⭐ Second Summative Essay (worth 60%)

2022/23 Autumn Term

Author

Dr. Ghita Berrada

Published

20 December 2023

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

⌛ DUE DATE: 08 22 February 2024 (64 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:

How do you see AI and data science impacting and shaping your field of study? What do you think about this evolution? Discuss.

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?

For additional details on what you can and cannot do with Generative AI, please refer to the Generative AI Policy.

✅ Submission

  • Render your Quarto Markdown file to HTML
  • ⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️: Rename your HTML to DS101A-2023-final-essay-<CANDIDATE_NUMBER>.html, replacing <CANDIDATE_NUMBER> with your candidate number.
    • For example: DS101A-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 #help-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. 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
3. 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
4. Your writing style is clear and free of excessive jargon and abbreviations. 5
5. The essay mentions specific and relevant examples of how data science/AI is already shaping/impacting your field or might do so in future (without falling into excess or being a laundry list of examples)
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
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/impact example you’ve envisaged? What are the consequences of that? 		10
7. The structure of your essay is logical and flows well 5
8. You have produced a well-argued, in-depth and coherent analysis of the ways AI/data science is shaping/impacting or has the potential to shape/impact a well-defined area of your field 25
9. You have produced a well-argued, in-depth and coherent analysis of the consequences of data science/AI already or potentially shaping/impacting a well-defined area of your field (i.e ethical implications, risks, opportunities, solutions if any) 15
10. Your analysis shows some originality and creativity 5
11. You have used varied and judicious references in your essay
You need at least 10 references in your essay. And while it’s fine to use the reading list, it would be good to have references of your own (especially ones relating to your own field of study!). Also pay attention to the placement of your references and their formatting.		 5
12. The essay concludes with lessons learned 5

Footnotes

  1. Revisit what you learned about Quarto markdown and Zotero from 💻 Week 04 lab. Try using a custom theme to make your essay look more professional (you can look at this page for help).↩︎