Debriefing the first homework assignment (Fluid Dynamics with Olivier Cleynen)

so I would like to debrief with you homework assignment number one I have good and bad things to say about this homework assignment and the work you did over there first let me begin by saying how super happy I am it’s really humbling and I hope I’m up to that and that Iwill keep giving you motivating things to do in the coming semester let me start with bad things I have to say about your work and then I will move on to the congratulations my main criticism with students in this homework assignment is regarding the complaints I received by email about the grades that you receive ten people have contacted me overall asking me to review their paper which takes a lot of time and a lot of energy most of the complaints go this way I receive an email that says “well peer number one need a pretty good job got almost all the points I wanted but peeeer number two oh this mean heartless person look they removed half a point in this question I only received one and I should have received one and a half Olivier I know you are very busy with all the work you do but you must restore justice and restore the hope and the faith of an entire generation by making this awful wrong right please review this paper and give me alllll the points I deserve” well I won’t tell you what I think about this I will just give you hard facts the hard facts are that among the ten people who contacted me - two received respectively 2 and 2.75 points more this is because the peers are human and as humans they are like you and me they live interesting and complicated lives some peers are heartbroken because they broke up with their partner the previous day or some peers are grading you while they feed the baby and so it happens and I’m here for this I’m happy to fix those kinds of errors this is my role so do contact me if you believe this is what happens but the eight other peers end up having their grades bumped up by an average of 0.3 point out of 10 0.3 point out of 10 this is not much because there are four assignments and out of those four times the average counts up for half of the final grade and so I ended up spending an entire afternoon and late into the evening grading all those papers and communicating with you only to bump up the average grade of 8 percent of the class by an average 0.3 percent so we have to ask ourselves here what we’re doing and how reasonable this really is and what I could do with this time instead for another 150 people instead of just a few individuals and so I ask you I implore you before you email me to complain about your grades to calculate how much you realistically will obtain with a review from me and to consider carefully whether you are reacting rationally to a series of facts or whether it is mostly the emotion the disappointment or the anger that is talking through your email be very careful with this okay this is for the complaints now about the congratulations I said the months ago that it was a little prize for the best paper in each of the best paper or best here grade grading and so here is the winner for this time is Peeyush and Peeyush wrote a superb paper very very neat not too long with lots of short and clear explanations and especially what we very much appreciated very very nice distinction between the general expression theory, the numbers put in, and then the final result this makes it very easy to grade it turns out everything is correct but if it was incorrect then it would be very easy to find out where exactly the mistakes come from because of that easy to see and easy to debug layout so congratulations Peeyush now we have a little prize I initially thought I was going to offer a book as a prize because who doesn’t like to receive a good fluid dynamics book so this is my very favourite book of course in fluid dynamics this is Hydrodynamica by Daniel Bernoulli it was originally published in 1738 and here’s the English translation from 1960 of the whole book wonderful present and I thought it would be good to offer this to the best student the best contributor every homework assignment but then I thought what if the students have the book already and what disappointment this would be so I changed my mind instead of this we settled on having the little prize of 20 euros of Amazon voucher which you can spend on Amazon Amazon is a very big website which is very well-known because so many books about fluid mechanics are available on there so I’m sure Peeyush you will find a good use for those 20 euros and again there are another three times this prize for the three upcoming homework assignments so congratulations and for the next assignment we will probably be looking instead of instead of looking at the papers we will probably be looking at the gradings for for the homework so how well and how constructive and how helpful the gradings are this by the way is not my selection the money is mine but the selection is done by my colleague Jochen and Jochen was a student last year in this program so he doesn’t just have the experience of the teacher and instructor this year but he also has experience of having graded and having being graded by peers last year and so I think this is a really good perspective that he can give when he picks out the best contribution every time all right overall what to look for in the next homework assignment well next assignment we calculate force on a panel on a flat panel and there are three things I would like you to pay attention on the first thing was not such a great success in the first assignment it is the vector notation the vector notation is very important in fluid mechanics and will get more important as we progress through the chapters when you write a vector equation it is a symbol where either an arrow on top or usually n bar on the on the bottom I don’t care how you write it when you write a vector is equal to something that something must either be other vectors or it must have two or three dimensions a vector has more than one dimension this is a fundamental property of it if you write a vector is equal to 12 Newtons this is inherently wrong vector the length of that vector would be the vector without the arrow or without the bar and this is correct we express the length of that vector but if you keep the bar or the arrow on the symbol and so you express a vector then you need to have either vectors or two or three lines on the other side of the equation so pay a lot of attention to this this is extremely important for us in fluid mechanics second thing is the clarity of the layout of the papers too many of you sent papers which honestly I’m if I was to receive them from my colleagues or I know for a fact if my colleagues were to receive them from me then this would not work at all and they would just send it back to me and say “Olivier just redo the work please I don’t have time to read through this. pay attention to how easy it is to follow the thread of your calculations by aligning the equal sign pay attention to clarity of the results don’t make it so that your peers wonder whether this is zero or a point where the decimal separator is make it very clear and very easy to read it is our experience from last year that the expectations of peers grow with time with respect to clarity and so if you don’t want to lose marks on this pay attention and conversely when you are grading your peers I encourage you to be severe with the presentation and the cleanliness of the papers that you receive and third thing is the same advice as I gave last time which is having very nice and clear separation between the general expression theory the number application and the final results and this enables your peers to quickly estimate and find where the error is and it makes our job a lot easier your just read through your paper and you say yes yes no yes yes done and so this is exactly what you want to generate for your peers, a quick and easy review separate those three things as clearly as you can right so overall I’m super happy with the energy that you put in this I am super happy with the quality of the work that you submit overall and I’m super happy with the quality of the reviews that you do as peers congratulations keep up the hard work I hope you’re hanging in there and I will see you next time. Bye-bye. .