In preparing your essay, you may wish to refer to the following
criteria which will be used for marking.

The precise weighting of each aspect is not given, but you can expect
that if you do well on all and only the basic criteria you will
receive a mark in the range of 60-69.  To do better you will need to
do exceptionally well on all of the basic criteria or (more likely)
show good evidence of some of the additional criteria also.

Please keep in mind that *more* text is not necessarily *better* text;
your essay is expected to be 2500-3000 words long.  If you find you are overrunning the limit, you should be able to shorten your essay by careful editing without losing any
critical information.  

Finally, as stated in the essay guidance, "your essay should be
written at a level that an interested but non-specialist reader would
understand -- someone who has some background in cognitive science but
not necessarily in the specific area you are discussing."

****************************************

Basic criteria:

- well-organized and clear structure, concise presentation.

- correct use of citations and bibliography.

- provides a clear description of the psychological phenomena
motivating the work and relevant behavioral data from this and/or
previous work.

- clearly states any hypotheses being tested by the model(s) and their
relevance to the field of cognitive science.

- clearly summarizes the models(s), including any key technical
details and assumptions that are made.

- summarizes key experiments and results obtained in the chosen
paper(s) (behavioral data if any, as well as modelling results) and
explains how these bear on the hypotheses being tested.

- demonstrates a detailed understanding of the chosen paper(s).

- discusses strengths and weaknesses of individual model(s) and
evaluation(s).

Additional criteria:

- includes original material in discussion (i.e. beyond that given in
the chosen paper(s)).

- explicitly compares alternative approaches or competing hypotheses,
especially if from other work.

- uses specific examples or other evidence (especially from other
work) to support discussion/analysis.

- reviews other uses of the model (from other papers).

- relates the topic and/or model(s) discussed to broader issues and
themes from the course and/or from cognitive science more generally.

- proposes useful extensions to the model(s) or further ways to test
it/them.

- goes beyond the original paper.

- offers an opinion not just a summary