HigherEd 2.0

Exam 2 is now in the books…and here is some feedback.

• Shear and moment (#1) was pretty decent, for the most part the class seems fairly confident about this issue.
• On #2, it was clear that many of you don’t quite get the idea of how to find the centroid of the transformed section, so see me and/or review the video solution on the Prentice Hall website for this type of problem.
• There were a few small problems on #3, but for the most part the class seems to get the idea of how to do those types of problems.
• For #4, the static indeterminacy was recognized by nearly everyone, and again other than small reasonably small issues regarding FBD’s and the twist constraint equation, most people got the basic idea of this problem.
• Number 5 was also quite reasonable, although there were a surprising number of issues in identifying Vmax (=800 lb.). The idea was to use shear and moment, and it’s an easy V & M problem. Some issues with Q too, but mostly this one was okay.
• Finally, #6 was pretty reasonable. Lots of people got the centroid and I correct, and many got Q correct. The biggest error on this problem was using the wrong A’ to start with.

On the tablet grading front, I can report that from my side it was much easier. You got your exams back in about 9 days, and it would have been sooner if I had not been traveling for 2 days last week. I figure the tablet grading saved me 25% on grading time, easy.

But the question is, how do you like the results? Do you like seeing your exams online, do you like the way they were graded? I noticed that my feedback to you was a bit more terse using this system, mostly because it’s a little more cumbersome to write alot on the tablet format. What are your thoughts? Feel free to use this post as an open thread for discussion/comments about the tablet grading scheme.

PS I will attach the problem solutions to this post once I finalize them.