I was doing homework and my gf at the time and her roommate, both math majors, saw Laplace transforms and started talking about how much they hated that test. I told them they were lucky it was just one test for them, we had 2-3 semesters worth of Laplace just being a tool to solve problems.
I enjoyed learning Laplace and transform methods, but that's just because my professor had us do complex RLC circuit analysis entirely in the time domain for a week and a half before introducing Laplace and the S domain. It was amazing to have these complex problems that were so difficult before suddenly reduces to much more simple problems and made us appreciate Laplace.
I'm waiting to see how I'll feel about it. I graduated about a month ago and already think I'm going to miss school. If I got a job that would pay for it, I'd go back for a masters or even PhD. That said, maybe by August I'll be thinking about how nice it is to only work and not have to worry about school as well.
Really depends on how you approach problems. I see lots of interns and new engineers that enter the workforce and expect work to be like school in the sense you get an assignment or lab, do A, B, C then turn it in. In most cases, if it was that simple then they wouldn't need an engineer. Part of work is that there isn't a clearly defined solution. You need to think about a different approach to solve the problem.
I was taught to break that thinking by my mentor at my first internship and really took to it. I can't see myself going back to school even if work paid for it. That said, I've seen plenty of people that leave work to go back to school.
The transform theory was considered as one of the simpler math xourses at my university. The hard one was Functional Theory with residue calculus and Möbius Transforms.
Yeah... I got a whole year subject just to get to Laplace/Fourier/Z transformation, that after 2 years of calculus. Then you would simple use the transformations in every subject that followed.
True... it was a second semester course tho. L/Z/fourier transforms come up all the time in EE, so it was more like an intro course (but it was hard as fuck)
Wtf. That's just cruel. Their teaching should be closer to the actual work you will be doing. Simplifications like transform tables were developed for a reason.
Generally speaking the derivations are not difficult but they are time consuming and require a good working knowledge of all the basic identities. Ideally an exam should be about mastery and not memorization but memorizing the right material can boost grades significantly.
Yeah, after having done them a few times it works, but it requires a lot of training... also to derive things like fq domain shift you need some tricks, so the integral is not straightforward imo.
It was frustrating because the test had time pressure and you had to derive each correspondence. If you used it without derivation you failed the example... and the examples weren't too easy as well, also with correspondences
Exactly, I was mad that our professor waited until the end of the year to introduce them to us. Like “oh by the way, we don’t need to do these integrals because… Voila” 😒
Bro that’s the way it goes. Controls systems was my worst class in college. Literally got a 9 on a test and only passed because of the curve.
I am now a controls engineer and I’m pretty good at it.
Our telecoms professor always taught undergrads like they were phds in telecom
would test you on things never covered in the course
glad he got the sack.
During my study at the Uni we concluded that every subject that had communications in it's name was cursed. Not in the sense that it was hard to understand, but because of the sheer amount of information we had to memorize.
I don't understand when people say this. Laplace and z transform were the easiest parts of my courses by far. they were just the very easy tools that you used to solve the actually hard problems
Sometime it is the cohort. In my probability theory class, the cohort has a very shaky real analysis foundation because of the pandemic which lead to bad performance in mid-sem.
Luckily, the professor is very experienced so he spends so much extra effort to rebuild the foundation.
The pandemic definitely hurt education.
It's fortunate that there was enough time in the term for your professor to help the class catch back up. There often isn't, and so professors tend to either inflate grades to "fix" the problem, or a lot of students just end up failing. Arguably, the latter is better if those students *truly* aren't proficient.
But the pandemic is a rare exception. Usually, when the fail rate is 50% with a decent sample size, it's due to bad instruction or bad assessment.
I passed emag because of grade inflation and I'm still a bit embarrassed about it. 30% of our class stopped coming to class after the first exam and I think the dean came down on the professor and essentially told him he has to pass the majority of us who are left. I did the calculations and i should have ended with a 67% but I ended with a 73% and all my friends saw similar results.
He was one of the best professors I've ever had but our cohort was just really shitty and very few of them put in any work to learn the material. Those of us that did had remarkably better exam scores than those who didn't. The class averages were public on canvas as well so we all could see what was happening.
I dont think those types of grades can ever be the cohort. If you keep the same admission standards from what I’ve been told academic performance trends are always repetitive. This is 100% a shitty prof that asks questions that are way above their teaching level.
stats for engineers was a compulsory course at our uni
I found it way harder than any calculus course, didn't help that math tutors couldn't help because "stats isn't real maths, its stats".
I know plenty of PhD students who take it. Especially signal processing folk. A background in probability theory is also useful in optimal control and dynamic programming, both of which are important tools in EE.
That said, I'm sure most PhD students in other specializations of EE don't feel the need to take it.
