Take-Home Exam – Grading Notes

We’ve completed the grading of the Take-Home exam.  There were a number of corrections to the raw scores that were appropriate on review of the exam results and also several emails from students.  All increased your score.  They are as follows:

Calculated Questions

• VistaBb had a bug that marked a number of your answers wrong when it shouldn’t have.   All these were corrected manually.
• For the soil pressure calculation the wording wasn’t clear whether there was water in the ground.  I therefore allowed the calculation with and without water.
• I also reviewed all the answers for the full set of calculated questions and gave partial credit in a number of cases for answers close to the acceptable range.

Multiple Choice Questions

The questions noted below had ambiguities in their phrasing or used information that may not have been available everyone.  In these cases everyone who didn’t get the “right” answer received 90% credit (2.0 out of 2.2).  The questions were:

• EER- Energy Efficiency Ratio
• Revit Features
• Revit Type
• Role of Senior Design Advisor
• Tacony-Palmyra Bridge Opening
• Use of Energy in Buildings

Paragraph Answer Questions

I went through and ensured that you got the maximum credit for all your attempts as on the highest-marked answer.

Jim Mitchell

Exam Grading Status

As of 5:30 on Tuesday (6/8/2010) we’ve completed the first pass on grading the exams.  The grades there ARE NOT YET FINAL.

We are very much in the process of reviewing the grades for difficulties that we’ll resolve over the next 24 hours.  Several students have written that apparently correct answers have been marked as wrong by VistaBB.  I’ll be working with IRT on Wednesday to figure out the source of the problem and to resolve it.

In the meantime I’m glad to hear about specific difficulties that you identify so I can include them in my review.

Jim Mitchell

Wording Error in Online Take-Home Exam

I’ve corrected an error on the exam that one alert student brought to my attention.  In the question addressing the significant digits in a multi-story concrete building I initially asked for the “volume” of concrete.  I’ve now corrected that to “weight” of concrete.  I’ve also alerted the only two students who had completed the exam.  No one taking it after about 8:30 on Thursday should see the erroneous version.