Essay 1

Essay 1 - Identifying Professional Considerations

Summary

• 1000 word piece of writing. Strict limit, not including bibliography.
• Draft submission by midday Friday 18th October 
• Peer review through TurnItIn by midday Friday 25th October
• Final submission by midday Friday 1st November 
• 40% of your mark for this course

PDF version attached, but this page is the final authority.

Introduction 

You might have noticed that the learning outcomes for this course are generally of the form “identify X and suggest ways to make improvements”. This first task is focused on the identification part. I am looking for you to reflect on your position in a (semi)real situation and anticipate some potential societal consequences. 

Part 1: The Project 

First choose a piece of technical work you are doing, or have previously done, such as a coursework or internship. We’ll refer to this as your project. The default here for most of you is likely to be the task for the Informatics Large Practical, or Introductory Applied Machine Learning. SEPP’s coursework is explicitly off limits, as you’ve already answered some relevant questions on that. 

For the purposes of this task, you should imagine that you are actually undertaking your project in a real world (i.e. not coursework) setting. This may be as part of a research project, development of a new system at an existing company, or as part of a small team at a start-up. The important parts are that it fits into a full system with defined purpose and that the intention is to deploy this system into the world. 

Part 2: The Essay 

Write an essay that answers the following question: 

“How might your work on this project contribute to unintentional harm?” 

The three main parts of this task are (in probable order of difficulty): 

• Describing the important details of the project concisely for a non-technical reader. 
• Anticipating potential harms or other negative influences of this system and making an argument for how important it is to attend to them. 
• Self-reflection on your own role and responsibility within this scenario and how it fits into a wider context of other actors/stakeholders. 

You can explicitly make these separate subsections if you like, but the whole essay should still flow together as a coherent piece. If you do this, I would strongly recommend keeping the project description as concise as possible. 

Peer Review and Deadline

Drafts should be submitted using the Essay 1 Draft link on Learn. This link is also where you should go to receive a peer's draft to review.

You will have a week to review this other essay and provide feedback (filling out the questions provided), then another week to finish your essay using that feedback before you finally submit it on Learn to be marked.

Advice

Good essays will:  

• Clearly choose a main position  
• Clarify important details with reference to other sources 
• Consider the terms used and define them where necessary  
• Justify arguments with reference to course topics
• Anticipate and address counterarguments  

How well you do these things will be the core criteria for marking your essays. 

Common mistakes:

• Focusing on technical problems (or "bad engineering" like bugs) over wider social ones.
• Trying to provide solutions. Referencing potential mitigations can be helpful for making another point, but beyond that they are not a part of the task here.

Marking 

Here are some of the main things markers will be looking for: 

• Answers the question  
• Clarity  
• Appropriate structure  
• Supported by other sources 
• Quality of argument 
• Recognition of counterarguments / alternate views 
• Knowledge and understanding 
• Style and presentation  

You will receive a mark according to the following scale (in line with the University’s Extended Common Marking Scheme): 

• Pass (40+): Essay attempts to address the provided question but is hard to understand and/or makes few clear points.   
• Good (50+): Essay is understandable, clarifies key terms, and comes to one or more obvious conclusions. Some course materials and external sources are referenced.  
• Very good (60+): Essay has a good structure, flowing between and building upon subsequent points. It identifies possible counter arguments or alternative views and integrates a variety of external sources.
• Excellent (70+): Essay reads well and contains well-made arguments which pull together a variety of views and sources.
• Excellent (80+): Marks in this range are uncommon. This essay draws the reader in and makes points beyond what would be expected of undergraduate students in Informatics.

Examples

Some examples of previous essays which did well are attached.