In computer science graduate-level courses at Berkeley, it is typical to have final projects instead of final exams. There are two ways in which these projects are disseminated among the students:

  • Class Presentations. These are when students prepare a five to ten minute talk to the class, using slides and other demos to state the project’s main accomplishments. Due to explosions in class enrollment (see my class reviews here for examples), time limits are strictly enforced, so presentations must be precisely timed and polished.

  • Poster Sessions. These are when students bring a poster describing their work. Usually, students create posters by stuffing lots of images and text in a power point slide (or other software). Then they print using their lab’s poster printer.

I’ve experienced both scenarios at Berkeley, and based on those I would strongly state the following to instructors: class presentations are better than poster sessions, and should be the method of choice for dissemination of final projects.

First, a class presentation means students practice a useful skill, one that they will likely need for their future careers. This is especially true for academic careers, and students taking graduate-level courses are far more likely to want academic careers than the average undergrad. For me, presentations are also a way that I can channel my humor, which isn’t immediately apparent to other students. A second, less important reason, is that in an age of exploding enrollment in graduate courses, it’s nice to be able to finally learn people’s names when they give class presentations.

One can, of course, learn names and project accomplishments in poster sessions, but this requires more effort and is challenging for people like me. I have lots of difficulty navigating my way through loud, noisy poster sessions filled with accents. I either resort to reading people’s posters (and not understanding much of it anyway due to time constraints) or going through the awkwardness of having a sign language interpreter with me (and having that interpreter struggling through accents and technical terms).

Poster sessions have other downsides that apply broadly, and not just to deaf students. For instance, poster sessions allow students to hide. What happens if students don’t manage to do much for their final projects? As I’ve seen happen in my classes, these students go to the corner of the room to avoid the spotlight. Presentations avoid this issue, unless students are willing to go as far as to even skip their presentation time. Some students who are nervous about public speaking might also want to hide. To most of them, I would respond: good luck convincing your future bosses to have you not do any presenting.

If class presentations force students to produce something that is worth presenting and force them to encounter their fears, then that’s probably sufficient reason alone to use them!

There are other downsides to having poster sessions. They cost more, creating a chasm between students who have access to fancy poster printers and those who don’t; the latter may have to resort to printing out ten pages of work and pasting them together in a poster. Furthermore, the posters that get printed are unlike to be used again, in the exact form. True, many conferences have poster sessions due to scalability issues, but class projects are not generally up to par with research projects, so students would have to re-print posters anyway. And that’s assuming that students are using class projects as the basis for future research, which isn’t always the case.

Class presentations are also superior to poster sessions in that they require less physical room. The presentations can be delivered in the same lecture room, while poster sessions force the course staff to go through the trouble of finding and reserving a large room (or hallway, as is the case for Berkeley).

Furthermore, the one “benefit” of poster sessions, scalability, does not stand up to a rigorous analysis. (If there are other benefits, please let me know because I can’t think of any.)

First, if the class size is so large that it approaches the enrollment of a popular academic conference, then would the course staff really have time to read the final reports? Remember, neither presentations nor poster sessions enable people to fully understand a project; for this, one has to read papers.

Second, with five minutes per presentation, the process goes by quickly, and it is also easier for the course staff to track progress. Also, with a large class, it is likely that students would be encouraged to form groups, drastically reducing the quantity of presentations. If there’s too many presentations for one class, the course staff should divide the class into groups.

Finally, scheduling presentations is not generally a problem even with many groups. Here’s a simple procedure: have a random draw to see who goes next. If the class requires a fixed schedule, then busy instructors should have their TAs form the order of presentations.

Unfortunately, the classes I’m taking next semester have historically used poster sessions rather than verbal presentations, but perhaps I could convince them to change their minds?