The presentation should not last longer than 10 minutes. You start by presenting the background to your work, the problem you dealt with in the paper, the most important results and at last a summary of your own personal conclusions. Remember that most students in the class are not familiar with your topic so you need to adjust your presentation so that everyone can understand it. Try to think about what you knew about the area when you started to study it to get a feeling for the knowledge of the other students in the class.

Your role as an opponent

To do an opposition means that you, in a critical way, review another group's term paper. With critical we do not mean to "find errors" but rather to give feedback to the authors so that they can improve their paper. Such feedback could be, for instance, referring to other relevant results, or issues that were not addressed in the paper, or to point at alternative ways of presenting the material covered in the paper.

Note that a good opposition requires considerable amount of work. You need to read the paper, the referred articles and possibly also search other articles in the topic area.

How to do an opposition

You do not need to do a written opposition, still we recommend that you write down your main points for discussion in the classroom. You will get 10 minutes for your opposition right after the presentation of the paper. Allow for questions and comments from the other students in the class. Discuss other relevant work, issues that could have been included and the conclusions. Try to get an engaged dialogue with the authors which may also involve other seminar participants.

The paper that you will make an opposition on will be announced on the presentation schedule on the course web page. In case you have a special request on the opposition topic or presentation time, send an email to the course instructors with the request.