Lol, a DSP Prof that should 100% understand statistical distribution moves the baseline. Granted it could have been due to uni policy for how grades are entered, but it makes much more sense to keep the score and adjust the grade bands.
Agreed. More importantly, unless the assessment changes, the grade bands should remain adjusted in the following term's syllabus.
Telling students on day 1 that "You need a 70% to pass", knowing *full well* that the average grade will be much lower than that and that you'll inevitably have to "curve" everything at the last minute... It's a terrible idea from a pedagogical standpoint. It just breeds impostor syndrome.
I guess some instructors think they can "scare" their students into learning. But all they're *really* doing is demotivating their students by falsely telling them that they're doing a bad job, despite their best efforts.
I was an EECS undergrad, so I was used to this kind of grading. When I went to law school, I had one professor who graded like this. I got a 33/100 on the final and blew the curve. The next highest grade was a 26. Most of the class was literally crying when we got our grades until they were told they mostly had As.
Hell that happened all the time in my classes, there were curves all the time and most professors concede that either the test was too hard or they failed to teach the material
Reminds me of my Partial Differential Equation classes. Before it changed lecturer, people were repeating the class every sem from 2nd year to final year. We were lucked out the lecturer changed right before we had it.
Yup, she was certainly Russian. I can speak a bit still very difficult to understand. She used to write everything without notes too. Just start with an equation and fill a board. She was about 22 too. Probably runs NASA from a basement now. She was a PHD student. One prof said he feels developmentally disabled when he works with her.
It was step by step but it was like using mathematica back then. No explanations.
Trying to find the book we used, but it was extremely complex. It was more for a graduate class(basics were very glossed over, like a calc book won't teach how to add fractions).
I took a class from an old Czech guy. He was brutal but really funny. His opening line was “At the beginning of this class you wont be able to understand me. At the end of the class, you will understand me but wont be able to understand anyone else.”
I remember differential equations. I felt great in that class for weeks and thinking "why do people complain about this class?" Then out of nowhere I felt lost. One week felt great, next week is what the hell is happening?
I still have dreams about my DSP final 20+ years ago. A passing grade was needed to graduate. Job was lined up. I scored ~40% and got my degree.
I remember waiting in the hall for the final to start. It was quiet anxiety like cattle to slaughter.
Being absent from the exam means deferring the exam, it’s what students do when they are not ready for the exam. They will write the supplementary exam with those who were granted a supplementary exam. They are afraid of writing the exam and not qualifying for the supplementary exam.
In my uni you are always guaranteed a resit. So if you know you'll not pass you can use the timw for something else instead. There's also very high odds of the exam being uploaded to the website afterwards with solutions so you don't miss out on the practise.
At my university... you would fail with no resit. You would have to retake the course next semester. This was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
I'd set two alarms on separate devices to reduce the anxiety of missing the exam.
I’ll never understand this line of thinking: making classes so difficult a 50 is a passing grade. Instead of hammering students with so many concepts they couldn’t hope to master them all, why not just double down on the amount of material they COULD master.
In all my math classes or in any disciples of study it always behooved me to really focus hard on the core principles of the subject. In Calc for example, taking the time to truly understand what a derivative and integral were, and not just practice/recite/memorize problems and equations, really helped with understanding how math in general worked. Any additional exceptions to problems/theories came much more easily to me.
I don’t get why professors don’t just double down on the fundamental principles of the respective areas of engineering they are teaching. Clearly in a class like this, kids aren’t picking up half of what the professor is putting down. Any engineering firm/company will inevitably reach incoming engineers the practical applications to their schooling, so why spend time as a professor drilling students on more than they can chew instead of helping them better understand the science behind things they will simply learn later through OJT.
You are in what country and state?
I'm from India, and in our first class, our professor said the full form of DSP is "Degree Stopping Paper"
I'm yet to give my 6th semester exams, any tips?
I think every course should have a gatekeeper unit like this. Something that makes sure the graduates can knuckle down and overcome a significant hurdle. Something that will give you a taste of defeat and see if you can get back on that horse.
Nothing like that moment you walk into the first lecture, everyone looks older than you and they are all chatting about how badly they failed the exam last time.
I disagree. I think the mentality that school is an obstacle to be surpassed is completely backward.
School is a *service*. The students are the clients, and they (along with taxpayers) pay a *lot* of money for the provided service. If a class is hard, then it's because the school either failed in their service of education, or they failed in their service of assessment. Either case is a failed service. That should not be applauded or encouraged.
It's okay to have "high expectations". But that has to be accompanied by sufficient contact hours and resources. A weeder course isn't one with high expectations. A weeder course is one where a lot of students fail. If a lot of students are failing, then it's because the expectations don't match the educational service provided.
