[E3018] Mechanical Engineering Lab I

Ines is pretty good at conveying the lecture part of this class. Her notes are well organized and quite readable. Only the statistics part of lecture is on the test. In lab itself, she is not helpful at all. Any technical question you have will be referred to Bob. You should avoid interacting with Ines in lab because she mostly tells you you're doing it wrong and costs you time. Generally the way you were doing it worked fine, but now you have to spend another half hour doing it again.

Workload:

1 Midterm: 2 statistics problems, a bunch of short answer "describe the lab you did" questions

5 Lab reports: Really, really arbitrary grading convention. Penalties for style, spelling, etc. You must get a very good grade on the first one so the TA's learn that your group is "good" and look for fewer things to penalize you for later on. Ines sometimes goes through with a different color pen, after the TA is finished, and takes more points off.

1 Lab notebook: It's not clear why you need to handwrite data for most labs. In most cases you'll just copy out of your excel file. The notebook is graded out of 5 points and hardly anyone gets 5/5. The reasons for this are unclear.

Professor Kysar genuinely takes an interest in students and their sucess in his class. He would always make room in his schedule to answer student questions and make sure they acutally understood the material. Bummer that he doesn't teach any further undergrad classes, as he's probably the nicest teacher at Columbia.

Workload:

5 Not Too Hard Lab Reports (50%), Medium difficulty Homework assignments (25%), Managable Final (25%)

Professor Kysar is extremely passionate about both his field of study and education. He cares a lot for his students, and makes a lot of effort to ensure that students understand the material. All the lectures are at the start of semester, and its easy to lose concentration in 3 hour lectures. But this is just how the course is structured. Its hard to find Professors in Columbia that are willing to go the extra mile for their students, and Professor Kysar is one of them.

one of things i don't like his class is that he always teach some stuff that you can't find in the textbook, and what that means is that in order to do well, you would have to go to his lectures, pay attention, take notes and not fall asleep. However, speaking of Prof. Kysar's own character and capability, he is recognized as, without a doubt, one of nicest profs at CU.

Workload:

ok