Some basic rules and thoughts about
preparing and delivering
your final exam presentation

1.  The talk

In your talk, you need to address two issues:

• Convey to the audience the following:
  
• What are you going to present?
  
• Why is this important or Where does this problem arise?
  
• What will the end result (or bottom line) of your talk be?
• These three points need to be stated at the beginning of your talk. The most important steps or conclusions will also need to be reiterated through the presentation and at its closing.
• Explain the main idea and/or algorithm of "your" topic, then state a particular problem that you handled with "your" method, and finally present results.
  

As you read to understand the material, jot down all your comments and questions. Try to answer them as you read the material again (and again, and again,...). Ask me if you still don't know the answer after having read the part that causes diffculty, three times.

Go to the link "Presentation-related materials", which I prepared for another course, and read suggestions about giving talks that I collected there. (Of course, you are welcome to use other information sources as well.) Remember: The clarity of your talk is at least as important as its content. Without your enforcing the former, nobody in the audience will understand the latter.

I will also be very particular about you being able to give your presentation in the allocated time (~20 minutes, but it varies from year to year; so ask me what this magical number X is for this year). I will take 5% of the grade off for the first 3 minutes of overtime. After that, the penalty will be 2% of the grade per each minute. So, when you practice, plan for being able to finish in X-3 minutes or less. The reason is that no matter how well you prepare, there will be unforeseen circumstances that will make your actual talk longer than you planned. Please, take my word for it rather than trying to verify this statement experimentally! I will be sad to subtract points from your grade, but I will do it if you run out of time.

Even though I have just emphasized the importance of staying within time limits, do not overdo it! That is, spend a good deal of time at the beginning on the introduction, explaining the motivation for your project, what one expects of the solution, and also going in detail over some of your important notations and their meaning. Remember: You may rush a little bit at the end, e.g., by stating just the problem and the result you obtained, without going into the details of solution. This may not be the best way, but it is acceptable. What is completely inacceptable is to rush over the introduction! If you do so, you lose your audience right there, and the remainder of your talk will fall on deaf ears.


2.  The report and codes

Along with your presentation, you must submit a hard copy of a report on it (and a soft copy if you have it). The report must contain, in addition to your slides, all derivation and details that were essential to your talk but which you could not present due to time limitations. The reprt can be hand-written. However, it must be neatly organized and be readable. As far as its structure, it should be a coherent story. If your presentation used computer codes, they must be included in the report. The soft copies of the codes must also be emailed to me. Any deviations from these rules will result in a reduction of your grade, even if your presentation is flawless.

Please note:  Last-minute emergencies have been known to often occur with those reports. I will not be sympathetic to them, whether it is your printer running out of ink, your roommate frying your hard drive, your car breaking down when you were on your way to deliver the report to me (all these are real stories), etc. Any of those can be avoided (or at least I can be given a proper notice) should you have planned on having your report done in advance. Therefore, I will reduce your score by an amount left to my sole discretion in the case of a delay occurring due to a last-minute emergency.