Final Exam & Final Grades

The graders have graded all the labs and made adjustments for any outstanding issues that have been brought to our attention. 

I personally graded all the Least/Most Valuable questions and reviewed the class averages on each question on the exam.

I’ve also made all the promised adjustments to the scores and calculated the final grade in the class. 

These notes give you more information on all of this.

Final Exam Questions

Even though there were some questions (below) on which there were low class averages my review of the question content against what was said and done in the course didn’t find any errors. 

Exam Adjustment

Nonetheless I decided that there were some questions that were unintentionally “tricky”.  To address this I added 5 points (out of 100 possible) to everyone’s score, thus “curving” the exam upward by 5% to a cap of 100 points.  The number used in the grade calculation includes this adjustment although the one on VistaBB is the “raw” unadjusted number. 

Exam Questions With Which People Had Difficulty

• Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER) – If you think you’ll realize it’s not dimensionless.  Its calculated as the ratio of heat moved to electrical power used.  I decided this was a bit tricky.
• Nested IF  Statement – I decided this was tricky even though you’d done a lab that required its use.  Learning the logic of this kind of statement will be useful in your career.
• Senior Design Advisor – In my lecture and the notes for it I stated quite specifically that different advisors have different approaches.  You may think, as many did, that there is a “right way” to do it, but in fact you’ll find considerable variation.
• Soil Mechanics – A number of you chose “interesting” as not being true of soil mechanics.  That may be true for you, but certainly Dr. Sjoblom found it interesting and emphasized how imprecise it is.
• Water Pollution Time – As one student pointed out, the lab you performed varied explicitly only the velocity.  In fact the explanation and the fundamental equations show that the diffusion is happening, which is factored into the equations.  I decided this was “tricky” which led to the adjustment mentioned above.

 

Final Grade Calculation

I calculated your final grades by downloading the data from VistaBB and performing all the promised adjustments (all in your favor) in an Excel spreadsheet.  Those adjustments were:

• Dropped the lowest lab score
• Dropped the lowest discussion score
• Allowed one missed attendance for lecture
• Allowed one missed attendance for lab
• Adjusted the final exam score as indicated above
• Weighted the ingredients as shown in the syllabus
• Rounded numeric percentages to the nearest percent before calculating the letter grade

Jim Mitchell