Final Project Report

The Final Project Report will provide a concise report of the whole project. You should incorporate your Interim Report into the Final Year Project report.

See:

Assessment Information & Deadlines for word count information (BEng Deadlines, MEng Deadlines)

You should discuss the structure of the report with your supervisor as different structures may be appropriate for different projects. However, it is important that you cover:

• Abstract or Executive Summary – this should be a concise summary of the project motivation, aims, key findings and conclusions.

• Introduction including background and motivation. You may then have an ‘aims and objectives’ and ‘overview of report’.

• Literature review. This will build on the literature review from the interim report. The final literature review may be a stand-alone chapter or be embedded within other chapters depending on what is most appropriate. The size of the literature review will vary between projects as for some this will not be as relevant as for other projects. You should be guided by your supervisor on this.

• Materials and Methods. The Materials and Methods chapter should be written in a way that someone could read it and repeat the experiments. Every material you used should be stated. The methods should be written in the past tense not written in the form of a protocol.

• Results chapters. These will describe the main work done during the project. Think about how to logically divide this work up and to ensure a good “story” is told. Try to present a balanced report.

• Discussion. This may be within the results section as ‘results and discussion or a separate section.

• Conclusions and future work.

• References. Ensure you use a consistent and correct approach to referencing throughout the report. It is very important that you reference correctly.

• Appendices. These should contain additional information that is not essential to understanding the main report. See the Top Tips for a Successful Final Year Project section for more information.

• Project management. You should include a summary of the project planning including a revised Gantt chart of how the project actually went and highlighting actual progress against the original plan.

• Self-review. You must include a short self-review. This should be no longer than one page and be a critical evaluation of your progress, your development and how the project went.

You can use the interim report as a basis for the final report. It is expected that some material from the interim report will be used in the final report. However, it is also expected that you will have significantly built upon the interim report when writing the final report. In particular you should be continually developing the literature review that formed the basis for the interim report. You will not be penalized for self-plagiarism for reusing text from the interim report in the final report, but a final report that does not significantly expand on the interim report is unlikely to get a good mark.

Supervisors will provide overall guidance on the final report and comments on a single draft of the report. They will not provide detailed editing and their comments will be more general about the overall structure and content. It is strongly recommended you discuss the proposed report structure with your supervisor before starting writing.