Comms IV Assignment
Contents
Introduction
There is one major homework assignment for this course and it counts as 30% towards the final mark. The exam counts as the other 70%.
Hints
Here are some verbal podcast hints to help answer your immediate technical questions about the assignment:
Questions
If you are having any difficulty, post any questions you have about the homework assignment here:
Deliverables
By the deadline, upload ono Canvas the following for each person (not group):
- your assignment as a written report; and
- a zip of your whole project directory on the assignment.
Deadlines
Start date: Start preparation now. You will be fully ready with the required knowledge when lectures have reached the end of Section 5.
Hand in date: Upload your written assignment (plus whole assignment directory) onto Canvas 2pm on Monday, 15th May, 2017.
The Rules
- Rule 1: The top caption of every Matlab graph must contain your Student ID and name (generated within Matlab, not added later)
- Rule 2: You must submit fully commented Matlab code with your assignment. The header for each code module should contain a comment with your name, date, and student ID.
- Rule 3: As well as electronically uploading your report on Canvas, you must upload your whole project directory containing all the Matlab files, log files, Word files, pdf files, and any files relating to this assignment.
- Rule 4: Submit the assignment by uploading to Canvas. Do not physically submit hardcopies to me or anyone else.
- Rule 5: The assignment report must include a signed cover sheet.
- Rule 6: Any slightest violation of Rules 1-5 will receive zero marks.
Plagiarism
Your submission should contain a detailed description of your procedures, any theoretical analysis necessary, the graphical plots specified, and your MATLAB code with plenty of comments. The assignment is expected to be your own work, copying of another person's work will attract zero marks and you should carefully note the policy on plagiarism.
Small groups
- You are to conduct the assignment in groups of two people. Please contact me if you cannot find a partner. If there are an odd number of people, a group of three can be formed with my permission.
- As a group you brainstorm and work out the assignment together. However, the report you hand up should be your own summation of the project and your own words. You can share graphs and code between your group members to put in your report, but you must name in the header of each bit of Matlab code who wrote it with their student ID. You must put in the caption of every graph the name of the student and ID that generated it. You must generate some of your own code and graphs. If a group member has taken the lead in writing the main code, you can still write your own code to explore aspects of the system and to investigate its behaviour further.
- The cover of your report should state your name first, and then should state who your partner is.
- Plagiarism is only plagiarism if you don't acknowledge the source.
Expectations
The emphasis in this assignment is to attempt a working simulation and does not require extensive use of Matlab functions or fancy programming. However, if you use “high level” Matlab functions, make sure you understand precisely what they do and set the parameters to appropriate values. It is often more straightforward to use simple functions.
Obviously a good working simulation will attract marks. But at the end of the day, I’m looking for a well structured methodology and evidence that you had an exploratory attitude to the problem. I don’t want to just see a neat solution; I want to see you take “ownership” of the assignment by describing your exploratory steps to arriving at your final code. For example, you may want make intermediate plots to convince yourself individual parts of your code are working, you may want to plot relevant formulas and functions to test how they behave. You may want to generate some trial plots that test how the random number generator behaves or how phase unwrapping behaves (for example) and so on. You are encouraged to put your investigations and “sanity check” plots into your report to show you really owned this assignment.
If you mess up the assignment it is still possible to get reasonable marks, if you diligently show the steps you took to gain ownership and the steps you took to explore the problem space.
Marking
- Extra bonus marks will be given for exploratory discussion and exploratory graphs that showed you owned the homework assignment.
- If you receive 100%, it does not necessarily mean your final simulation was correct. It may mean the bonuses you accumulated outweighed the marks you lost. Marks over 100% will be truncated at 100%.
- Zero will be given if there are any signs of copying or if any of Rules 1-5 are broken.
- Late submissions will lose 20% per day late. The only concession is a medical certificate. Please carefully read the departmental policy on lateness.
- A correct simulation that does not contain discussion of your results and does not show the exploratory steps of how you got there will get much lower marks, than a submission with a flaky simulation that contains good discussion and shows ownership and an exploratory attitude.
