Take Home Assessment–Comments

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

The Process

• I graded all the essay questions myself – almost everyone was careful and received full credit. My comments on the essay are in a separate post.
• I reviewed the “item analysis” provided by BbLearn.  It looks at the performance on each question to see if there problems because they were poorly written or possibly required material that was not presented in class.
  • As a result of that review I decided to add 3.6 points to each person’s raw score to make allowance for possible lack of clarity, although I found only two questions that I felt had some ambiguity (see below).
  • The result of this increase in the exam is reflected in the column –CAEE-201 AdjustedAsses.  This was used in computing the final grade.

Some comments on questions where there were difficulties.

• 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.
• 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, not a sketching or drafting tool.  When I Googled the word Revit the first entry stated that as I did in class.
• EER – EER is a ratio of BTU/Watt-Hour – It’s a measure of efficiency of an air conditioning system.  It is NOT dimensionless as it is used. 
• Member Weight Calculation – It’s surprising that a number 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.
• Issues of Concern to Engineers – Four of the five options are likely to be important to engineers.  Only the analysis of lives of great engineers is unlikely to important.
• Practice Requirements – Almost everyone recognized that our disciplines are interactive with and affected by disciplines and issues outside our department and outside our country.
• Controlling Storm Water – My “correct” answers were that it’s a problem in older cities and it’s required by EPA.  A number of you chose that it’s politically popular to control storm water.  I decided to award a makeup point to everyone since denying this was questionable:  Few politicians want to vote to pay for cleaning up storm water (and few taxpayers want to pay for it), but all want to claim credit.
• Foundation Types – I awarded another makeup point because a mat foundation can indeed be used for large buildings, but that may not have been clear from the lectures and from Google searches.