MECE 3381 - Finite Elemental Rao (Goat Droppings)

Hopefully Rao is not teaching your class, but if he is, Rao is King Dick. DO NOT GO TO HIS OFFICE HOURS, because if you don’t quite understand something he will shoe you away for daring not to understand one of his self-gratifying napoleonic orations of profundity! He is a control freak, and the classroom is his lion’s den.

Let's put it this way; you are the ant, and he is the petulant egotistical pedantic narcissist man-child with the magnifying glass.

May God have mercy on your GPA.
(Rant over)

Structural Analysis Internet Stuff

TextBook w/Solutions Manual

ADVICE

Make a friend who has the previous semester's work. That's how most people did well in this class.

Parts of this course are heavy (especially the second half). My advice (again, if you have Rao) start homework early, and record lectures. He loves to sprinkle in critical concepts in a nonchalant way to make them seem unimportant and if you don't take notes fast enough they will wiz right by. I say begrudgingly, he knows his stuff and can teach, but, he will definitely make you work for it and in my opinion, sometimes make you work too much for little or nothing.

One of the final assignments is potentially worth almost 1/5th of your ENTIRE (unweighted) grade in this class (hw8 for my class) and it (at least for me) was a motherfucker.

I do suggest that once you begin the sections on frames that you get a membership to EngineersEdge.com . With it, you have access to a beam/frame in-browser modeling application that will make your life much easier as it will do shear/bending diagrams for any beam configuration imaginable and let you calculate an infinite amount of loads and elements at once.










And if some folks call him Goat Droppings here's why: Below is an email we got in 1331 which pretty much sums up why he has the reputation he has...

It took a long time, but I am close to the finish line now. Test 3 has been graded, and your final course grade should be available on Peoplesoft later today. 

Us faculty are busy with many things this week, including the commencement on Friday. I am trying to set up a time on Thursday morning for you to come and review your Test 3, and I will let you know if this is possible, and if this is finalized. Note that you cannot take Test 3 with you – I need to retain these test papers (university rules). 

Now, some final thoughts.  First, I want to thank you for your extensive feedback in the test 3 survey, and also on earlier surveys. Based on your feedback after Test 3, three themes stood out strongly: 

1. WTF was that exam review about? It had nothing to do with the exam we got last Tuesday. Review was a waste of time. It did not prepare us for the exam at all.


2. How is it possible to write perfect MATLAB code without sitting in front of a computer? There are only 5 or 6 questions in a test, and it is so easy to lose many points if you get the syntax of a command wrong.


3. Dr. Rao, why do you set such a tough exam? Don’t you know what people say about you? After all, this is only an “intro” class. You are #$%&@. Or, to quote directly from the survey feedback: “whyyyy??? why?? do you really enjoy watching us suffer this much :'( “

 Let me address these three points in the reverse order. 

(3) As I said on opening day, this is a “problem solving class”, and for that reason, it is quite different from other classes that you have taken so far in your academic curriculum. I fervently believe that it is my job in this course to challenge you, and to take you on a journey of adventure and self-discovery where you learn that problems which appear at first to be very difficult and beyond your reach, are indeed solvable and conquerable by you after due effort. There is a life lesson in this, which I hope you will find useful both in your subsequent courses, and afterwards, in your professional life as an engineer. 

With the above as my motivation, I set out to frame tough exams. But as you are about to find out, I balance that by grading liberally (what you might call a “big” curve, etc.). As illustration, one out of every 4 students who took Test 3 last Tuesday has ended up with an A or an A-.  Well over half the class has scored a B- or better. 

(2) As I have said many times previously, in problems where you hand write MATLAB code, I do not take off points for syntax errors or other small things.  Here is how I graded the individual questions on Test 3.

The ellipse problem (using max and fminbnd) was something that we have seen many times since before Test 1, and I graded this problem the most strictly.  

The kasm (i.e., mask) problem was, at its heart, an exercise in how to draw and identify the half-space in the X-Y plane which satisfies a linear equality of the form a*x + b*y >= c. I recognize that this was likely the hardest problem in the test, and very few got it correct. 

For the bisect problem, and for the last problem on the longest winning and losing streaks, all I was looking for was evidence that the correct logic had been arrived at, and that the student was on the pathway to successfully implementing a solution. If I saw this, I awarded the full 20 points for each of these two problems, regardless of syntax or other errors. 

(1) Now, about the feedback on the “review” that was given/posted. A majority of you have written about this in your exit survey. And yet, I am most perplexed about this notion that you needed to be a given a “honest and decent review” that would have prepared you adequately for the final exam. Remember what I have said repeatedly about this being a problem solving class. Which means that I get to test you on solving problems, and in particular, problems which you have not seen before. 

I think my biggest mistake was in nomenclature, i.e., in calling that posted collection of problems a “review”.  Instead, I should have labelled those set of problems as one of the following:

• EPPTSPE (Extra Practice Problems to Solve for Personal Enrichment)


• GPTSWNBE (Good Problems to Solve which will never be on the next exam)


• NRNRNR (Not a Review, Not a Review, Not a Review). 

Based on the extensive feedback, it strongly appears that many of you view the review as some sort of a “filter” that will happily narrow down what you need to focus on in your exam preparation.  This simply cannot be the case when I have repeatedly told you that I will pose problems in the test that you likely have not seen before. 

Come to think of it, all students in this class are about 2.5 years away from graduating and starting a very well-paying job (between $75K to $90K, in today’s numbers). Do you think that when real life begins in such a job, that the challenges coming your way at work will be moderated by any kind of friendly “review”? 

So yes, I have learnt my lesson and I will never make this mistake again in future classes and I will never ever give out anything called a “test review”. 

In fact, so strongly do I feel about this that I am right now praying fervently to god that starting tomorrow morning, each of you wake up with numerous fresh goat droppings – both under your pillow and inside your nostrils – until the time when you convincingly proclaim under oath that “Dear God, I will never again demand a “review” before an exam. Dear God, please stop these daily goat droppings because I have erased the word review from my vocabulary……”

I will post this note on the discussion board also (but I will lock that thread as these are my personal thoughts and I don’t want a public debate over this).  

 ------

Dr. Rao