Abstracts are common in the science literature and could also serve a useful purpose as concise summaries of student papers. These are probably less than one-half page. This adds up to a bare minimum of around seven pages for a concise, narrowly-focused paper. Ten to twelve pages or more would be better. Style Manual , 5th edition, but students could use any quality journal as a standard to follow to keep their work closer to the subject matter of their study.
Formats vary from one journal to another, so there is no one format that is standard or best.
As long as students present an organized paper with a consistent method of literature citation, there should be no problems. Even with students who do 10-week summer internships in professional labs, there are cases where experiments have not worked out or been finished in the time allotted, or the expected results have not been achieved. Students need to compensate for these deficiencies by doing more literature analysis and summary as part of their paper. High expectations are fine but probably unrealistic. Student who have had basic statistics should probably be advised to perform simple statistical tests, as appropriate.