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THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Department of Civil Engineering

GUIDELINES FOR LEVEL III PROJECT REPORT

1. INTRODUCTION

The primary aim of the project is to give you an opportunity to handle a practical
engineering problem and to present your findings in a precise and concise report. An
important part of the project lies in the way in which you plan and carry out the task, and
apply your engineering knowledge sensibly and diligently to solve the problem. The way
in which you present your findings is equally important.

2. FORMAT OF THE REPORT

Very often, the quality of your work involved in a project is judged more on the basis of
what is presented rather than on what has actually been carried out. The objective should
be to produce a report that is precise and concise. A longer report is not necessarily a better
one.

The report should be written in good English and not more than 50 pages in length,
(excluding any essential Appendices). It should be prepared using a suitable word
processing package (e.g. Microsoft Word) and printed on both sides of A4 size sheets with
size 12 “Times New Roman” fonts. In general, SI units should be used. A left hand margin
of 25 mm should be provided. Standard single-line spacing should be adopted.
(Remember, one page saved by one student adds up to a saving of 200 pages in a class of
100 students that would be a valuable contribution towards environmental conservation!)

The report should include the following:

Page
(1) Title of the report, author's name and date of 1
submission
(2) Abstract (not exceeding one page) 2
(3) Acknowledgements 3
(3) Table of contents 4
(4) List of figures subsequent
(5) List of tables pages
(6) Main body of the report that may include some or
all of the following :
- Introduction
- Literature review and/or theory
- Work done
- Problems encountered
- Summary of results
- Discussion of results
- Conclusions
- Recommendations
(7) Others
- Calculation sheets
- Drawings
- Figures
- Plates
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- Bibliography
- Appendices
(Computer program listings, detailed results, etc.)

Soft copy of the project report should be submitted to the ‘Turnitin Assignment’ on Moodle.
Before submission of your project report, you will be asked to give a 30-minute oral
presentation (20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion). This will usually
be held during the reading week of the second semester. You are also required to submit
an interim report by the last day of the last teaching week of the first semester. The interim
report (maximum 25 pages long with single line spacing) may include a literature review,
preliminary findings and future plans for completing their project. The exact deadlines for
the submission of the project report and the interim report will be announced in due course.
Late submission will be penalised as follows:

Percentage of total marks to be

Time overdue deducted from overdue reports/assignments

 1 day 10%
 2 days 20%
 3 days 30%
 4 days 40%
 5 days 50%
> 5 days 100%

3. SOME NOTES ON QUOTATIONS AND REFERENCES

3.1 Quotations

The correct use of references and quotations is essential to the completion of a well-written
project report. A clear distinction must be made between your own words and those of the
authors of books and articles that you have read. You may quote as much material as you
wish provided that you clearly indicate the quoted material by use of quotation marks
(inverted commas).

Quotations of only a few words or a phrase should be indicated as shown below:

In research aimed at investigating construction firms' marketing methods Baker and

Orsaah (1985) investigated "how customers choose their contractor" and found that
low price, company financial standing and company reputation were the major factors.
Quotations of more than one sentence should be indented, single-spaced and written in
italics as shown below:

Bromilow (1974) succinctly states that in his opinion:

"the most significant overall objectives in building operations are to define the design
and specifications, price and timing of the proposed building, and, once they have been
agreed by the client, to meet them."
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3.2 References

Full details of all published and unpublished books, articles, reports and journal papers used
or referred to in your project should be included in the bibliography at the end of the main
body of your report and should be arranged alphabetically by author and then by date of
publication (if the author has more than one publication). When referring to publications
in the text of your report you may cite the author's name and date of publication (as above)
or, if the references are numbered sequentially, you may cite just the reference number,
shown in brackets, e.g. (1).

The following examples of how to present your bibliographic references are based on
BS1629:1950:

1 Books

Author's name & initials, Title of Book, name of publishers: place published, date
published. For example:

Fellows, R., Langford, D., Newcombe, R. & Urry, S., Construction Management in
Practice, Longman: Singapore, 1983.

The title may be underlined rather than written in italics if preferred. If the author has
two or more works published in the same year these may be distinguished by (a), (b),
(c), etc. For example:

Leung, A.Y.T., (d), ..........

2 Articles

Author's name and initials, "Title of Article", Name of Journal (or conference and
location), Volume Number, issue date and/or number, year, page numbers. For
example:

Rowlinson, S. & Cheung, T.M., "Leadership style in construction managers in Hong

Kong", Proc of CIB W55-W65 Joint Symposia, Sydney, March 14-21, 1990, pp 388-
399.

Leung, A.Y.T., "A simple method for exponentially modulated random excitation",
Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol. 112, No. 2, 1987, pp 273-282.

3 Theses

Author's name and initials, Title of thesis, Degree awarded, University, Date of
acceptance. For example:

Stocks, R.K., The building team: an organisation of organisations, [Link]. Thesis,

Heriot-Watt University, 1984.
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4. PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the act of taking and using another person's writings, designs or inventions as
your own work without proper acknowledgement.

If your project report contains part of another person's book, journal paper, article or even
another student's project report or thesis, including data, graph or computer program,
WITHOUT quoting the source, then you have committed PLAGIARISM.

Plagiarism is the worst of intellectual dishonesty. If you are suspected of committing

plagiarism, you may be required to attend an oral examination. If you are found to be guilty
of plagiarism, you will have to undertake a new project in the summer or repeat the year,
depending upon your performance in other courses.

Revised: May 2012

Updated: June 2023
Updated: July 2025