STAT0035/0036
Academic Year 2024-2025
Guidelines for the Statistics Project (STAT0035/0036) in 2024-2025
INTRODUCTION
What does a project involve?
A project is a course that allows a student to undertake a major piece of independent work under the guidance of a supervisor. The assessment is based on a written report and an oral presentation. This course is different from other courses in that the content is determined to a large extent by the student. It provides a lot of freedom in choosing what to study but on the other hand it requires a lot more independent thought and organisational skills than the majority of courses. Many students find the project more demanding than the usual lecture courses. However it is also more rewarding, and a well-executed project can give confidence and pride in the results. It is also something that can be used to demonstrate ability to potential employers.
Project versions
There are two versions of the course available: STAT0035, which is a 30-credit course, and STAT0036, which is a 15-credit course. Both modules are associated with FHEQ Level 6 or Level 7.
THE PROJECT
Choosing a topic and supervisor
If you decide or need to do a final year project, you must first find yourself a topic and a supervisor.
● A provisional list of projects will be available (usually in the summer) before you do your project. You should discuss possibilities for projects before the start of Term 1 of the final year.
Undertaking the project
You should agree a series of regular meetings with your supervisor to discuss your progress. The frequency of these meetings may vary overtime depending on the nature of the project and on your other commitments, but most students aim to meet with their supervisors every one or two weeks during Terms 1 and 2. While such a meeting and supervision during Terms 1 and 2 are expected to be in person, remote sessions are allowed upon the agreement between you and your supervisor.
It is important to get started on your project early in the firstterm, eventhough the deadline for the completed report may seem a long way off.
The project coordinator will be available to answer queries about your project. Three workshops will be offered to help with the written report and the oral presentation.
The Christmas vacation can be a good opportunity to do some concentrated work on your project. However, you should not leave anything major to be done over the Easter vacation since (a) you should be revising for your exams then and (b) if you do run into problems at that time it maybe difficult to contact your supervisor. You should aim to have the bulk of your report written before the Easter break.
For the STAT0035 Project you are expected to undertake approximately 260 hours of study, including the preparation of the report. This equates to around 8-10 hours per week during the term time and vacation time available for your project. The amount of time required should betaken seriously. In particular if you do not work hard enough in the first term you will regret it later. The STAT0036 project should take approximately 130 hours of study.
It is a good idea to write up the work that you do as you go along. Otherwise, when you get to the end of the project, you may have forgotten the details of some of your earlier work. It is also a useful way to organise the work that you have done and can show up gaps that need to be filled before you move on. If there is a lot of computing involved, it is important to keep good records of what you have done. It is very frustrating not to be able to reproduce an earlier result.
More formal descriptions of the courses are in UCL's Module Catalogue.
Content of the project
For your project you should undertake a substantial piece of work that investigates aspects of a particular problem, presents solutions and discusses them critically and coherently. This investigation maybe purely via study of books and other sources, but more usually it will involve applying mathematical or statistical techniques to analyse a probability model or a set of data. Through the project, it is important to develop and demonstrate your statistical understanding rather than collecting/cleaning data.
A project is not expected to result in 'new discoveries', as would be the case for a postgraduate thesis. However, you are expected to demonstrate originality in the compilation of your report and, for example, wholesale copying of material from books in undigested form. is not appropriate.
Writing the report
The main output from your project is the final report, which for STAT0035 projects should typically be in the range of 12,000-15,000 words (excluding computer programs, tables, graphs and other output). For STAT0036 projects this should be 7,000-10,000 words. These lengths are guidelines, not prescriptions, and quality is more important than quantity. If it looks like your project will either be very short or very long compared with the guideline, discuss it with your supervisor, preferably not at the last minute. Note that over- length reports will be penalised.
● You need to think carefully about the structure of what you are writing. In order to make a report of this size readable you need to:
● break the material down into chapters, sections and subsections;
● make sure that the material in each section fits together coherently and that the section titles etc. are an accurate description of the content;
● number sections, figures, tables and important equations so that you can cross- reference them;
● put a caption below or above each diagram, graph or figure to say what it is;
● give a list of references and cite them correctly.
