MSE405 – Microstructure Determination – Spring 2007

Lab report guidelines

- Each laboratory exercise will span two lab sessions; i.e., each exercise will take approximately 5 hours to complete.

- Each team of two students will submit a joint report. At the beginning of the second laboratory session for each exercise, you will show the lab TA in charge of that exercise a draft of your report that describes the work you did during the first session.

- Include the following either on a cover page or at the top of your report: the title of the lab; your names; the due date for your lab; and a space for the TAs to fill in “date submitted” to be checked off when you turn in your report.

- Text must be typed (double-spaced, 12 font size, 1-in. margins).

- Don’t forget to attach plots, figures, sketches, and calculations that you are asked for in the lab write-ups or by the TAs.

- Reports must be turned in during your regular lab section one week after the laboratory exercise is complete, or, alternatively, they must be submitted to the TA’s mailbox (Javier Bareno or Andrew Signor) in 216B MSEB no later than 5 pm that day. Otherwise they will be considered late and grades will be reduced by 10% per day (see the course syllabus for more information on grading policy).

- We do not need a detailed or formal “Introduction, experimental methods, results and discussion” sections as you may have learned to include in other labs you have taken at UIUC. We prefer a narrative that describes the sequence of events that took place in the lab with, of course, the addition of the more detailed plots and analysis of the data that will you will do outside the lab. Another way of saying the same thing: think of your lab report as an extended and more orderly version of your laboratory notebook. The presentation of the data and the analysis of the data are more important than the text; the text is needed to provide a context and explanations of the data and analysis.