NIM Project Guide — Advisor Guide

A team that cannot write a specific project title usually has not finished defining the project.

The title is treated as a formatting item, but a vague one is a symptom. When students struggle to describe the project in one sentence, work upstream on the problem and goal rather than editing the title — otherwise the result is a better-formatted submission that still lacks coherence.

Honest accounts of failure, uneven participation, and partial improvement read as credibility, not weakness.

Students hide these by instinct because they expect to be penalised. Reviewers read the opposite: an unblemished account of a real project is implausible. The advisor's job is to make honesty safe and then require it — a specific account of what went wrong and what was done about it is worth more than a smooth narrative.

Scope errors are advisor-detectable in week one and unfixable in the final week.

A topic too large for the team to investigate personally, or an effect they cannot measure, will not recover later. The team will produce vague recommendations and assume that if everyone acted on them the large problem would improve. Screen for controllable scope before the plan is written.

Section B is where disciplinary rigour is assessed; the other eight sections establish that the project was well-run.

A submission that scores well everywhere except the core process has demonstrated project-management competence without domain competence, and reviewers read that pattern clearly. Use this guide for the universal sections and the track's own guide for the core process — neither substitutes for the other.