentences from the book or lecture. Your expected contribution is in the understanding and organization and thinking about this material.

For your own education, however, you may wish to use material outside the course material. If you do (and if you do it well and properly) you might receive some extra credit points. (Reminder, extra credit points will be used for cases that fall on the boundary between grade-point categories, e.g. between B+ and B). If, however, you just scatter extra material around your essay, you will probably lose points.

If you do use material from other sources, reference them by putting "(Author, year, page numbers)" at the end of the relevant sentences. Then you should include a page of bibliographic references at the end of your written assignment giving the full reference in some standard form (author, title, year, publisher, volume, pages, etc. -- whatever is relevant).

Planning ahead is usually a good idea of course, but particularly so here. Remember that late papers will not be accepted unless there is a very serious situation. In particular, as was covered in the agreement you signed during class 2, things like printer failures will not be acceptable excuses. So plan ahead and do not wait for the last minute to do the work or turn it in.

Since different T.A.s will be reading different sections, we need to have them divided into the different sections.

Staple each section together, with your name and social-security number on top. Then paper-clip the separate sections (and the collaboration note) together.

The note describing your collaboration (or your less extensive discussions with other people) should NOT be stapled to any section, but should be paper-clipped together with the sections.

If failure to staple the sections separately becomes too much of a problem, the T.A.s have the right to take off points from those people who did not follow this instruction. (If you think this sounds picky, consider how the T.A.s feel spending hours picking out staples.)

FYI: When people submit grant proposals asking for thousands of dollars from the federal government or private foundations or corporations to do scientific research or other scholarly or artistic projects, the proposal will be rejected immediately without reading if it violates the format rules or the deadline. This is not just a desire to be difficult, but because those violations end up creating a lot of trouble for somebody.