The main task of the tutor is to guide the writing process of students on topics that interest the tutor. Tutors suggest the topics, too. Moreover, seminar tries to burden the tutors as less as possible with the administrative tasks, yet the tutor needs to participate the grading of students because they know best their own students and their development and learning.

Tutor's schedule

In addition to the common course schedule, a tutor should note the following deadlines and tasks. The additions to the common schedule are marked with bold text in the date field. The schedule below tells what should be done from the tutor's point of view in different phases of the course. Please read carefully the common course schedule, and more information about grading and commenting student's work is on requirements and grading page.

In addition, previous "paper-writing" seminars have produced many generally useful guidepages for tutoring, grading etc. However, please note that these guides are common and guides given particularly in this seminar are primary (especially in grading).

Topic descriptions

Each tutor should write at least three topic descriptions. Note: the topic should be fromthe topic area of the year. The tutor presents the topic descriptions in the first meeting and descriptions are added to the topic page. Students will suggest on what topic they wish to write, and course staff will distribute the topics to the students. If you are first time tutoring, you may want to look detailed instruction of topic descriptions.

A topic description should have following parts:

• a clearly stated question or problem (5-10 lines of text). It should suggest a viewpoint to the subject, give an idea where to start from etc.
• what kind of student this topic suites to (what the student should be familiar with beforehand, how difficult the topic is etc.)
• two sources where students can start to look for more information

Please, send your topic descriptions to course staff using email address (given in the end of the page) as plain text (easier to cut-paste to Noppa) as soon as possible but latest before the first course meeting. In addition in the email, tell also your user account name in IT center (for optima account) and your student number.

Meetings with students and helping students during the course

After the topic distribution, tutor should meet the students individually. In the meeting, following topics should be discussed

• Finding good references: scientific papers, standards and such are good sources for the seminar paper. TKK's library has good collections, both printed and electronic ones.
• Marking the references to the text: From the beginning of the writing process, student should mark the used references into his/her text. There should be very little directly borrowed text, and it has to be marked with quotation marks and reference.
• Writing own text: tutor's task is not to be proofreader for the paper or write the paper on behalf of the student. However, tutor should check that the student does not copy text directly from the sources but write it by him/herself.
• Scope and structure of the paper: (abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion...), what should be left out, how many pages for each section, where to start (it may be easier to start from the end of the paper)
• For the draft paper, tutor should mention that the draft paper have to have at least one page of text with full sentences.

After each student deadline, tutor reads through the paper and give comments to students. Requirements and grading page has more detailed information what should be considered in each phase. Comments have to be given in Optima since the course staff need to see them too, but of course, additional means can be possible, too. For example, some students may need (or ask) a meeting after draft or/and full paper phase, if the paper have significant shortages (or the student feels that he/she need more help).

Grading students

Tutor's responsibility is to grade the paper because (s)he knows best her/his own students, their development, learning and writing process. Course staff grades the presentation and paper opponing. (see how paper affects to the final grade)

• 1 - Adequate (clearly accepted)
• 2 - Quite good
• 3 - Good
• 4 - Very good
• 5 - Excellent/fantastic

If you have only one paper to grade, you can ask other tutor's or course staff's opinion about the paper. If you are not sure if the grade should be e.g. 3 or 4, you can leave the final decision to the course staff. Especially, grade 5 means excellent, and typically there are only few of excellent papers per course.

Here are listed six aspects that you should consider while deciding the grade: (The purpose of questions is just to give you an idea what each aspect means. You don't have to answer all of them.)

1 Overall impression of the paper:
Does the paper look like a scientific article?
Is the structure of the paper logical?
Does the content corresponds the title and the abstract?
Is the paper otherwise consistent, leading from background and sources to analysis and conclusions?
Is the text student's own (no sudden changes in the quality etc.)?

2 Language:
Is the language appropriate for a scientific paper?
Is the language consistent?
Is the paper easy to read and understand?

3 Revision of the paper:
Has the student really read the text through?
Are there major mistakes in language and grammar?
Are pictures, graphs and equations correct and tidy?
Is section numbering correct?
Is the reference list correct?

4 Usage of references:
Are references relevant, up-to-date and appropriate for the topic and a scientific paper in general (sources such as Google and Wikipedia are not used)?
Are there enough references?
Are essential references missing?
Are references used correctly?
How is the reference list, are the bibliographic data for each item in the list correct?

5 Meeting timelines:
How well the student has followed the course timelines?
Where there any problems in the writing process?

6 Scientific quality:
How well the content of the paper meets the requirements that were defined in the beginning of the course (requirement of the tutor and those agreed together with the tutor and student)?
Does the paper contain any useful information?
Does the work make any scientific contribution?
The scientific contribution is not a requirement (afterall the course is for undergraduated studens) so it should not affect the grade negatively.

Send the grade of the paper by using email to the student and cc course staff (use course email address coursecode@tkk.fi). Deadline for grades is above in the schedule table.

Grades for the tutor

If a tutor gives three topics for the course and guide three student through the course, he or she will get "passed" marking from T-110.6110 Individual Studies in Datacommunications Software (4 cr).

If you want to guide less or more than three students, please contact course staff anyway. Other amount of credits can be given e.g. if guided student(s) drop the course. Tutors will be given ECTS-credits according to the following table.