CEG 4420 (or 6420) Lab Report Template

Introduction

1. This is a template for lab reports of CEG 4420/ 6420. A lab report is a technical report. This applies to both 4420 and 6420 students. Sections, page numbers and a Table-of-Contents are a must.
2. The report must include your details at the very beginning: Your Full Name, Your preferred email address, Your WSU UID, Your WSU/Pilot Login ID, Date(s) of the lab, and Title of the Lab.
3. Use the section headings shown here, excluding "Submission". But, ditch the section content. Every paragraph that you include in the lab report must be *in your own words*. Exception: Output of programs. Do not copy-paste from other sources, including my descriptions of the lab. If you did, for seriously compelling reasons, you must cite the source(s).
4. Be driven primarily by the following motive. Suppose you come across a lab report of your own, say, two years from now, and re-read it. Can you make sense of it? Can you recall the important thoughts you had and observations you made two years ago? Include all such details.
5. If you have an unquestionably better way of doing a lab report than what is suggested here, go ahead with it. Include a defense of your view point.

Purpose of the Experiment

Experiment Setup

Identify the (i) equipment and (ii) software you used. Some of this will repeat for every lab. Even so, include it in every lab report. Linux has commands named lshw, and uname -a. Use it and select the important entries. Do not just dump it. Most software has a flag -v that gives its version number. Record any other details that you think are relevant for the particular lab.

Experimental Procedures

1. The Lab descriptions given are not detailed recipes. You are expected to fill in all the missing details. Post requests for help, if needed, on Pilot.
2. Describe the details of your procedures. If you literally followed the steps in our lab articles, with no changes whatsoever, just say so, instead of copy- and- paste. If you did do verbatim copy-and-paste, either from my articles or those written by others, you *must* *cite* your source explicitly; otherwise, it may be considered plagiarism.
3. Labs typically have 4 or 5 tasks. Include subsections here for each task.

Recorded Observations

1. Collect all your observations here. Much of this should be verbatim cut-and-pasted from stdout, or from a redirected stdout file. But grouped, and labeled. Be judicious about how voluminous this is. Cut out portions that are repetitive, or not illuminative. Include relevant screenshots or cut-and-pasted text. Avoid screenshots of pure text windows.
2. Include time stamp/ duration of major steps. Learn to use the command named date.
3. Labs typically have 4 or 5 tasks. Include subsections here for each task observations.
4. Thoughtless cut-pastes make your reports unnecessarily too long.
5. This section is an as-was collection of observations, including time stamps.

Interpretation of Recorded Observations

1. Interpret your recorded observations. This is the most judged part of your report. Make these stand out.
2. Labs typically have 4 or 5 tasks. Include subsections here for interpretation of the observations under each task
3. Some students prefer to merge this section with the one above. I am not forbidding this. But, it *is* better to leave these two as separate sections. The Recorded Observations are mechanically collectible; your interpretations show how well you understand.

Remarks

1. Critique this lab overall. This section should include your commentary on all aspects of this lab. Includes negative as well as positive comments.
2. Are there any suggestions for improving the lab?
3. Feel free to include a "personal experience" story in your description. What did you learn? Was something surprising? Was something [unexpectedly] difficult?

Journal

1. Include in the PDF a journal. Include entries related to this course only ;-) Record how long each task took. Record/ describe glitches, if any.

Conclusions

In technical reports, the conclusion section includes both summary as well as derived statements as ending remarks.

References

1. Include a numbered list of references you used. See the course articles for example usage of this section.
2. https://opensource.com/article/19/9/linux-commands-hardware-information
3. WSU, Tech Report Expectations. Applies to all students of this course.

Submission

1. Submit into Pilot-> Assessment -> Dropbox. (This is not the same as https://www.dropbox.com/.)
2. Submit a single PDF file named *exactly* Report-Ln.pdf, where n should be replaced with the number of the lab. (Scripts are used to check various things -- so file names, and section numbers, etc. should obey "rules".)
   1. In this course, we prefer open source tools, but you use what ever tools you like to write the lab report.
   2. enscript can convert plain text files and source code into colorized PostScript files.
   3. ps2pdf converts PS files to PDFs, and
   4. pdfunite can combine several PDFs into one.
   5. It is recommended that you initially produce one dot-txt file for each section, and convert each to a PDF, then consolidate them into one PDF file, but name them as separate sections.
3. Source code submission is expected in some labs. Submit all source code as one tar ball named Ln.tbz, with sub directories in the tar ball, as needed.
4. Make sure the report never exceeds 20 pages. Literally capturing the output can do that. Not counting the Recorded Observations, the entire report is probably under 10 pages.
5. Our standards of how well written the reports are fairly low. But, really careless reports will lose points.
6. There are 20 points assigned for the lab Report-Ln.pdf [and the tarball, etc. if any] for meeting the above expectations of editorial quality and compliance. For non-compliance with the template, you will lose points.