A tutor should be a postgraduate (doctoral) student (whose major has been Telecommunications software) with interest in new technology and scientific research. Tutoring in the seminar is an opportunity to learn more about a technology or a research area. Tutoring is also a great way to learn to know M.Sc students who will soon be looking for thesis positions. Moreover, doctoral students can get study credits for tutoring.

Tutor's tasks

The main task of the tutors are to propose topics in their own areas of interest, help find key references, guide the writing process, and provide feedback for grading. We do our best to minimize the administrative burden on tutors. The task of the tutors are the following:

• Provide topic descriptions to the course staff.
• Present their proposed topics to the students during first course meeting.
• After topic assignment, contact your students by email and meet the student individually to discuss the topics.
• Within one week after the First Draft deadline, read and provide feedback to the student.
• Within one week after the Full Paper deadline, read and provide feedback to the student.
• Within one week after Final paper deadline, read and provide final feedback to the student.
• Optionally, review the student's presentation before the seminar.
• Tutors are expected to participate the course conference and also act as a session chairs.
• By the end of the seminar, send brief comments and grading recommendation to the course staff.

The tutor is expected to meet each student at least once, but face-to-face meetings after each deadline are recommended. This is the easiest way to provide efficient guidance.

Participation in the two-day seminar is highly recommended for tutors. The value of the seminar for the students depends on active discussion by senior participants.

In addition, previous "paper-writing" seminars have produced many generally useful guidepages for tutoring, grading etc. However, please note that these guides are common and guides given particularly in this seminar are primary (especially in grading).

Topic descriptions

Tutors should preferably propose three different topic descriptions from the topic area of this year. The descriptions are added to the topic page. The tutors are invited to present their topic descriptions in the first course meeting. Students will suggest topics of interest when they sign up for the course, and the course staff will assign topics to the students. The general instruction for writing a topic description can be found here.

A topic description should include

• a brief description of the technology or research area in question
• the goal of the seminar project: in addition to describing a technology or summarizing source literature, good students will want a question to answer or a small problem to solve
• prior skills required from the student
• at least two key web links or literature references where students can start to look for more information

Please, send your topic descriptions along with your user account name in IT center (for optima account) to course staff by email as soon as possible but at latest by the first course meeting. Note that the best students often choose their topics early.

Initial meeting with the student

After the topic assignment, the tutor should meet the students individually. In the meeting, following should be discussed:

• Goals of the seminar project and how high the student wants to set them.
• Finding good references: How to find technical and scientific papers, standards and other original and definitive sources.
• Scope and structure of the paper: (e.g. abstract, introduction, background, method, results, discussion, conclusion), keeping focus, what should be left out, how many pages for each section, where to start.
• Marking references in the text: From the beginning of the writing process, student should mark the used references into his/her text. There should be very few direct quotations, and it has to be marked with quotation marks and a reference.
• Writing original text: The tutor's task is not to be proofreader for the paper or write the paper on behalf of the student. However, tutor should check that the student writes his/her own text and does not copy or modify text from the web or other sources.
• Agree on the next meetings if possible.

Grading students

Tutor's responsibility is to propose a grade for the paper using the following scale:

Send the grade proposal and associated comments by email to the student and a copy to the course staff by the end of the seminar. Here are some aspects that you can consider:

Overall impression of the paper:

Does the paper look like a technical or scientific article?
Is the structure of the paper logical?
Does the content corresponds the title and the abstract?
Is the paper otherwise consistent, leading from background and sources to analysis and conclusions?
Is the text student's own (no copied or modified from the web or other sources)?

Language and editing:

Is the language appropriate for a technical or scientific paper?
Is the paper easy to read and understand?
Has the student really read his/her own text through and revised it?
Are there major mistakes in language and grammar?
Are pictures, graphs and equations helpful to the reader?

References:

Are the references relevant, up-to-date and appropriate for the topic and for technical and scientific writing in general (Google and Wikipedia are not acceptable)?
Are there some references to high-quality research papers?
Are any essential references missing?
Are citations used correctly to prove a point or to acknowledge a source?
Is the bibliographic data correct?

Process issues:

How well has the student has followed the course time-line?
Has the student listened to the feedback and revised the paper accordingly?
Has the student done the work independently or is the paper mostly written by the tutor?

Technical or scientific contribution:

How well does the paper meet the requirements that were defined at the beginning of the course?
Does the paper contain any useful information not already available from open sources in a similar format?
Is the paper interesting to the seminar audience, or to any other technical audience? Is it worth reading?
Does the work make any new technical or scientific contribution? (This is not required but best papers often present a small novel idea or point of view, or confirm and demonstrate ideas from the literature.)

Grades for the tutor

Doctoral students can get study credits for tutoring seminar papers. These will be for the course code T-110.6110 Individual Studies in Datacommunications Software and will be marked as "passed". Tutors will be given credits according to the following table.