CVEN90051: Civil Hydraulics

Assignment/prac report for each of the 3 components (10% each)
30 minute test for each component (10% each)
2-hour exam (40%)

The assignments of this subject were all pretty good. You’re given one at the start of each component, but you’re expected to work on them progressively and they’re designed to follow along with your pace of learning the content.

Each of them try to take on some real world scenarios and generally use real world data. With the first one – on channel hydraulics – you’ll go through some basic Manning’s equation calculations (which are made a bit harder by some irregular geometry for the channels), plus some stuff on hydraulic jumps, weirs and sluices that should be somewhat familiar if you managed to decipher what Roger was trying to say back in SMD. For the second – on natural channels – you’ll have to answer some stuff on sediment distributions, sediment transport and erosion mitigation. For the third and final one – on coastal hydraulics – you’ll be concentrating on the Port Phillip heads and looking into gnarly items such as waves, rips, tides and storm surges.

As far as hydraulics goes, the assignments are all pretty interesting and not too difficult. Some questions were a little confusing at times, and I would’ve appreciated a few hints or clearer explanations as to what they were looking for, but they’re not too bad for the most part. They published the class averages for each of them and they were about 68-72% from memory. And although they were all individual assignments, they encouraged some collaboration and discussion with peers.

And I’m not totally sure if they realised but they published some overly specific rubrics for the first two assignments that kinda gave away some of the answers, which I guess was a bit of a pre-cursor of the exam blunder I mentioned in the TL;DR. But before I get to that you’re going to have to read about…

I currently have an amazing amount of work to do. Also, I just found a half-written but extremely long subject review that I must’ve done SWOTVAC and left in my notes app. Rather than doing actual work, I finished it off, so here you go…

Hydraulics taught well?

Hydraulics?

Taught well?

Wow.

So my review of the hydraulics component of Systems Modelling and Design wasn’t the most glowing I’ve ever written. Roger Hughes was a spud lecturer, the exam prep material was a joke, and the admin/student relations of the entire subject would’ve been better run by a Russell Hobbs toaster (they’re known for their excellent communication skills btw).

This subject takes quite a turn for the better. It starts with a clearly codified structure (which was completely absent in SMD), and it’s assisted by the concise and cogent video lectures from Mike Stewardson.

The subject has three components: channel hydraulics (basically a review of SMD), natural channels (i.e. rivers and streams) and coastal hydraulics (waves brah). These are given 4 weeks each, and each of them have their own assignment, prac report (except for coastal) and mid-semester test. Each component is given equal weighting on the exam so it’d be wise to pay attention all year, though we all know them late semester strugs.

So the review’s been pretty positive so far. Now we get to the awkward part.

Okay, so in the exam, Alex/Mike made a pretty massive mistake. Twice.

As you often see on the exams of mathsy-type subjects, they had a ‘show’ question. Basically “show that the volume of flow down a channel is 20.20 m/s” (I’m just making that figure up btw – this was like five months ago). Problem is, they left out the Manning’s n, a crucial figure you needed to end up at that value.

Panic-stricken, Alex rushed around about 15 minutes into the exam and told everyone the mistake and what the value of the Manning’s n should’ve been. By this time, I’d already had a go at the question, got stuck and moved on. So, when Alex gave us the figure, I went back and did it again. I still didn’t end up with the value we were meant to show.

As it turns out, the value that Alex gave us was wrong. Oof.

Then Mike hurriedly came around and gave us a different value. I did the question again and got the answer I expected, but I’d probably wasted at least 10-15 minutes faffing about throughout the process. If you had kept trying to find your mistake, having made the assumption that the staff of the subject had actually done their job and provided the correct info, you probably could’ve wasted a good 30 minutes.

So yeah, pretty bad form. And apparently a similar thing happened back in 2013. Double oof.

To account for this, they did a bit of a boost job on the exam results – rather than marking them out of the full 120, they cut it down to 90, which accounted for that 30 minutes lost within a 2 hour exam. This was a pretty good compromise in the end (and it probably got me a higher mark that I would’ve otherwise gotten tbh), and it’s why I haven’t doffed anything off my rating for the subject despite this massive, double-tiered effup.

Proofreadibg, amirite.

Stuffups aside, it's nice that the exam is only worth 40% and isn't a hurdle. With ~70% being the average mark for the assignments, it should mean that the average student will only need about 20% on the exam to pass the subject. If you've stuck with this super-long review to this point, I'd say you're probably capable of that.

N/A (YouTube lectures)

Mike Stewardson

This is a subject where you won’t attend a lecture all semester, and not just cos you’re lazy or because the lectures are scheduled before 11am.

