Marks are allocated for the presentation by the student of a preliminary analysis of the data (calibration, spectra and initial identification of features) within the specified time.
Read the comments in the report(s) of your partner(s), as well as your own. Often I do not repeat comments that are common to both (or all) reports.
PHY300W is a major course, so a high level is expected of the report, in terms of accurate presentation and critical analysis of the data.
Use a decent word processor. Pay attention to proper notation, eg. subscripting etc. Instead of cobalt-60 use the proper superscripted form, etc.
Use accepted scientific style. Check whether it should be X-ray or x-ray.
Always use a spell checker. The real world expects UCT graduates to produce written work of high quality.
Provide a scale diagram of apparatus, showing source detector distances, presence or absence of lead shield, etc.
Provide a block diagram of the electronics used
All figures should be captioned.
Proper scales must be chosen for graphs, and all axes properly labelled, and units shown.
There must be a check for gain drifts (run a short calibration file befoe and after the long runs)
Check for systemmatic errors in fitting the peak (due to the inadequacy of modelling the background by only a linear term) by varying the x-range over which the fit is carried out.