1
Lab Report in PHY294Lab
Lab reports are submitted in electronic format to the Portal page corresponding to your lab section.
We hope that you have got experience in submitting electronic reports. Since not all students and
TAs have an MS Office package installed to their PCs, we would ask you to submit the reports in
the PDF format. If this is a problem for you, please feel free to submit the report in the MS Word
format or any other format that permits commenting in the text.
Here are some reminders about the lab report requirements that were announced in September
when you started the PHY293Lab.
If a setup of your experiment is not connected to a computer, make notes and preliminary
calculations in a notebook. Some number of paper notebooks is always available in the lab room
MP 222. Right after you finish direct measurements with this setup, go to the MP 222 to begin
writing the lab report, fitting data, calculating results and errors, before you forget important
details. Applying fitters and calculating the goodness of fit, try to exclude Excel from your final
version, but replace it by Python, Matlab or any other efficient software. The Matlab is installed to
all computers in MP257 – a renovated student computer class that is very close to our lab rooms.
You will not be provided with a template for your write-up. We hope you have already got enough
expertise in creating a good lab report with all details of the experiment setup, procedure and
results included; clear explanation of a method and outcomes along with error calculations
provided; results of measurements presented in tables and diagrams; and discussion and analysis as
well as summary/conclusion completed. It would be good to outline the experiment objective at the
beginning of your report. However, the report is still expected to be informal and written in a style
of a diary like a pen-and-paper report in a standard notebook. We can suggest the following
sections: equipment with a reading error or resolution; a drawing of a setup that can be taken from
an online handout (if possible) or made manually, or got as a photo; objective of the experiment;
explanation of a procedure; explanation of the method(s) of measurements; a table that includes
the results of direct measurements with their reading errors and calculated indirect measurements
with their uncertainties; description of difficulties; malfunctioning equipment (if applicable);
failure in getting the expected values of quantities (if applicable); ideas on improving the results of
the measurements; detailed description of your struggle with difficulties during the experiment;
your thoughts, ideas, trials, success and failures; calculation of the required physical quantities;
calculations of errors (uncertainties); analysis of a value and sources of each uncertainty; graphs of
functions with captions and properly labelled axes; discussion/analysis of the results; brief
summary/conclusion, and so on. In general, the report must be composed for an imaginary
experimenter who will take it as a guide and, following your description, would be able to
understand equipment, repeat all measurements and calculations.
Anyways, try to not exceed 6 pages per one weight of an experiment.
By default, you are expected to submit one lab report for two or three lab partners. The lab partners
will get equal marks for the report presentation, results of measurements and calculations, error
analysis and other parts of the lab report, but a supervising Lab Demonstrator will assign
individual marks for in-lab performance. The lab partners must consent on the choice of
2
experiments and contents of the report. Don’t forget to save your lab report file on a USB drive or
elsewhere making it accessible by both lab partners after submission.
Usually, a lab experiment is worth more than one weight. Some lab manuals give a clear idea
about the division of your lab into weights. If this is not the case, discuss with your Lab
Demonstrator how your current experiment will be marked, i.e. decide on the division of the lab
report into parts corresponding to one weight each. In the folder Course Materials on the Portal,
find assignments entitled Lab report 1, Lab report 2, Lab report 3 and Lab report 4. Open the
assignment and upload the part of your lab report associated with a specific weight. You begin
with the Lab report 1 and upload the other parts of your experiment report in chronological order.
All experiments are treated by the Portal as assignments.
To submit the lab report for marking, make sure that your file name includes information about
you, your experiment and contains only letters and numbers, e.g.
Experiment 1, part 2, by Xingxing Xing and John Wei.
Do not attach multiple files with same name. To upload your report





Click Browse for local File on your personal computer. Locate your file.
Once you see the file listed in the BB window, click the Attach File button
Click Open
Click Submit
You are allowed two attempts. After you click Submit 2nd time, you cannot alter your
submission any more. The latest attempt is marked. You also cannot re-submit the report after
a marker has started grading paper. Watch the deadlines!
If your submission is impossible due to problems with Portal access, ask an experiment supervisor
a permission to send you’re the report via e-mail. However, you still will be required to upload the
report to the Blackboard assignment later.
Each weight is worth 22% of the final experiment mark. Rubric posted to the BB will be used to
provide clear and fair marking in a very similar way by different TAs.
One of the experiments (not weights!) must be written as a formal report, following the style and
format required by scientific journals. We recommend the style of Physical Review E Journal that
is mainly focused on publishing papers in experimental physics. The complete and helpful
information on the formal report preparation is posted to Blackboard in the folder Formal Report.
You will get additional marks out of 12% of the final experiment mark for your Formal Report
presentation.
All experiments are booked by you using the Booking system as in the fall term.
ATTENTION!!!
The booking system cannot be accessed from home or any other location on the campus
except the MP building, i.e. the building of the Department of Physics.
We suggest the following steps of booking an experiment:
1) Go to the lab course Homepage http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~phy294lab/phy294lab.htm
and study all experiments listed in the link Experiments.
3
2) Together with your lab partner create a wish list with at least three experiments in the
descending order of interest. You need to get 4 weights for this lab course. You can book only
one experiment at a time. Either student of two lab partners can book the chosen experiment.
3) The button Book an Experiment is at the bottom of the page under the list of experiments and
the list of lab instructors. Your Login is your student number; your password is your casesensitive official last name as on ROSI
4) If you do not see a desired experiment on the list, it means that your classmates were prompt
and managed to book this experiment before you. Since you have a wish list of three
experiments, proceed with the second one from this list.
5) After booking the experiment, log out. You can change your mind and book the other
experiment later.
It would be good to ask an advice from the TA supervising the experiment of your choice.
After you upload the lab report to the Portal, submit same copy to the web facility Turnitin. To
open its web page, click on the link Turnitin on the lab Homepage
http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~phy293lab/phy294lab.htm . At the top right corner, you have two
options: “Create Account” and “Login”. To create an account, enter your email address
(@mail.utoronto.ca is recommended) and a password. Then click on “Student” and follow the onscreen directions. If you have created the account in the fall term, log in with the new class name
and enrollment password. The class name is phy294lab; the enrollment password is physics; the
class ID is 10640946. You can use your turnitin account for later submission of other assignments
in the other subjects. The weight 1 of the lab report corresponds to the assignment “Lab report 1”
on the turnitin.com. The following weights will be submitted to assignments identified as Lab
report 2, Lab report 3, etc. If you failed to upload the current report on time, you have an
opportunity to upload it later to the assignment Late submission 1 and/or Late submission 2 that
have no real due date.
To upload your paper,
-
-
Click on the Submit button and select File Upload from the pull-down menu.
Enter a submission title for your paper. Use the Browse button to select the file that you would
like to submit. Click Submit.
You will be asked to confirm your selection. Click Yes, submit to finalize your submission.
Once you have submitted your paper you will receive a digital receipt.
Submitted papers will appear in your class portfolio next to the relevant assignment. It is
impossible to delete any submitted document, so, please, be sure that you are uploading a
correct and final version of your Report.
The turnitin.com software was designed to check just the text part of your report, so that the
diagrams can either be absent or become corrupted in the downloaded version. Please don’t
panic, since this is a student’s copy that can be not identical to the submitted document.
The deadline for the lab report submission to the Portal and to the Turnitin is
11:59 PM on Tuesday in one week after your lab session.