UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING, SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Level 6 students in Civil Engineering

Professional communication skills – part of the project module.

Assignments – Interim assessments of final year projects

1. Introduction

In addition to the statement of aims and objectives, assessed work for the professional
communications programme is in the form of a written first draft and an oral
presentation of progress on the final year project. The oral presentation will take place
in Semester 2 and more details will be issued about this nearer the time. This note
concerns the written draft work, to be submitted by the deadline shown below. It is
expected that students will have made good progress on their projects by this time.
Failure to have made the necessary progress will be reflected in the marks awarded
for the assignments. The mark for this written assessment is worth 4% of the overall
module mark.

2. The Written Report

Each student must submit a first draft of the early part of their work (including the
aims, context, background and literature review sections), together with appropriate
reference details, using the Harvard convention. It is expected that this submission
will have a word count of at least 1,500 words. It will be assessed by the project
supervisor from two points of view:
• The structure, layout and overall presentation of the entire document.
• A more detailed assessment of an extract of the draft (about 500 words), focusing
on the use of English (e.g. vocabulary and sentence construction), spelling and
grammar, style of writing etc.

3. Learning outcomes and assessment

Within the Benchmark statements that form the basis for the expected learning
outcomes from engineering degree programmes, these coursework assignments are
aimed at: transferable skills – effective communication. Students will be required to
demonstrate that they can integrate presentational techniques and the information to
be presented for maximum impact. The criteria for allocating marks for the written
assignment reflect this learning objective as indicated below.

Clear statement of aim and objectives 20%

Use of English 50%
Structure, layout and presentation 30%

The deadline for the written draft, to be submitted in the usual way, is Friday 26
November.

R Henson
October 2010