Paper Presentation Grading Rubric (by David Duvenaud)

Your main concern in this presentation should be clarity. It’s OK not to cover everything in the paper, and it’s often a good idea to spend most of your presentation setting up the background necessary to understand the main idea of the paper.

It’s also OK to re-use materials from other people’s presentations, as long as you clearly attribute them on the same slide. However, you’ll need to understand the material well enough to answer questions no matter what.

1. Say the first sentence of your presentation without saying any filler words or sounds: 5% For instance, saying “Hi, I’m [name], and our presentation is about [paper]” without saying “Um” will get you full marks. If you say “Um” or”Uh” at any point before the end of your first sentence, even to get the audience’s attention, you get no marks for this part.

2. Provide the necessary background to understand the main contribution of the paper: 20% This could be most of your presentation. Try not to show any math that you don’t have time to explain. But it’s OK to gloss over a big equation just saying “and the expression for this is complicated”, or “this is the regularization term”.

3. Related work: 15% You can leave this until the end, if you like, but you should list the main papers that this work built on, any similar papers that came out at the same time, and notable papers that built on this work.

4. Explain the main ideas of the paper clearly: 20% Don’t be afraid to have a slide saying “this is the main idea”. The hard part is waiting until the audience is ready to understand it. Often it’s a good idea to say the main idea at the beginning, explain the background, then revisit the main idea at the end.

5. Explain the scope and limitations of the approach, or open questions 10%. Also feel free to talk about what you personally found confusing, was unnecessarily complicated, or questions that were raised in your mind.

6. Show a visual representation of one of the ideas from the paper: 5% This can just be a figure from the paper, or a demo.

7. Get feedback on your presentation from the instructor or TA: 5% Meet with one of us a few days before the presentation and give a draft version of your presentation so we can give feedback.

8. Original content: 10% I’m not expecting every group to do this. But providing an original demo, animation, figure, or connection is necessary to get an A+.

9. Finish under time: 10% I will cut you off at the agreed upon time limit! However, questions or interjections won’t count against your time. A TA will be keeping track of presentation time and will let you know your remaining time.