Paper Review Guide
Why write a review?
Reading and evaluating research papers is an important skill that improves with practice. Paper reviews give you practice identifying a paper’s research problem, understanding its technical contribution, evaluating its evidence and limitations, and communicating your assessment clearly and concisely. These skills will also help you assess related work and develop ideas for your course project.
You may meet in small groups to discuss the papers, but every student must read the chosen paper and submit an individual review.
William Griswold’s How to Read an Engineering Research Paper offers useful advice for reading actively. Keep its questions in mind as you read. If you cannot explain the research question, proposed solution, validation, contributions, and new ideas after finishing the paper, revisit the difficult parts before writing your review.
Review contents
Write exactly four short paragraphs, in the following order:
- Stated goals and solution. Explain the problem, its scope, the proposed solution, and how the authors determine whether the solution works. Assess whether it meets the stated goals. Use your own words rather than repeating the abstract.
- Cool or significant ideas. Identify what is new, important, or most interesting. Consider whether the contribution is a one-off technique or an idea that could be reused elsewhere.
- Fallacies and blind spots. Identify important assumptions, limitations, theoretical concerns, or practical difficulties. Focus on the research rather than minor presentation issues such as notation or typographical errors.
- New ideas and connections. Suggest an extension or improvement, or connect the paper to other research or course ideas. Explain what the connection reveals about the paper.
Editing and format
The review is limited to 700 words. Anything after word 700 will not be graded. Brevity, clarity, and careful proofreading matter; you do not need to use all 700 words.
The review PDF must contain only the four paragraphs. Do not add a title, salutation, introduction, paragraph numbers or headings, closing, or signature. If you draw on another source, identify it within the relevant paragraph.
Grading
Reviews are graded holistically on a four-point scale:
| Grade | Standard |
|---|---|
| 3 — Exceeds expectations | Demonstrates exceptional insight about the paper or related work and noteworthy effort beyond simply reading the assigned paper. Few, if any, reviews will receive 3 points. |
| 2 — Meets expectations | Clear and concise; demonstrates understanding of the paper’s key concepts in the student’s own words and considers the paper in the larger context of the course |
| 1 — Does not meet expectations | Shallow, minimally sufficient, or needlessly wordy; misunderstands or omits key concepts, or mostly echoes the authors’ words |
| 0 — Unacceptable | Late, incomplete, or not submitted |
Submission and course policies
Submit each four-paragraph review as
submission.pdf in your Classroom50
assignment repository. You may add any other documents to the
repository, including notes, drafts, and source files, as long as the
instructor can easily find your final submission.pdf.
Placing it in the repository root is recommended. Only the review PDF is
graded.
Commit and push your PDF before the deadline, then check on GitHub that it is present and opens correctly. Your review must reflect your own reading and analysis, even if you use tools permitted by the course policy.
The five shared late days apply only to programming labs and cannot be used for paper reviews. Contact the instructor before the deadline if an approved accommodation or exceptional circumstance affects your submission.