Take-home exam

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Instructions

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The purpose of this exam is only a little different to other exams. The difference is that this exam will assess your ability to answer more realistic problems that require more time, thought, and access to a computer. You are expected to use **any appropriate tools** to solve the problems in this exam, particularly the tools learnt in this course.

The 3E4 course teaches you a collection of tools that will be useful in your engineering career. And the challenges you will face do not come neatly posed as problems of the type: "Solve this linear system using Gauss elimination" -- rather you need to reformulate your challenge and pick the appropriate tool to solve the problem, taking into account the level of complexity.

In that regard there are many correct ways to achieve a result. In this exam about 80% of the grade will be given for **how** you solve the problem, and we will pay particular attention to the **justifications** you provide along the way. You must clearly outline **why** you choose the method and **why** you did not choose alternative methods. The **accuracy of how you implement your method** is also important, but the actual solution is of little value for determining your grade.

Also, as you will find in your career as an engineer, you will have to apply tools that you learnt about long ago, tools just learnt recently, or you may have do some research and figure out how to use a tool you've never used before. This exam has those aspects as well.

Some other points are:

• Complete this exam with 1 other person, or by yourself.
• Please identify the person you work with at the top of your answer submission. **Please note: submit one solution per group**.
• Please attribute any sources of reference you used (textbooks, websites, and so on).
• The intention of the group work is that you discuss the questions and collaborate in the same way you have done in the assignments.
• But **do not share** any electronic files (e.g. Word documents, source code) outside your group; take care in the computer labs to safeguard your work.
• Like any other exam, neither the TAs nor myself are able to answer direct questions about the exam. Similarly you *should not* look for help about a *specific question* from other resources (e.g. asking for help with the question on a website, friends, other students in the class, *etc*).
• You may use the course notes and any other textbooks and resources though.
• There is no make-up for this exam.
• You will benefit from going through the `software tutorials <http://modelling3e4.connectmv.com/wiki/Software_tutorial>`_ on the course website.
• Your answers should preferably be typed up.
• Your answers must be structured like a report and flow together logically. Please do not submit pages and pages of computer printouts and source code in appendices - unfortunately this will be penalized.

- Hand out date: 17 November 2010, - **Due date**: - Paper hand-in: by **17:30 on 22 November 2010, in class** - Totally electronic hand in: email to dunnkg@mcmaster.ca before the above time and date. - A valid electronic hand in must be in PDF format *only* (no separate Word, MATLAB or Python files). If you are on Windows, you could use `PDFCreator <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/>`_ to make PDF's; Macs and Linux have built-in PDF capability.

.. Note:: There are a maximum of 30 grade points available in the 5 questions, plus a variable amount of bonus points.

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