Assignments

Assignment principles

   

The course assignments provide a structured hands-on experience with bioinformatics methods. You will be asked to go through a number of steps of a sequence analysis. This models a typical workflow that you may encounter in a research project. Five assignments will be given, we will drop your lowest mark at the end of term. Typically you wil be given an assignment every two weeks and it will be due before the next one is given.

Point form

The assignments are intended to model labwork, therefore the submission should model a lab notebook style. Be concise, but include all the details that would be required to reproduce the results.

Only occasionally, when we do ask for analysis and interpretation, we expect more explicit reasoning:

• what did you expect to observe,
• what have you observed,
• what can your results mean.

Submission

You will be asked to submit your assignments as Microsoft Word documents. We will accept only doc files (MS Word documents prior to the 2007 format change). docx files or docx.zip files will not be accepted, neither will we accept rtf files. Make sure you know the difference from the outset.

We will also reject files that have embedded macros. Make sure you understand what macros are, what security risks they pose, how they get into documents and how you can remove them. Basic computer literacy is part of the course objectives.

Submitting an assignment in a wrong format will not stop the clock for late submissions!

Group work

Group-work on the assignment is allowed but must be conducted in accordance with the University's code of academic standards.

• You must take full responsibility for the entire submitted assignment.
• You must be familiar with the concepts and procedures your assignment pertains to as if you had executed them yourself.
• You must not use copies of results or any other materials you have received from others without properly referencing this fact.

Omission of references is considered plagiarism and may result in academic misconduct procedures against both the submitter and the source. Please review the University's Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters, section B.i.1. for other academic offences.