Course Final Grades

The TA’s finished grading the final labs today.  That allowed me to calculate and enter the final grades for the course.  I’ve left the course open through the end of the first week of the summer term for you to review for any significant errors since we were unfortunately late in returning your final labs.

Below are the statistics for the overall grades.  You’ll see that we had a high percentage of A’s and a number of A+’s.

These grades take into account:

• Dropping the lowest lab and discussion grade
• Using the adjusted grade for the final take-home assessment
• Allowing a total of three missed lectures and labs for the attendance grade

Four individual had their final grade drop from the “running” grade displayed during the term.  This occurred because they hadn’t turned in required work.  This wasn’t taken into account by the “running” grade.  I warned about this earlier in the term.

Related Posts

• Take Home Assessment – Comments
• Best and Worst of CAEE-201 – Your Comments

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.

Best and Worst of CAEE-201–Your Comments

I’ve completed grading the essays on the final assessment and thought you’d like to have some statistics about what you said – and what I learned.  While grading them I kept track of your comments in a variety of categories suggested by what you wrote (see below) to get a sense of what worked and what needs to be improved.

I’ll use these results to try and improve what we do when next we offer CAEE-201.

What Worked

Overall you were very positive about CAEE-201.  You liked the variety of speakers, the discussions, the labs, the exposure to what the CAEE majors consist of, and the site visits.

The breakdown of the comments overall was

• 81 Students completed the essay – 1 did not
  • 42 wrote only positive comments
  • 37 wrote both positive and negative comments
  • No one wrote only a negative comment
• 194 Positive/Best comments
• 55 Negative/Worst/Needs Improvement comments

What Needs Improvement

As you’ll see in looking at the details the biggest area you felt needs improvement is the instructions for the labs (22 comments).  There were 48 “worst” comments addressing some aspect of the labs (please note that there were 70 positive comments as well).  There’s considerable variety in the specifics of what you felt was problematic.

Detailed Comment Breakdown

• The groups of comments are organized alphabetically within “Best” or “Worst”
• In some cases I included specific issues as well