Welcome Comps in the Biology major! These guidelines are meant to give students an overview of the goals and objectives of Biology comps and help prepare them to be successful.
Learning Goals for Comps
In completing Comps, Biology students will develop and demonstrate their ability to:
- Critically evaluate primary literature and data, and apply information they have learned to new situations.
- Effectively communicate scientific concepts and/or experimental results to both expert and non-expert audiences using oral, visual, and written formats.
- Effectively utilize problem solving skills such as: critical thinking, data analysis, graphical analysis, and statistical analysis.
Learning Objectives for Addressing your Comps Question
In completing the paper, talk, and Q&A, students will:
- Identify a focused topic of interest from within the comps question.
- Effectively search primary literature databases to identify articles relevant to the topic.
- Critically evaluate primary literature and data to determine what data are of high quality, and what has been studied and is known about the topic.
- Synthesize information from different sources of primary literature that supports the major conclusions behind what is known about the topic.
- Identify which aspects of the topic remain uncharacterized, understudied, and/or inconclusive.
- Propose future directions that would allow researchers to address these uncharacterized, understudied, and/or inconclusive aspects of the topic.