Fluids II News Fall 2017 Nr.

6
January 2, 2018
Greetings and happy new year to everyone!

Before providing some data and feedback on the final exam I’d like to mention a few
things regarding the course, which still remain to be important.

A. All grades are now open on MyCourses. Please refrain from sending me any e-mails
before:
a) you see your letter grade on Minerva (I have no idea when they are going to be
open); and
b) you read this newsletter.

Note that there are two bonuses which were added to your course grade calculated
according to the grading scheme:
1) Turning Point (in-class polling) bonus – the maximum value is 5 points.
2) Course evaluation bonus – 0.77 points to everyone as a small token of my
appreciation. This time I decided to make it equal to the response rate 😊.

B. Everyone is entitled to see his/her final exam, if desired. For that, you may come to
my office starting from January 8. Appointments for specific time are also possible as
usual by e-mail. Please note that this exercise is intended to be for educational purposes
only: no bargaining about points given will be entertained. To make the whole thing more
efficient, it is expected that you study the final exam and solutions (see MyCourses) in
detail before coming.

C. If I am not mistaken you have till January 31st to nominate profs and TAs for teaching
awards (from Winter 2017, Summer 2017, and Fall 2017 terms). It is a Faculty-of-
Engineering-wide competitions, so it is important to have Mechanical Engineering well
represented in it.

D. I still have a lot of your midterms and assignments. If you wish to pick them up you
may do so until January 24 inclusive. After that I’ll discard everything (sorry, no storage
space).

And now about the final exam. First and foremost, I would like to congratulate you
with great performance overall: this is the best final exam (and consequently, the best
final grades) among all my courses at McGill since 2003! See for yourself on the next
page.
The final letter grades are distributed as follows:
A: 38; A-: 20; B+: 9; B: 3; B-: 10; C+: 2; C: 4; D: 0; F: 2
Unfortunately, even though the exams are generally good, my dreams of easy and fast
grading did not materialize: 40-70% percent of students (depending on problem in
question) made either calculation mistakes or had wrong table readings, thus altering all
subsequent numbers and making the exam grading a slow and time-demanding process
☹
And here is the final course grade statistics:
I do not think that at this point it would be worthwhile to provide a detailed feedback for
each problem. Those who are interested may look at the solutions. I’ll make just a few
major comments which might be helpful in some way for your future attitude to studies.
As I have said above, overall you did a great job, so I’ll mention here just a few points
where you could do still better.

The grades for each problem are as follows:

Problem 1 - 80.97%
Problem 2 - 70.92%
Problem 3 - 77.54%
Problem 4 - 83.71%
Problem 5 - 69.57%
It is seen that the grades are markedly lower for Problems 2 and 5 where it was necessary
not just follow a more or less routine recipe but to think and apply one’s knowledge
intelligently. This is especially seen in Problem 2 (about Ilon Musk’s Hyperloop capsule)
where the sub-question grades are: a) 96.88%; b) 42.99%; c) 83.23%; d) 34.80%.
Questions a) and c) were exactly the same as in the textbook, just for a different situation
and with different numbers, so no wonder that the scores are high. But question b) and d)
required some simple reasoning using the acquired knowledge, and the results are not so
great. In fact, question b) is also like in the textbook with the only difference that the
Mach number based on the capsule’s speed is 1, not 0.24 and that created serious
difficulties for many students, not sure why, even though the solution for M=1 is, in fact,
simpler than for M=0.24.

In problem 1c), way too many students, for my liking, assumed that sound wave is
isothermal. Yes, it is a famous Isaac Newton’s mistake, but I hope you do not believe that
by repeating it you would approach him in greatness 😊.

In Problem 4, too many students could not calculate properly isentropic flow with a
shock in the middle – I would expect better performance for this very basic problem.

In general, as unfortunately typical for undergrads, some students did not do a really great
job in writing clear explanations for “why” questions. My advice: read more books (any
books, fiction or non-fiction, but books, not tweets or social media pages) to improve
your vocabulary and writing skills. If you think that job of an engineer or researcher is
mostly about calculating or designing something, I would disappoint you: it is mostly
about writing various texts: proposals, reports, assessments, justifications, articles,
applications – you name them… So, writing skills are important indeed…

And now a final note…. I would like to thank you again for taking the course with me. I
think we had a very good atmosphere in class and mutual understanding. I wish you all
the best for 2018. Stay in good health, share a good chunk of luck and be successful in all
your endeavors.

Warmest regards and best wishes,

Evgeny Timofeev, your now former Mech 430 instructor