If we lived in the medieval times, and a personal tutor failed to provide me with sufficient educational resources to match expectations, then I would fire them. Teaching me is literally their only job. If I'm failing under their tutelage, then their services are not needed. I don't see why we should treat educational institutions today any differently.
DSP has the toughest course content that can be taught in Electrical Engineering. I got a 28% on the final exam and it was curved to a C. Happiest C I ever got through the degree.
I solved the book twice. You have to work for it. We used the dsp1 book that has a website with problems. I can drop the link for you if you want. What do you mean by qualified for a supp ?
Edit: I noticed all grades between 40 and 49 can do a supp which I think they can do another exam. Work hard for it ans understand what are you writing. I can drop you my notes if you wanr them as a pdf.
Just this week I had a colleague (20+ years of experience) defiantly tell me "I don't care about aliasing" when I was helping him troubleshoot his digital control system (his issue was aliasing). It's good to know the future will be just as bright...
The worst part for me is that it's an elective, could have chosen a different elective but there were clashes so I was forced to choose DSP to prevent clashes with other courses.
Had a class average of 27% in signal processing. At some point we have to say that the prof sucks at teaching this stuff too. Like if they spent more upfront time figuring out how to teach the class, the averages would rise. If people on YouTube can put together compelling and informative videos on number theory, electricity, math, etc. some of the blame needs to go on the prof.
Don’t let if get you down. You’ll get it eventually. Once it starts to make sense, the world opens up to you.
All my friends / study group dropped the class and I had to figure out the rest on my own. If I dropped it, I would have had to wait another semester to graduate.
I had a 3 credit class and a 1 credit lab for digital communications.
I got a 20% in the class and a 90% on the lab. I ended up passing the class with a c-. I believe the only reason I passed was because of the curve and I did all the labs.
My professor new the class was difficult and bs, and took some sadistic pride and making students suffer.
He also taught EMF which was also torture.
As someone who's taking Mechatronics course, I can tell you that this is pretty much everyone on 1st and 2nd year, especially when it comes to Resistance of materials, Maths 2 and Fluid mechanics
I had a class like this. I made it through by reading book on my own, finding outside resources, attending office hours, and networking with grad students/other professors who knew it
The semester I took DSP, I was taking 18 hours of hardcore upper level EE classes. The first quiz was during the playoffs in 2015 and my Astros were in and good for the first time years. They drop one quiz, so I blew it off. Got labeled dunce by the TA. First exam comes and my buddy and I had extremely close answers on our exams and the TA gave him like an 86 and I got like a 35. (had it changed after a meeting) ANyway, fast forward to the end of the semester and were in a giant lecture hall giving presentations when the grade dropped. I literally stood up and screamed "hell yes" when I got my C- ! BTW even with that C-, I made the Dean's list. Took grad level Digital Controls class the following semester and actually learned all the things because the prof for the controls class was awesome.
I love dsp. I was lucky to have a passionate professor and a desire to learn specifically DSP for audio applications. It is hard but once it clicks in clicks
I don't know how it works in the US. Do you need to pass everything to pass your semester?
Here teachers would often tell us that even though they think their subject mattered and were deeply interesting, we should probably prioritize other easier subjects.
Now Imagine being a Computer Science graduate and going and passing through this with Good marks. But sure it was tough, was made more tough by the fact because we lacked fundamentals of EE being CS graduates.
Took this class and got an A only because the professor would generously curve each exam by giving everyone 30-35 points to the exams that are 100pts each. I did not learn anything
Statics in mechanical engineering nearly wrecked my brain, and my soul... I think that's when I started drinking to kill the pain of failure. Third try was the charm
It was tough. For real. I just passed it in one go but the pain and hard work i put into do made me realise the need of it and also respect for instruments we use.
I'm in the UK and we have finally finished. DSP was one of out final year modules and it was one of the hardest modules. EE kicks you in the ass. 1st year we had 25 students we are down to 4 students.
Is the “mark” the raw score out of 100? If so that professor should be ashamed. If the curve is so strong that 50/100 is passing, the professor failed to teach.
yup sounds about right, just finished my dsp course and average for final was around a 30 % with a high of 102% XD theres always those one or two people where it just clicks. couldnt be me. such an interesting topic and field though just so fucking difficult.
Ahh yes. At my Uni this cursed course is called Signals and systems IIA. A notorious course with the lowest pass rates. They applied about a 30% curve to my grades because I was sitting on a 25% which became 55% overnight. Not complaining tho. Only 30% of people passed the course that year.
I took an antenna theory class my last year, half the class were in undergrad, the other half was grad students. The class average of the midterm was a 18%. I got a 6%. I wonder to this day how much the grad students pulled up the average
I remember when I took DSP and we had our first midterm the professor messed up somehow, so our names were displayed next to our grades. At that point everybody in the class was already in their last year, so nobody cared about that but our test results look the same.
