⭐ Second Summative Essay (worth 60%)

Author

Dr. Jon Cardoso-Silva

Published

05 May 2023

🎯 OBJECTIVE: Write a 2,000-word essay using Quarto Markdown and Zotero 1

⌛ DUE DATE: 25 May 2023 (20 days from the release of this page)

🗺️ Context

Throughout this course, you were exposed to several of the data pre-processing techniques, machine learning tools and algorithms, and data visualisation methods that are used in the field of data science. You also heard from us about the ethical and legal issues that arise when working with data. In this essay, you will be asked to reflect on all you have learned and to apply your knowledge to something closer to your academic interests.

📝 Instructions

We want you to write a piece of writing that addresses the following questions:

What are the ways that data science and AI tools are being used or could be used in your field of study? And how do you think these uses will affect the field, in a good way or a bad way?

We then expect you to draw on everything you have learned in this course to answer these questions.

Requirements

  • You are free to choose the style of the piece you want to write (e.g., systematic review or newspaper article or blog piece) but you need to state what type of piece you are writing at the top of your essay (it won’t be part of the word count). We will be evaluating how well you adhere to the style of the type of piece you say you are writing.

  • If you choose to write a literature review or systematic review, we don’t expect an exhaustive list of references but we expect to see references inclusion/exclusion criteria.

  • If you choose to write a blog piece, we expect to see a less rigid structure and more of a narrative style.

  • We expect an engaging and clear style of writing regardless of the type of piece you choose to write.

  • Always keep in mind that you are writing for an audience of reasonably educated individuals (e.g., fellow LSE students) but who might be clueless as to the subtleties of your field and its jargon as well as abbreviations in particular. So, don’t take things for granted.

  • Your essay needs to contain at least ten references. The references must come at the end of the document but feel free to use any citation format you prefer (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). Consider varying the style of citation depending on the type of essay you’re writing (what would be suitable for a literature review might not be in a newspaper context!). Check Quarto’s documentation if you want to modify the citation style.

👉 Avoid making explicit references to the course (e.g., writing things like “As we saw in Week 05…”), as this would go against the spirit of the exercise, which is to write to a general audience. Instead, refer to the bibliography we have provided and try to make connections between the ideas we have discussed and the case study. The same goes for AI-generated text.

🤖 Using AI help?

You are allowed to use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to help you write your essay. If you do use it, however minimal use you made, you are asked to report the AI tool you used and add an extra section to your essay to explain the extent to which you used it (this won’t count towards the word limit).

Note that, while these tools can be helpful, they tend to generate responses that sound convincing but are not necessarily correct. Another problem is that they tend to generate responses that are formulaic and repetitive; thus, limiting your chances of getting a high mark.

In effect, you are asked to explain the following:

  • What AI tool did you use?
  • How did you use it? For example, did you use it to generate ideas, write a draft, proofread your essay, etc.?
  • How much of your essay was written by the AI tool? For example, did you feed it the entire prompt and it wrote the entire essay? Or did you feed it guided questions?
  • If you didn’t edit the AI tool’s output, what was the output like? For example, did it produce a coherent essay?
  • What did you do to make sure that the AI tool did not produce gibberish? and that the essay was not formulaic.
  • Importantly, how did you ensure that the essay did not contain any plagiarism?

✅ Submission

  • Render your Quarto Markdown file to HTML
  • ⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️: Rename your HTML to DS101L-2023-final-essay-<CANDIDATE_NUMBER>.html, replacing <CANDIDATE_NUMBER> with your candidate number.
    • For example: DS101L-2023-final-essay1-123456.html.
    • You might be deducted marks if you don’t follow this naming convention.
  • Upload this file to Moodle under the appropriate assignment.

✋ Getting Help

  • If you have any questions about the assignment, please post them on #assignments channel on Slack.
  • Book office hours.
  • 🏅 Organise a study group with your classmates.
Tip

Tip: if you want to search for relevant academic articles, try adding specific ML keywords while searching on specialised websites.

Example: “conflict prediction” + “supervised learning” on Google Scholar, app.dimensions.ai, scopus.com or LSE Library Search.

📑 Marking Scheme

The following is the marking scheme we will use to mark your essay. Note that full marks mean that you have met a particular criterion to an extremely high standard, beyond our expectations. If you did “everything right”, you should expect about 70% of the marks on each criterion.

Detailed Marking Criteria Marks
1. The essay contains an introduction to the topic and it’s succinct and concise. 5
2. The essay mentions specific data science/AI tools used in your field or ones that have the potential of being used (without falling into excess or being a laundry list of tools)
Your examples should be carefully chosen and while we expect you to list a couple of examples, you should not give in to the temptation to list too many examples either as your essay analysis would be run the risk of being superficial and shallow.		 10
3. Your writing style conforms to the type of piece you stated you were writing above the title of your essay.
If you state you’re writing a newspaper or a blog piece, your tone and writing style needs to be relatively informal without being clickbait-y (you can look at BBC, Guardian or LSE Blogs pieces for inspiration) and you need to have a reference style to match while a literature review article would need to have a more formal tone.		 5
4. Your Quarto Markdown formatting is again appropriate for the type you are submitting, e.g., style of headers, the inclusion of images, themes, etc. 5
5. Your writing style is clear and free of excessive jargon and abbreviations. 5
6. The essay presents data sources and data preprocessing (as they apply to the impact examples you have selected)
For the examples you’ve selected, where might you find relevant data? How is that data processed in the application you’ve envisaged? What are the consequences of that? 		15
7. You have selected relevant examples within your field and the discussion is within topic 10
8. You have produced a well-argued analysis of the current or potential impact of data science/AI tools in a well-defined area of your field 25
9. You have produced a well-argued analysis of the ethical implications of the use of data science/AI tools in a well-defined area of your field 15
10. The essay concludes with lessons learned 5

Footnotes

  1. Revisit what you learned about Quarto markdown and Zotero from 💻 Week 08 lab. Try using a custom theme to make your essay look more professional.↩︎