The ToolBox

Our principal objective is to educate chemical engineers in such a way that they can be successful wherever they do and in whatever field they land up in. Obviously a great deal of that will depend on the student him(her)self - as to how good they are. I have been interested in collecting what I term a set of problems and solutions which can span the entire undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum that a student (or someone graduated years ago) can learn from as a refresher or as a way to understand how to solve a particular problem they may be dealing with. It is like determining a set of factors (if you will) that can span the entire curriculum. These solutions will be detailed and created using different software (when applicable).

So, the questions I ask myself are

a) What are these problems? and
b) How should they be solved (using what techniques?)

And place them somewhere where it will always be available.

I will be updating these pages time to time. Feel free to post comments, suggestions and ideas.

Open Book Versus Closed Book

With rare exception, most of my exams have been open everything (textbook, notes, anything the students want to bring with them). Recently, in Thermodynamics, I have had one exam closed everything - these have included questions on mathematical manipulations involving thermodynamic variables and relations between them. For example, students will have to prove that the ideal gas heat capacity at constant pressure is not a function of pressure or that the Joule thompson coefficient for an ideal gas is zero (and so on). What I do is prepare a set of questions (with detailed answers) and provide that to the students to study, for about a week. I then select questions from that list for the exam. Thus, students have had an opportunity to study the questions (and answers) and I expect that they would do well.

I am wondering if this is the best way to teach students about how to manipulate thermodynamic variables. Are many simply memorizing the steps? (Rather difficult I'd say, I am very strict about the grading - I want to see close to perfection for a good grade since the students have had a week to study the questions and answers). Do they remember the manipulations long after the exams?

Exams

I have always believed that exams should be designed to test comprehension. Show students how to solve Problems A, B, C, D for example and ask them to solve Problem E that they have not seen before. Problem E will contain conceptual elements from A, B, C and D (and ofcourse relying on student's assimilation of concepts prior that particular class - for example when I teach Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, I do expect students to know how to write (and solve) Mass Balances, balance chemical equations, do integration/differentiation and so on and so forth).

Often I have run into students who will complain that the exam questions were "too hard" or that the questions had nothing to do with what I had done in class or related to the problems I have worked in class or whatever. When I do solve the exam in class, I try to point out as to how the questions were in fact designed to test specifics from the relevant chapters/sections and what I may have told them about such issues in class.

Is that not how ALL exams are supposed to be written? Is that how ALL evaluations are to be done?