Protocol portfolio

Week 8Due 30 April 2027Worth 20%

Four protocols, chosen by you from weeks 1 to 8, collected with their raw records, roughly a page each. This is the least glamorous piece of assessment in the course and the one that will teach you the most, because writing a protocol down for somebody else to run is how you discover which parts of it you had been improvising.

What each one needs#

• The measure, and how long a single recording took
• The duration, and whether you completed it
• The raw record: the actual log, not a summary of it
• One thing this protocol cannot detect. A sentence, minimum

The third criterion#

“Legible to someone else” is not a politeness. Hand your portfolio to the person next to you in the lab. If they cannot tell what you did on the Tuesday, the record has failed, however clear it is to you, and it will not be clear to you either, in October, when you need it for the replication.

The second criterion is the interesting one#

Every protocol has a blind spot, and week 2 was about choosing which one you could live with. A portfolio where all four protocols claim to see everything is a portfolio of four protocols nobody has examined. So say what each one misses, as concretely as you can: the nights it could not cover, the difference too small for it to register, the thing it records only when you remember to. You are marked up for finding a real limitation, not marked down for having one.

What is not being marked#

Whether any of the four produced a result. Two of these can be complete failures of measurement and the portfolio can still score full marks, provided you can say why they failed and what the failure rules out.