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. Facilities and Faculty Science is particularly limited in both. The Plymouth Bluff center might provide a site for field studies. Our solution for the better students is for them to have summer internships at larger universities and to use that work for their honors projects. Mathematics students who would need computer access have a divisional computer lab, the MUW data center, and possible access to the U. Miss. supercomputer.