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

L7 – Grader Comments

• Memos are an extremely important form of communication in the engineering industry.  They serve as as means of information exchange and also as legal documents.  It is very important that you follow a standard memo format when writing.  Microsoft office has many pre-loaded templates that you can use as a starting point.
• Avoid saying "plugging these values into the equation".  A better way to say this is "through engineering analysis, it was determined....".  Furthermore, the person reading your memo may not have engineering training and is most likely just looking for your expert opinion on the situation.  It is important to be direct and know your audience when writing memos.
• Many of you have shown significant improvement in calculation procedures, complete engineering analysis and writing a corresponding memo to support your findings.  Keep up the good work.
• Please don't hesitate to ask questions if you are confused about the lab.  It is advisable to attempt the lab a few days before it is due to avoid roadblocks at the due date.
• Use the spell check option for reviewing the memo before submitting, simple errors can be avoided easily.
• Before solving an equation such as this in excel it is easier to break it down into components and solving it by parts. That way errors can easily be traced and corrected

Week-9 Discussions – Grader Comments

* The majority of discussions this week were excellent.  It seems as though many of you are benefiting from doing your own research and writing a discussion about it.  There were also several comments which linked what you read during research to the senior design presentations you attended.

* Many of you used transitions in your discussions which adds quality to your writing.  Good work!
* Drexel has a superior engineering librarian in Jay Bhatt.  Please keep Jay in mind as you advance through Drexel for all research inquiries. 

* Jay Bhatt
Librarian for Engineering
Hours M-F: 9am-6pm
Hagerty Library, Room 132
bhattjj@drexel.edu
* Please continue to put effort into your labs and discussions as the term comes to a close. 

L6 – Grader’s Comments

• The labs this week were exceptional!  The most common place students lost points were for Question 2 when calculating the electricity consumed by the chiller where a conversion factor was not needed because it was already taken care of within the EER value.  Make sure to pay attention in class and lab for key information like this. 
• Another place students lost point was when plotting many switched the data between CO2 and O3 and did not even notice the difference. Before submitting anything please go over your work and make sure what you are turning in makes sense.
• There was no memo required this week; however, a few students decided to write one anyway, which is a great habit to get into and also a great way to improve your writing skills, keep it up!

Discussion-3 – Bridges – Grader Comments

• As with the past 2 weeks, the most common place for students to lose points was in the "most interesting" or "most confusing" categories, although substantially less points were lost in this discussion.  
• However, the course information available on VistaBB states that the "most interesting" and "most confusing" sections of the post should be one to two paragraphs.  So expand upon one sentence, which typically cannot sufficiently describe the most interesting aspect of an article.
• Simply listing dimensions of a particular bridge should not be the most interesting part of an article.  While the facts are good to include in your post, talk about something new you learned about the bridge or actually found interesting, in addition to their dimensions.  And again, if nothing was confusing, simply state that.
• I had a comment about how VistaBB won't let you indent, if you want to clean up your post so it's easier to read add an extra return between paragraphs to space them out nicer.  And still take advantage of the "preview" function associated with the discussion posts and make sure to proofread and spellcheck! 

Lab 1 – Grader Comments

Overall, the submissions for Lab 1 were good, but there are few things that I would like to stress to the students:

• Please fully read the entire assignment before completing and submitting your solution. There were a few instances of incomplete assignments. Partial credit can not be given if a question is not attempted.
• Students should be careful about using significant figures and scientific notation appropriately and applicably. Answers should not be submitted with multiple decimal places shown and there is no reason to represent 180 cm in scientific notation. 
• Because of the amount of difficulty students had with properly using significant figures, the suggestion of having a tutorial/refresher on significant figures will be contemplated by the teaching team.

My last comment is a suggestion for how the students could help the graders. If the students were to include their first and last name in the title of the file they submit, it would make the grading process easier.

Jim Mitchell for the Graders

Seeing Graded Comments

It’s not intuitively evident how to see what the grader has provided to explain how they graded your lab.  This post explains how.  The issue lies with VistaBB’s idiosyncrasies.

Graded Labs (Assignments)

The grader creates an attachment file that explains their grading.  That file may well be a copy of the file you originally submitted with a different name.

To see that file you need to go to “Assignments” on the left hand menu, and within that click on the “graded” tab.  You’ll then see the files that are related to the assignment, both your own original and the one returned by the grader.

Graded Discussion Posts

For reasons known only to the VistaBB designers you have to click on the “My Grades” menu item on the left.  Now you’ll see a button entitled “View Graded Grading Form” that will show you the grading form with whatever comment the grader made.

Jim Mitchell