During each lab session throughout the course, your demonstrator will be watching you and making notes on how you perform in the lab on an ongoing basis. Once, halfway through the course, and again at the end of the course, your demonstrator will base a mark on this ongoing observation; the In-Lab Mark will be the average of these two.

Criteria for In-Lab Mark. While the criteria for arriving at the In-Lab Mark will overlap to a great extent with those for the Experiment Mark, the In-Lab Mark is meant to provide a more general overview of your work, with particular focus on your experimental ability. It will allow your demonstrator to reward those students whose notebook skills may be poorer than their experimental ability and creativity. In arriving at this mark, your demonstrator will take into account: the way you approach and organise your experimentation, your efficiency in planning and setting up the experiment, your ease of learning to use the equipment, evidence of graceful handling of instruments and equipment, and your care in taking data. Also considered will be: your ability to estimate errors (rather than calculating each one exactly), your ability to distinguish the essential from the inessential, the way you work with your partner (if you have one!), your willingness to try something, to make a mistake, and to learn from it, how often you seek advice and ask questions (a student who never asks questions of a demonstrator may leave the impression of being disinterested). Vital in good experimenters is the ability to squeeze the maximum information from their data, the curiosity to ask the difficult questions and to follow and try to explain unexpected results; your demonstrator will be on the lookout for such qualities in his or her determination of the In-Lab mark.