The CS710 thesis presentation sessions - one for each student on the course - start on 28th March 2001 (see this year's CS710 agenda for the detailed schedule). I took CS710 in 1998, so I know what to expect.
As a student of CS710, you have two obligations:
Each student should make a `CS710 edit' of their thesis available to the group at least 24 hours before their presentation seminar, i.e. not later than 12 noon on the Tuesday before. This should contain:
The one thing you absolutely must include is the chapter, but in 1998 I was disappointed to see that everyone except me submitted nothing but the chapter to CS710! ;-) To derive maximum benefit from CS710, I believe you should submit all of the above. The thesis plan is the most optional of the above items, but writing a plan will benefit you enormously at the strategic level, and it will be instructive if we can compare each other's styles of plan.
You submit your package to the group by making it available online. Put it in your home directory and don't forget to set the read permission, or put it on your website so that we can download it. Please don't waste bandwidth and blow our filestore quotas by sending it as an email attachment, but don't forget to give us all the link by emailing [email protected]!
Please submit your CS710 edit in a format we can all print out, namely PostScript (.ps) or even PDF (.pdf). Do not submit it as a Micro$oft Word document or a LaTeX source file, for example (if you use LaTeX, please convert dvi files to ps).
We then each print out your CS710 edit and scribble comments all over it, which we give back to you at the end of your presentation seminar.
The presentation seminar is not you giving a presentation about your thesis (as you might have expected after courses such as CS700), it entails the class criticising your thesis and grilling you over it. One person leads the discussion - David Br�e for the first one, and thereafter the person who had his/her presentation session the previous week (or previous half of the seminar - MPhils are usually scheduled two a week, half an hour each, although in 2001 we stopped after the PhDs because there were simply too many MPhil students on the course to have an in-class presentation for each) gets to lead the presentation seminar for the next student. It's an interactive workshop, where the group go over their comments with the student in question. It can be an unpleasant experience for many, but it's good to get some feedback and constructive criticism. At the end of the presentation seminar, we all give the student our commented printouts of his/her thesis so they can go away and read them.
The major problem with a group discussion such as this is that if it isn't carefully planned and moderated, it tends to drift off into protracted discussions of minor points, making it very tedious and laboured for the rest of us.
Part-way through CS710 2001, students started giving a 5-to-10-minute presentation on their thesis at the beginning of the session, to give the class some background on what they're criticising. Personally I don't think having a brief presentation by the author at the start helps me very much, because I have already read their thesis by then, and I don't change my comments in the light of their presentation. I would prefer to launch straight into the discussion.
If you're a PhD student who has written an MPhil in the past, and have only written up one chapter of your PhD thesis so far, and it's a nasty, technical chapter (I'm in this situation myself, and I know I'm not the only one because someone else asked about this in class), you could submit the introduction or conclusion chapter of your MPhil thesis instead, which would get you some feedback on your style (as it was then), and provide a good example to the MPhil students among us. However, it would not help you with your PhD, so I think it's best to submit the chapter you've got, however bad it is (and there's time to improve it between now and your thesis presentation!).
It's much better to submit Chapter 1 or your conclusion chapter if you are in a position to do so, though, because they are the most valuable chapters for you to get feedback on, and the most interesting for the rest of us to read.
BTW, if you want to read my MPhil thesis as an extra example for CS710, it's here. Assuming that you don't want to read it all(!), I recommend just reading the abstract, the contents, Chapter 1 and Chapter 7.
When making comments on someone's thesis, please try to focus on the strategic level rather than just the tactical level. It's not easy, especially if it's written in bad English or you don't understand the subject matter, but good strategic-level comments are much more useful in the long run. To focus on the strategic level, try reverse-engineering a plan from the text of their chapter, as we did for Chapter 1 of Ian Horrocks's PhD thesis in Week 6 of CS710 2001.
Just print out their CS710 edit, scribble comments on it by hand (but make it legible!), and give it to them at the end of their presentation session - it's quicker than sending your comments by email, and doesn't lose the context of their own writing.
Using non-black ink, and circling using a highlighter pen, make it less likely that they will miss comments (e.g. if you insert a comma somewhere).
I usually make comments all over the printout, and then make an overall comment at the end.
You can make your comments anonymously, but I always include my name and email address in case they want to comment on my comments (as a couple of people did in 1998).