Final Presentations

CS-340: Software Engineering

Spring 2023

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In lieux of a final exam, there will be group presentations during the final exam period. The purpose of these presentations are for students to explore a topic covered in—or related to—class and share their findings with peers.

Requirements

In groups of three (3),* present on material related to Software Engineering. The presentation must:

  • Last 10 minutes with an additional 5 minutes for student questions
  • Be on a topic approved by the instructor
  • Conform to an outline generated by ChatGPT (details below)
  • Be accompanied by a slide presentation
  • Include speaking from all group members
  • Provide references to sources used when researching material

*There will be one group of two (2).

Selecting Topics

Topics for this final presentation are fairly open-ended, but must be approved by the instructor. As you think about the focus of your group's presentation, you might consider the following ideas:

  • Look through the list of topics in the syllabus. If there was a topic you wish we devoted more time to, this would be a good candidate topic.
  • We had several case studies at the beginning and end of the semester, but we did not have enough time to study all of them. These could be good topics as well.
  • There are a number of optional readings (often academic papers). Summarizing one such paper could be a reasonable topic.
  • Topics of discussion by our industry guests could also make for a starting point for a presentation topic.

Creating an Outline with ChatGPT

Use of large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) can run afoul of academic honesty policies, especially when it is used to generate the entirety of an assignment. However, there are good and compliant uses of these tools. (Compliance will vary from class to class.) To give you practice with ChatGPT and to encourage good habits, you will use it in this presentation to create the outline for your talk.

First, create an account with ChatGPT by going here. You will then be brought to a page where you can type in a conversation prompt. You will want to give it some parameters for the talk (e.g., audience, topic, duration, etc.) and ask it to generate an outline. You can experiment a bit with this step to get a high-quality outline generated.

You should NOT ask ChatGPT to provide any actual material, text, or information beyond the organization of the presentation. Especially when it comes to citations, the current version of ChatGPT will generate fake references. Therefore, you do not want to trust the system to do this.

Once you have generated an outline, save a copy of your interactions to submit for this assignment. You will then need to return to your traditional skillset of research to prepare the content for your presentation. You will receive part of your score based on how well you adhere to this ChatGPT-generated outline.

What to Submit for Final Presentations

You must submit the following files to Gradescope:

  • Your ChatGPT-generated outline and associated conversation
  • A PDF of your slides
  • references.txt: your file of citations
  • You can submit these by dragging the files into the submission window on the Gradescope interface.

Grading Rubric

Presentation Grading (out of 15 points):

  • 5 points: conformance to ChatGPT outline
  • 10 points: Oral Presentation
    • 4 points: Communication
    • 2 points: Preparation
    • 2 points: Understanding
    • 2 points: Content
  • -all points — submission does not provide a references or works cited section.