● You should think about the audience for which you are writing. For the project you should attempt to present the material in a form that you would be able to understand and assimilate if you were given it by one of your peers.
● You need to attend to details in the presentation. Make sure the spelling and grammar are correct. Spell-checkers and grammar-checkers can be used, but ultimately these can only be properly checked by a careful reading of the report. Make sure references are accurate, dates are correct and so on.
● You need to organise your time during the writing. If you produce a report in the final 3 days, it will show. You may need to edit the report many times before it is in a fit state to be submitted. You should give your supervisor the opportunity to comment on the plan for your report.
● Before the end of Term 2, you should agree with your supervisor a time frame for providing feedback on your draft report (and presentation slides). Some supervisors may prefer to provide feedback on one chapter at a time; others may prefer to provide feedback on the whole report at once. Either way, you need to provide drafts in plenty of time for your supervisor to read them (e.g. usually at least two weeks before the final submission deadline). In return, your supervisor will be happy to provide you with concrete and constructive comments and suggestions for you to revise your draft report (and slides).
● It might help if you can benchmark your draft (written report and oral presentation slides) against the criteria listed in the marking forms (which you can find in the "Marking scheme" section on Moodle).
Using mathematical word processing software
There is a lot of software currently available that may make the writing up of your project easier and it is recommended that you spend some time familiarising yourself with the possibilities at an early stage of the project. You will probably find that you will need to revise the structure of your report several times, so software that reliably renumbers sections is obviously an advantage.
Many word processors (for example WORD) will allow you to organise and cross- reference material as well as to write Greek letters, subscripts and equations. If your report is likely to contain many and/or more complicated equations, you will almost certainly be better offusing the mathematical word processing package LaTeX, which is widely used by members of staff.
Whatever software and computer you use, remember to backup your files regularly. Disk failures on laptops are not all that rare, and WORD has an uncanny knack of knowing just when it would be most inconvenient to overwrite your file with rubbish.
Help with preparing written reports will be given in the workshops.
The oral presentation
In the end of Term 2, we will hold a practice oral presentation. The final (assessed) oral presentation will be held face-to-face in Term 3, with slides submitted online in advance. The oral presentation will involve your giving a talk of 13-15 minutes about your project, plus about 5 minutes of Q&A.
Help with preparing and delivering oral presentations will be given in the workshops and the practice oral presentation.
Assessment of the project
The project is assessed on the written report (80%) and the oral presentation (20%). (See the Moodle page of the course for marking schemes.)
Electronic versions of the written report and the slides of the final oral presentation should be submitted in two designated areas of the Moodle page of the course (see the Moodle page for the update of information including precise deadlines).
Structure of the written report
● Include a frontpage with the title of your project, your candidate number, course code (i.e. STAT0035 or STAT0036), word count, and date (e.g. April 2025).
● The second page should contain an Abstract of up to about 300 words in length. This is a brief statement of the aims of the project and a guide to the major results. It is distinct from the Introduction, which gives the background, motivation and aims of the study in more detail.
● Include a Table of Contents (and possibly a Glossary if appropriate), a chapter/section of Introduction, a chapter/section of Conclusions including discussion of limitations and future work, and a list of references.
● The reference list should include all references that have been used to support the work reported, and these references should be cited in the text ofthe report to indicate where they have been used.
● There are a number of standard ways of referencing books, articles, lecture notes, software, etc., and you should use one of these. You should read the separate guidelines on referencing and discuss with your supervisor what system you are going to use.
● The pages should be clearly numbered and should have a left-hand margin of at least 2cm.
● Examiners attach considerable importance to accuracy, clarity and overall quality of presentation. Achieving this means starting to write early, so that you are not rushing to write everything up at the last minute, and giving your supervisor the opportunity to give you some feedback in time for it to be useful.