College Lab Report Format

How to Format College Lab Report

The aim of the BU lab program is to come to know the physical principles first-hand and enable students to put across their findings in a comprehensible, logical manner with distinguishable objectives, metrics, and results.

All lab reports in the ME curriculum must be written using the same format. We collected the key points of college lab report format. If you still experience difficulties with it, turn to Write My College Lab Report service.

Your college report format includes:

• Title page
• Introductory part
• Theory
• Measurement Methods
• Analysis and Results
• Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Appendices

General Tips:

• Write your report using the third person. You can sometimes resort to the first-person narrative to reduce an overabundance of the passive voice.
• You should number and reference any figure or table which is used in the report.
• Your report should be concise.
• Correct your errors by reading your report out loud to yourself.
• Your report must also be well-organized to enable the readers to find the information they are looking for quickly.
• It should include all the important information and reasoning to make the reader agree with your conclusion.

You can assure this by using this framework:

• Objective: State what the purpose of your experiment is. A couple of grounded and deliberate sentences will suffice.
• Method: You must provide a summary of the lab procedure using your own wording; do not resort to copying the manual. This part should display your awareness of what you measured, how you measured it, and why this measurement relates to the question you presented in the objective section. Mind that this section should not exceed half a page.
• Data: In this section, you should include the raw data you measured.
• Conclusion: After all the above-stated procedures, you need to go back and answer the question you set in your objective section. Does your data suffice to accept or reject your hypothesis, or is the data implausible? Can you provide a comparison of your results basing on the value in the literature, a second measurement, a measurement with a different method, etc?

Further Tips

To get good feedback from your instructor, you should demonstrate your understanding of the experiment and perform it thoroughly. If your experiment ended up in an unexpected result or uncertainty that is absurd, display that you have noticed and thought about it, not just wrote down a number from your calculator and went on.

To show your understanding, you should work thoroughly on your presentation. If one has to search high and low for your results or skim through a mass of pointless statements to read your conclusion, you will come across as a researcher who is unaware of what the significant and relevant parts are.

Make sure that your words coincide with your actions. If you expound on a brilliant way to reduce uncertainty but did not do it, your instructor will want to know why. Ideas that are supported by tests will make a better impression than hollow speculation.

Make sure you acknowledge the uncertainty at the beginning of the semester, as it will not disappear. If you doubt whether you can submit your lab report in time, set your priorities. You should allocate at least 45 minutes for both your analysis and writing of the report, thus plan in advance.

If there are multiple parts to an experiment, it makes sense to put all the sections for one part together, then write all the sections again for the other part. It will enable your instructor to follow your findings easier than if you had separate big sections for methods, data, analysis, etc. You only need to state that there was a big systematic error if your result doesn’t conform to the expectations within your stated uncertainty. If it does, you are saying that random errors are sufficient to explicate the difference between the two. If not, ensure that the systematic error you mention affects your result in the right way.