Fourth year

Welcome to the Fourth Year in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Hope you all had a successful Industrial Placement. This noticeboard contains relevant information for your needs throughout the year. We hope you will have an enjoyable time and all the very best!

We now run a Twitter feed for the 4th year - follow us: @DoCFourthYear

Overview

• The fourth year provides students with less required courses and more selective courses. Students may study up to two optional courses (one for JMC) offered by other departments in the Engineering Faculty (at the appropriate level), the Imperial College Business School or Imperial Horizons. You can take any of the Business School courses available on this list and for Imperial Horizons from this list (except any 'Level 1' courses, such as Japanese Level 1) - to register for these courses, please follow the instructions on those pages carefully.
  
• An element of the assessment of the Industrial Placement is the final presentation, which takes place in Week 1 of the Autumn Term of the new Academic Year. For the current academic year, the presentations will take place on 7th/8th (week 1) October 2021.
• All students (Computing and JMC) are expected to work on and complete their Individual Project.
• The minimum required to pass the final year and graduate with third class honours is 40% overall for the year, with 40% for the individual project, whatever the marks in previous years.
• From 2020-2021 the Industrial Placement becomes pass/fail.
  
• There is NO pass degree grade with the MEng, so failing on either of these counts causes a fail of the year. There are no September examinations in the final year.
• For more details on specific elements of the fourth year, as well as relevant contacts, please refer to the links on the right.
• All teaching will be mixed-mode in 2021-2022. Please watch out for communication from the lecturers about what the plans for their courses are since some teaching/labs/Q & A will happen on campus while others will be remote.

Exams in DoC

• Final exams for courses taken during a Term would take place in week 11 of that Term.
• Week 10 of both the Autum and Summer Terms are set aside as a designated 'revision' week.
• Courses that clash in the timetable will have an exam clash so you cannot take courses that have a timetable clash. This only applies to DoC courses.

Coursework Weighting

• Each fourth-year course has a coursework weighting of 20% with an exam contributing 80%, with the exception of:
  • Advanced Computer Graphics (70001),  Software Reliability (70024), Robot Learning and Control (70067), and Mathematics for Machine Learning (70015) - have a coursework weighting of 30% and an exam contributing 70%,
  • Deep Learning (70010) and Reinforcement Learning (70028) - have a coursework weighting of 50% and an exam contributing 50%,
  • Software Engineering for Industry (70025) - evaluated through multiple courseworks through the term, and
  • Communicating Computer Science in Schools (60003) - evaluated through a combination of a oral presentation, written report, host teacher's comments, teaching material and review of the teaching journal (or logbook).

Individual Projects

• Individual project proposals are put up on the Project Portal early in October and are allocated towards end October.
• Students are expected to list three projects as their choices - one first choice, one second choice and one third choice. Failure to do so will jeopardise your chances of getting your projects in the first round. Students who put up their own projects don't need to list all the three choices.
• If you choose three projects that are very popular, it's likely that you may not get any during the initial allocation phase and will be asked to make another set of choices.
• The Interim Report is due in the middle of January and it's your responsibility to ensure you meet with your second marker to review your project. Failure to do so will count against the 'Project Management' aspect of your Individual Project.
• Individual Project presentations are held during the last week of the summer term, so please ensure that you stay till the end of the term.

Good (tried and tested) ways of surviving the fourth year are:

• Submit all the coursework on time.
• Submit the Industrial Placement Executive summary and slides on time.
• Work hard on your Individual Project - it is very important (counts for a good portion of your final year mark), and you must score more than 40% to pass.
• Check the Web, Twitter feed and your email regularly - this is our only way to reach you with important news.

Wishing you all the very best for the year ahead :-).