Nah, Mike goes all PewDiePie on us and delivers his lectures via YouTube. The lectures he gives are really concise and pithy (about 15-25 minutes a week), somewhat following the old 80-20 rule – you’ll get about 80% of the content from them in about 20% of the time it’d take for a normal, full-on lecture.

If you’re keen, you can pick up the remaining 20% from the prescribed readings. This is really how they want you to learn the subject and you’re probably going to need to do it if you want a H1. But you could probably do alright just relying on the YouTube lectures tbh.

The video lectures seem to have quite a low production budget (so much so that Mike wore the same red fleece in all of them), but they cover all the main points from the readings and direct you where to go to find out more. It also makes it easier to illustrate stuff via video than a traditional lecture would – editing exists and serves to cut out any fiddling around with technology that goes along with the process of middle-aged academics venturing beyond words on a slide.

And as a lecturer, Mike’s pretty good at getting his point across and explains things clearly and with reference to real life examples.

Hydro was pretty good I guess, and this is way too long already.

Yes

This subject has a prac for each of the first two components. Both are done in the wet lab below eng blocks C/D and are run by Danusia Kucharske (which is an anagram of ‘Sauna Shark Duckie’, in case you were wondering). Danusia is really good at explaining what you need to do with the prac. She’ll give you some examples and directions and let you know what you’ll need to pay attention to for the prac reports, each of which account for some proportion of the assessment for these components.

The first prac is on weirs and the hydraulics jump, and it’s pretty similar to what you would’ve done in SMD. It’s actually pretty fun cos Danusia’s a bit of a legend and let’s you play around with the apparatus a little. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but hydraulic jumps are pretty damn cool – me and physics aren’t the best of friends but Conservation of Momentum might be my second favourite natural law (my first – thanks for asking – is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says that, in the long term, we’re all fucked).

The second one is on sediment transport and incipient motion and I have far less to write about it. It was fine.

These pracs follow the old rule of experimental data: your results are never going to look as nice as you’d hope. Danusia has a pretty keen eye, so I’d be cautious about chopping and changing data to make it look like you knew what you were doing. Variance is expected and can usually be put done to a few factors, the discussion of which is appreciated by the markers.

4/5

None required

Tutes act as the main platform to reify concepts from the lectures and readings. Lone tutor Alex McCluskey has been involved in this subject for yonks and has it pretty down pat.

The tutes are pretty uniform in structure. Before each week’s tutorial, you’ll be expected to have watched the lectures, done the readings (again, if you’re keen), and worked your way through the little unassessed quiz they put out.

The tutes then start off with Alex running you through a recap of the quiz and some of the week’s key concepts, then doing some questions from the week’s ‘learning guide’, then perhaps a chance for some chat about assignments and the like.

These are run pretty well and I found them a lot more valuable than the tutes run in the Structural Theory and Design subjects, where you’ll just have a tutor doing questions on the board while everyone watches. They seem a bit more collaborative than your average eng tute, give you plenty of time to work on the questions, plus Alex is pretty diligent in coming around to everyone and trying to explain any problems you might be having. It’s a little like an old MAST style tute actually, and I’d say they were some of my favourite tutes at uni, which is a pretty big call when you realise that they involved doing maths.

But the learning guides could use a bit of a polish up. While they’re generally fine and actually give a really good (and, again, quite pithy, which I appreciate) summary of what you’re going to learn each week and the sections of the readings to focus on, a couple of them were quite typo-laden and some of the questions are a little buh.

For some reason, the tutorials were scheduled for three hours but none ran over two.

I’ve grouped the MSTs in with the tutorials because they’re not MSTs of the usual sort. After you finish each of the three modules, you’ll have an assessed test at the start of the next tutorial. So rather than mini-exam style MSTs, they’re just in-class tests, as you probably would’ve done at school. The questions are all multiple choice and there’s 15 or so to do in half an hour. They’re built from a database of about 40 or so questions, so you probably won’t be able to cheat off the presumably smarter person next to you – their test will be a little different.

These tests aren’t too hard, but some of the questions are based on content from the readings you probably didn’t read and you might meet a couple numerical questions that are tricky to work out within the allotted timeframe.

Each of the three tests (three modules, three tests) are worth 10%, same as the yet to be mentioned assignments. I did fine on the first two tests, but my mark on the last one was actually my worst mark so far in 4 years of university. 4.8/10. I think it’s the only thing I’ve ever failed. Golden boy no more.

2-hour tute each week
That’s it!

Semester 2, 2015

H1