A tutor should be a doctoral student, researcher, or an experienced security professional with interest in new technology and scientific research. Tutoring in the seminar is an opportunity to learn more about a technology or a research area. Tutoring is also a great way to learn to know MSc students who will soon be looking for thesis positions. Moreover, doctoral students can get study credits for tutoring.

The course staff contact email address is T-110.5291@tkk.fi.

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Tutor's tasks

The main tasks of the tutors are to propose topics in their own areas of interest, help with finding key references, guide the writing process, and provide feedback for grading. We do our best to minimize the administrative burden on tutors. The tasks of the turors are the following:

• Provide 1-3 topic descriptions to the course staff.
• After topic assignment, contact your students by email and meet the students individually to discuss their topic and how to find information on it.
• One week after First Draft deadline, read and provide feedback to the student.
• One week after Full Draft deadline, read and provide feedback to the student.
• One week after Final Paper deadline, read and provide final feedback to the student.
• Optionally, review the student's presentation before the seminar.
• Participate in the two-day seminar if at all possible.
• By the end of the seminar, send brief comments and grading recommendation to the course staff.

The tutor is expected to meet each student at least once, but face-to-face meetings after each deadline are recommended and often are the easiest way to provide effective guidance.

Participation in the one-day seminar is highly recommended for tutors. The value of the seminar for the students depends on active discussion by senior participants.

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Topic descriptions

Tutors should preferably propose three different topics so that students have some choice within the tutor's interest area. The descriptions are added to the topic page and the tutors are invited to presents their topics in the first course meeting. Students will select topics of interest when they sign up for the course, and the course staff will assign topics to the students.

A topic description should include

• brief description of the technology or research area in question
• the goal of the seminar project: in addition to describing a technology or summarizing source literature, good students will want a question to answer or a small problem to solve
• prior skills required from the student
• at least two key web links or literature references where students can start to look for more information

Please send your topic descriptions to course staff by email as soon as possible but at latest by the first course meeting. Note that best students often choose their topics early.

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Initial meeting with the student

After the topic assignment, the tutor should meet the students individually. In the meeting, following should be discussed:

• Goals of the seminar project and how high the student wants to set them.
• Finding good references: How to find technical and scientific papers, standards and other original and definitive sources.
• Scope and structure of the paper: (e.g. abstract, introduction, background, method, results, discussion, conclusion), keeping focus, what should be left out, how many pages for each section, where to start.
• Marking references in the text: From the beginning of the writing process, student should mark the used references into his/her text. There should be very few direct quotations, and it has to be marked with quotation marks and a reference.
• Writing original text: The tutor's task is not to be proof reader for the paper or write the paper on behalf of the student. However, tutor should check that the student writes his/her own text and does not copy or modify text from the web or other sources.
• Agree on the next meeting times if possible.

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Grading students

Tutor's responsibility is to propose a grade for the paper using the following scale:

Overall impression of the paper:

Does the paper look like a technical or scientific article?
Is the structure of the paper logical?
Does the content correspond to the title and the abstract?
Is the paper otherwise consistent, leading from background and sources to analysis and conclusions?
Is the text the student's own (not copied or modified from the web or other sources)?

Language and editing:

Is the language appropriate for a technical or scientific paper?
Is the paper easy to read and understand?
Has the student really read his/her own text through and revised it?
Are there major mistakes in language and grammar?
Are pictures, graphs and equations helpful to the reader?

References:

Are the references relevant, up-to-date and appropriate for the topic and for technical and scientific writing in general (Google and Wikipedia are not acceptable)?
Are there some references to high-quality research papers?
Are any essential references missing?
Are citations used correctly to prove a point or to acknowledge a source?
Is the bibliographic data correct?

Process issues:

How well has the student followed the course time-line?
Has the student listened to the feedback and revised the paper accordingly?
Has the student done the work independently or is the paper mostly written by the tutor?

Technical or scientific contribution:

How well does the paper meet the requirements that were defined at the beginning of the course?
Does the paper contain any useful information not already available from open sources in a similar format?
Is the paper interesting to the seminar audience, or to any other technical audience? Is it worth reading?
Does the work make any new technical or scientific contribution? (This is not required but best papers often present a small novel idea or point of view, or confirm and demonstrate ideas from the literature.)

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Study credits for the tutor

Doctoral students can get study credits for tutoring seminar papers. These will be for the course code T-110.6110 Individual Studies in Datacommunications Software and will be marked as "passed". Tutors will be given credits according to the following table.