Final Assessment Analysis

 

Some of you may wish to know how the class performed on the final Take Home Assessment.

Below are the results of my analysis of the question scores with the color coded column giving the average class score on the question.  I’ve followed the image with some comments on the red (low scoring) questions, as well as what you wrote about the Best and Worst aspects of the class.

• Learning after Graduation – It’s almost certain that you’re going to need to go on learning throughout your career as an engineer.  Many of you chose answers that indicated your thought there wouldn’t be much later learning.
• Heat Transfer Calculation – this was the same basic question as in Lab #1
• Nested IF Function – This was admittedly a difficult question, but it was directly based on the hydrology lab.  Learning to use this kind of logic will almost certainly be beneficial in your engineering career.
• Gas Concentrations – A key result of the IAQ lab was that you cannot have all things – low ozone and low CO2 merely by ventilating.
• Revit Type – Revit is BIM software.  When I Googled the word Revit the first entry stated that as I did in class.
• EER – EER is a ration of BTU/Watt-Hour – It’s a measure of efficiency of an air conditioning system.  it is NOT dimensionless as it is used. 
• Kinetic Energy Calculation – The trick here was to refer to Prof. Dasaro’s lab, where the weight had to be converted into mass to perform the calculation.
• Member Weight Calculation – It’s surprising that so many had difficulty with this one.  You needed to calculate the volume and multiply by the density, being sure to watch the units of volume to work in either in^3 or ft^3.

Short Essay on Best and Worst Aspect of CAEE-201

As the bright green number shows, most of you were very specific and wrote clearly.  As in past there were comments on many aspects of the course.  Only one person out of 113 chose to focus primarily on the negative aspects – everyone else focused on the positive ones, sometimes with a negative comment as well.  Here are some key ones:

• Most Positive Aspects – In order by number of comments Received
• Site Visits – Tacony-Palmyra Bridge & DAC (70 mentions total)
• Variety of lectures & Labs & Speakers (55 mentions total)
• Clarifying your major focus, including graduate study (36 mentions total)
• Discussions (15 mentions total)
• Overall structure of course and TA and Prof. help (18 mentions total)
• Worst Aspects – the total was only about 10% of the number of positive and not nearly so emphatic
• Discussions – about the same number as made positive comments (this has been true every year – 18 mentions)
• A variety of comments about the labs and grading (15 mentions total)
• Two people stated firmly that 10:00AM is too early for the lecture