Writing laboratory reports

WRITING LABORATORY REPORTS

Chem 351 and 353 are 2nd year University courses, so we will be expecting more from you than your High School or even your first year courses did. Most importantly, we will expect you to think, be thorough and to scientifically analyse your work.

General Statement: We are more interested in QUALITY and not quantity. More is NOT necessarily better! In Science, it is important to be accurate, concise and to the point.

We will be building on report writing skills that you should have acquired in first year chemistry (which are the prerequisites for this course). This means we will be assuming that you have some understanding of what goes into scientific laboratory reports. In turn, now that you are taking a 2nd year course, we will not need to be quite as specific in our report writing guidelines (based on first year, you should already have a feeling for that). A key issue here is we want you to start to get used to making decisions for yourselves and understanding why / how etc. rather than just doing something because someone told you to do it. That being said, we need to strike a balance because many students spend too much time writing reports. For example, if you were to spend 5 hrs working on a laboratory report which is worth about 1.5 course marks, then you should be spending about (40/1.5) x 5 hrs = 133 hrs preparing for the FINAL! What does this all mean ?

PUT THE MOST EFFORT WHERE IT IS MOST CRITICAL. MOST STUDENTS...
- SPEND FAR TOO MUCH TIME ON THE LABORATORY REPORTS AT THE ULTIMATE EXPENSE OF EXAMINATION PERFORMANCE.
- ARE MORE ANXIOUS ABOUT LABORATORY MARKS THAN THEY ARE ABOUT MAKING SURE THEY CAN DO WELL ON THE EXAMINATIONS.

This means that you should use your time wisely…It is important that students do well on examinations in order to get good grades in Chem 351. The examinations are the part of the course where we find out what an individual is capable of and it is the examinations in general, and especially the key performance indicator, the cumulative FINAL examination, that have the most significant influence on the course letter grade.

As a rough guideline, once you are used to writing reports, we would expect that an average student should be able to complete a reasonably good weekly report (i.e. B grade) in an average of about 2 hours. If it is taking you longer you may be writing too much or you are not working effectively and you should reconsider how much time you are putting into the reports (see comments above). Note that in our experience, the main reasons students do not do as well as they would like on reports are:

poor discussion of the scientific (especially chemical) issues pertinent to the experiment likely a sign that your chemistry background knowledge is weaker than it should be and may be that your organic chemistry knowledge is not where is should be (i.e. are you behind ?)
incorrect style (see student laboratory manual for the required style)
“claims” must be backed up with references, e.g. the statement “the boiling point of water is 100 C at sea level” should be supported with a reference (see the student laboratory manual for acceptable reference styles).
incorrect terminology (use your textbook, lecture notes etc.) to make sure you are using the appropriate terms in the correct manner.

When writing reports :

Think scientifically about what you are writing, analyse your results
Don't expect to get "excellent" (A) marks for "average work" (C)