Why do we ask you to do a Large Practical such as this in the third year? There are several reasons. It provides you with a gentle introduction to the issues and requirements of the more demanding fourth-year project that is worth a third of the final year's marks. It gets you some experience of reading published papers and trying to figure out what the important content is. It requires you to think about how to write a report on a modest piece of scientific work: you have to explain what you did, and why, and what conclusions you reached, and why, and you have to do this clearly and convincingly. It compels you to write programs to investigate a certain question; you must write well-structured, well-documented programs because they too are acts of scientific communication. If you wrote programs which some reasonably intelligent reader, who was not necessarily a specialist in the topic, was unable to follow then there would be some doubt remaining as to whether your programs really implemented what you claimed to be investigating.
These are the main considerations that will be used to judge your work.
Students are divided up into tutorial groups with a demonstrator allocated to each group. Tutorial groups will meet at least once a week at a time of mutual convenience. The LP coordinator and demonstrators will assist students with the planning and organisation of their LP.