Work Reports

Non-confidential work reports must be submitted to the Learn dropbox prior to 11:59 pm on the 3^rd Monday of the term. (for example, if the first day of classes is on Jan 9th the report will be due Jan 23). WKRPT100 cannot be considered confidential.

Any report that is submitted after the deadline will be treated as a fail, and receive a mark of 38%. This grade will not be included in your term average but will be in your fail count until it is cleared in a future term.

Work Reports should not be classified as confidential unless absolutely necessary.

If your employer feels that your report contains confidential/proprietary information, you have the option of handing in a Confidential Report, marked by the department delegate.

To submit your report, you will hand in a hard-copy along with a completed Form 1 - WORK REPORT CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT to the physical hand-in box located around the corner from E7-3322 (by NE staircase). You will also need to upload Form 1, which will be signed to the appropriate Dropbox in LEARN. These reports will follow the normal report submission deadline, 3^rd Monday of the term.

For those students submitting confidential marked by employer report, please connect with your academic advisor; mechadvisor@uwaterloo.ca (Mechanical) or mme-tron-advisor@uwaterloo.ca (Mechatronics).  If your marker does not have PEng, they will need to be approved to mark. Please send their credentials (i.e. copy of their degree or LinkedIn profile) and their contact information to your advisor. 

Your marker will need to complete Form 2 - The Employer Evaluation Request. Once complete, it is the student's responsibility to hand this into the Confidential dropbox in Learn by the end of the first month of the term.

Only one of your required work term reports may be 'Confidential, Marked by Employer'. If your current employer is not willing to allow a department delegate to mark the report, then you must write a "Self-Study" work report on the topic totally unrelated to your place of employment.

Selecting a Suitable Topic:Ideally, your report will describe a technical task or project that you completed during your work term. The report, however, can also be based on a prior work placement, work completed for a student team, or on a technical topic of interest (called a self-study report). The important point is that the report must meet two acceptable standards:

• With the exception of WKRPT100, the report must have analytic content. It must describe a challenge or problem (this is the purpose of the report), what methods were considered to meet the challenge, which one was selected, and how it was implemented it (this is the analysis), what the results were, and the main conclusions and recommendations.
• Generally, reports without a critical engineering analysis, such as descriptions of processes, systems, equipment or mathematical models or a literature or web page review;are unacceptable work report topics.

Note: Many students have the misconception that a decision matrix is a required part of a work report. This is not the case. While a decision matrix can be a useful tool during the design process, it is usually not required.

The focus of the marking process changes with each report:

WKRPT100 will focus mainly on formatting and technical writing to communicate information. The marking will be done with the intent of providing feedback to students and requiring them to fix and resubmit the report before the end of the term.

WKRPT200 will focus mainly on technical writing. The marking will be done with the intent of providing feedback to students and requiring them to fix and resubmit the report before the end of the term.

WKRPT300 will focus on analytical content and technical writing. In an acceptable report, students will need to demonstrate an acceptable level of proficiency in both areas.

WKRPT400 will focus on analytical content and technical writing. In an acceptable report, students will need to demonstrate a good level of proficiency in both areas.

Common Work Report Error Checklist

Work Report Marking Sheet

Note on Plagiarism: Plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and, not crediting the work of others is an academic offense that can result in severe penalties. For more information, review the academic integrity tutorial from the library, and Integrity for Students from the Provost's Office.

The UG office will not approve or disapprove of a work report topic, because the report marking is NOT based on the quality of the topic selected. Marking is based on the technical content (application of engineering principles), and on a demonstrated proficiency in technical writing. More information about topic selection can be found in the ‘Content and Formatting Guidelines’ section.

No, you are only allowed one marked by employer report. But there is no limit on the number of confidential - marked by a department delegate you can submit.

We do not provide sample reports to students. Guidelines for report preparation are provided in the ‘Work Report Content and Formatting Guidelines’ section. Further, WKRPT200 submissions are considered to be a formative assessment, and the marking is done with the intent of providing feedback on how to correctly report writing, style, formatting, and structure. Having completed WKRPT200, it is assumed that students now have a model on which to base their 2nd and 3rd work reports.

Yes. An acceptable work report would be any one of a number of types of technical document (i.e. research paper, case study, etc). As long as the submission meets guidelines for technical writing and analytical content, it will be accepted for marking.

Ideally, feedback will be provided before the 40th day of lectures or about 10 weeks after the start of the term. Those with online submissions will receive their feedback online. Those with confidential submissions will be contacted by the Academic Advisor when feedback has been returned.