Design of Bridges (CI9-STR-35) Exam Petition

I feel that exam done nothing to test our ability to understand the provided resources or to show our comprehension for the course material. As much as I understand being tested to see how we can provide our engineering solution, in a 2hour exam with 4 questions I don’t think that was possible. It doesn’t make sense to have 9 tutorials which were very well detailed, to give a whole questions on a topic that only had two slides of theory (2nd question). I hope this can be taken into consideration and the grade boundaries can be changed.

With all respect to our lecturer, I have to comment that the course was not sufficiently orginised to be completey prepared for this exam. I see no point making it that critical and put students under risk of failing the module and wasting their time on resitting in the next year. There are people who have to travel thousands of miles to do it again, only just because somebody decided to make this paper “unstandard”. This is an exam and not the statistical experiment. Thank you.

An unfair assessment of what was taught during lectures and portrayed to be important through tutorials. Marking was also unfairly distributed, questions which carried significant weighting in a question in all previous papers now accounted for less than half.

Impossible to complete such the paper within 2 hours for me.

Quiet little time for us. Too many new types questions.

The limited time in the exam does not allow to address the first two questions which are never given neither on past exam paper nor tutorials.

So hard beyond expectation. I feel so sad.

The question is confusing. And it is far more difficult than the past papers.

So hard!

There is no way to complete this exam within 2 hrs. If others can do, it’s only because of my stupidness but not my laziness. A marginal increase in difficulties in all four question, while reward less mark for doing similar content than last year,l. such as no of reinforcement in question 4 only worth for 15 instead of 20. It’s a paper for test ppl from D to U, not A to F.

Was really time consuming to start an exam with two unfamiliar mandatory questions

I found it very difficult, I felt we were not ready and/or exposed to a such ‘new’ type of problems. Some materials asked was not taught in class.

Despite the fact that all of the material was covered in the lectures, there were not proper tutorials for half of the exam questions. Hence, our focus shifted more on exercises similar to the tutorials and past papers that didn't cover the exam. I like solving different type of exercise but not under time pressure but on coursework material. On the other hand, the theoretical/practical questions are tricky, because half of them are too general and others are not correctly explained (in the question).

The Bridge exam was not unfair, because the lecturer did not give us proper materials to learn. The type of first and second questions are not given in any of the tutorial and are not elaborated well enough in the lecture materials. The second question of the Prestressed Bridge question has never been taught during the whole course either.

the reference documents for review are not useful

The questions are unfamiliar to us as in the lectures and tutorials, the lecturer mainly focus on other contents which makes us think that these are more important.

TWO of the COMPULSORY questions had structural forms that weren't covered by any numerical example to some extent in either the notes, tutorials or past examination papers. The bridge exams are already VERY difficult to finish in time even if the student knows everything by heart, this is partly because of the many small diagrams required in every question in order to produce a clear answer. So, if any additional 'thinking' is introduced in the exam, there's too little time to write even a B. And yes, Ana needs to "distinguish the people that deserve 100 from the people that deserve 70" but I doubt many people even managed a 70 in this exam. If so, well done to them!