CVEN90044: Engineering Site Characterisation

3x Online Quizzes and Assignments (5% each)
Individual GIS Assignment (5%)
4x Group Reports (30% total)
2 hour exam (50%)

The fact that there is an assignment that covers almost every topic taught is probably the best thing about the design of this subject. However, the trade-off with this comprehensive approach is that they are all very simple and not particularly challenging.

Most of them involve getting out in the field and completing some practical activities, with a very basic site visit report after going to Yarra Bend Park, a report on ground penetrating radar and seismic testing after a on-campus prac, and a basic topographic levelling exercise and report. All of the pracs were very well run and well conceived, and each report is completed in randomly allocated groups of 3-4 people. None of these assignments ever reach the complexity or amount of work where group dynamics should become a huge issue. So, in that sense, it’s a good chance to meet some people.

But this lack of complexity results in a kind of banality. Your hand is held quite tightly throughout the entire process and they don’t require any deep level of research or critical thinking. Don’t get me wrong; it’s nice to have subject where the stress is minimal and the assignments are straightforward for a change, but it’d be more valuable if the assignments were a little more mentally stimulating and freewheeling.

There was also a basic assignment on wind loading (which was, again, really straightforward and an easy 5%) and a couple of online quizzes within the first half of the semester, the first very simple, the other a little convoluted but still easy enough.

And there were also two computer-based assignments: the first, which was completed individually, was on basic GIS applications; the second, completed in groups, was on noise propagation, which integrated a bit of MATLAB coding. Again, your hand was held throughout these assignments, as they essentially required students to follow a set of step-by-step directions.

So this subject is a bit of a amalgamation of a bunch of fields of engineering and project management that culminate in site characterisation. Obviously, the content taught here is highly applicable to work in the field as a professional engineer, and – though it does straddle the boundary at times – it never reaches the point where the content is so common sensical that building a subject around this stuff seems superfluous (which was the main problem with Risk Analysis, a subject I did (and reviewed) last year).

The main topics covered, all from a site characterisation perspective, are:

• (Very) basic geology and cartography
• Geotechnical site characterisation and in situ testing (this is the main focus of the subject)
• Basic surveying (mainly levelling)
• Wind and earthquake loading
• Cross-boundary pollution (e.g. noise)
• Heritage

So, as I mentioned in the assessment section, only one example paper was provided and no solutions were offered (though some crowd-sourced solutions have been posted on the non-official facebook site). To me, this always appears lazy. It means the examiners can put the same questions on an exam year-in year-out and get away with it, and it seems as if that’s what they do, as this year’s exam had a couple of repeat questions from the sample paper and no doubt from previous semesters.

The exam, however, was quite fair and manageable. And though it did ask a couple of esoteric and overly specific questions (e.g. asking for specific Australian Standard numbers that would have been covered on one slide in one lecture for a good 5 seconds), it generally did what an exam should do, requiring students to have a pretty high level of understanding of the content overall. No complaints about that.

Yes

Mahdi Disfani – Geotechnical
Cliff Ogelby – Surveying
Massoud Sofi – Wind and Earthquake Loading (and fire risk)
Graham Moore – Cross-Boundary Pollution

The main lecturer for the subject was Mahdi Disfani, as he covered the geotechnical component, which accounts for the first 6-7 weeks of the 12-week course. This was his first time teaching the subject (and first semester at the UoM), and – though he is a good guy – he wasn’t a great lecturer for this subject. However, I don’t think this is really his fault, as his lecturing style was fine and he does seem to know his stuff. The main issue is that the teaching materials and content were completely unchanged from previous years, which meant that Mahdi was using someone else’s slides. This led to times when he didn’t fully explain everything on the slides, skipped over stuff, or sometimes spent too much time emphasising things that weren’t of particularly relevant to the assessment or objectives of the subject. I managed to track down last years lecture recordings, where the subject’s coordinator, Guillermo Narsilio, was the lecture. These lectures seemed far more comprehensive and a lot more consistent with what was on the slides.

So to fix this, I hope Mahdi – if he is going to continue to be the lecturer for this subject – builds his own slides, or at least revises the current ones in such a way to better shape them for his style of lecturing.

Most students will know the other lecturers from other subjects. Cliff Ogelby will be familiar to anyone who did either Mapping Environments or Surveying and Mapping (see my review for the latter here), and his slides and approach is essentially unchanged from those subjects, though the scope is obviously far narrower. Massoud Sofi, who runs through the AS1170 standards for wind loading and earthquake loading, is one of the staff for the Structural Theory and Design subjects (reviews for those here and here) and High Rise (review for that upcoming).

Overall, the lectures are fine, but never anything to write home about. Despite being dull at times (there is a lecture literally titled “boring,” for instance), they are generally adequate at teaching the content, but they never reach that level of “wow, that was a really good lecture.”

If I had to describe this subject in one word, that word would be “inoffensive.” The content is fairly simple, the teaching methods are fine, and the assessment should never cause you to break a sweat if you’ve managed to make it this far in your academic career. It does a good job to integrate some practicality into what can sometimes be an overly theoretical approach at the UoM, and this is something that the subject can hang its hat on. But when a subject doesn’t offer any sort of challenge or provide any really interesting or inspiring content, I can’t give it much more than a 3.

No, only one sample paper is provided (without answers)

3.25/5

You’ll be given an electronic version of a Geotechnical Site Investigation manual, but nothing needs to be actually purchased.

Tutes were up and down. The geotechnical site investigation tute sheets were a complete joke because they are archaically written and provided neither codified sets of questions nor directly assessable answers. Even worse, the tutors had access to a full suite of worked solutions (though, as I said, the questions were kind of wishy-washy so I don’t know what form the answers took) but they weren’t made available to students, which seems absurd on quite a few levels. I have no idea who designed these but they are very much in need of a revamp, preferably by filing them in the incinerator and coming up with something completely new.

The other tutes – one on levelling, one on cross-boundary pollution and another on cultural heritage – were all quite good and the level of teaching was high.

But overall, this subject is in need of some new and improved tutorial materials that fall more inline with the content of the lectures and that provide a better indication of what is examinable.

1x two-hour lecture and 1x one-hour lecture per week, 4x 3 hour practicals spaced throughout the semester, a 1 hour labs/tutorials in each of the non-practical weeks (so 8 in total)

Semester 1, 2015

H1