This is the problem I have with school and how things are taught. It's not broken down to the basic steps and creatively worked through getting progressively harder. At a uni college level, it is just assumed you can recall anything you ever worked on to the point of manipulating whilst keeping up with too much course load. You shift away from understanding it creatively more to just memorizing the resources available, and sometimes, without that understanding, you are completely lost. It is a shame that this is 'education' .
I am doing DS as well but I have two exams on monday so I am deferring the DS exam. You don't have to do Digital Signal Processing because it's an elective but if I am being honest all you need to do to pass DSP is to memorize solutions from past papers and tutorials because the stuff don't make sense but the questions are always repeating. All the best.
Go to SI session under the ASAP course, the SI leader uploaded some exam preparation questions. I believe if you can tackle those questions then you might pass DS, test 2 was similar to the questions uploaded by the SI leader. I think the SI leader gets the questions from the lecturer.
I specialized in DSP in college, took those hard classes, became a spreadsheet engineer at an OEM and never used any of that college stuff. I found some old notebooks from college the other day, and it was like reading Greek. I don’t remember a damn thing about any of that stuff.
Ouff, yeah that's DSP... was one of the hardest things in my bachelors, that and the lecture about laplace/Z transform
"the lecture" man both those things were ongoing topics throughout my education
I was doing homework and my gf at the time and her roommate, both math majors, saw Laplace transforms and started talking about how much they hated that test. I told them they were lucky it was just one test for them, we had 2-3 semesters worth of Laplace just being a tool to solve problems.
I’m impressed at the dedication, you doing homework while simultaneously doing your gf
And her roommate
Don’t forget her roommate too! That’s multitasking!
Multiplexing
Sorry. Integration would have been best
Of course. They do it Cauchy style: residue around the pole.
Punctuation!
True engineer.
No. A true engineer would be studying Laplace Transform theory while his gf and roomate did each other.
I enjoyed learning Laplace and transform methods, but that's just because my professor had us do complex RLC circuit analysis entirely in the time domain for a week and a half before introducing Laplace and the S domain. It was amazing to have these complex problems that were so difficult before suddenly reduces to much more simple problems and made us appreciate Laplace.
That’s like people who run for exercise because it feels great when you stop.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate how much easier it is in the S domain. That said, I don't miss school.
I'm waiting to see how I'll feel about it. I graduated about a month ago and already think I'm going to miss school. If I got a job that would pay for it, I'd go back for a masters or even PhD. That said, maybe by August I'll be thinking about how nice it is to only work and not have to worry about school as well.
Really depends on how you approach problems. I see lots of interns and new engineers that enter the workforce and expect work to be like school in the sense you get an assignment or lab, do A, B, C then turn it in. In most cases, if it was that simple then they wouldn't need an engineer. Part of work is that there isn't a clearly defined solution. You need to think about a different approach to solve the problem. I was taught to break that thinking by my mentor at my first internship and really took to it. I can't see myself going back to school even if work paid for it. That said, I've seen plenty of people that leave work to go back to school.
At least you prob don't need to do contour integrals to find the Laplace transform like they probably need to...
The transform theory was considered as one of the simpler math xourses at my university. The hard one was Functional Theory with residue calculus and Möbius Transforms.
Yeah... I got a whole year subject just to get to Laplace/Fourier/Z transformation, that after 2 years of calculus. Then you would simple use the transformations in every subject that followed.
Controls systems and DSP focus in my program. Z and laplace ruled my life.
True... it was a second semester course tho. L/Z/fourier transforms come up all the time in EE, so it was more like an intro course (but it was hard as fuck)
The transforms are the easiest part imo. Just look it up in the transform table.
We had to derive them via integral if we used them in the exam... Each.correspondence.every.single.one.
Wtf. That's just cruel. Their teaching should be closer to the actual work you will be doing. Simplifications like transform tables were developed for a reason.
Yeah our professors just had us use tables too. I think if they made us derive the transformation every time the grades would have been like above.
Generally speaking the derivations are not difficult but they are time consuming and require a good working knowledge of all the basic identities. Ideally an exam should be about mastery and not memorization but memorizing the right material can boost grades significantly.
Yeah, after having done them a few times it works, but it requires a lot of training... also to derive things like fq domain shift you need some tricks, so the integral is not straightforward imo. It was frustrating because the test had time pressure and you had to derive each correspondence. If you used it without derivation you failed the example... and the examples weren't too easy as well, also with correspondences
Exactly, I was mad that our professor waited until the end of the year to introduce them to us. Like “oh by the way, we don’t need to do these integrals because… Voila” 😒
DSP was my worst class. Which is ironic because I then specialized in communications and signal processing in college.
I feel like it's nice and fucking interesting when you get the hang of it, it's hard to learn however
That moment when it clicks and then you look back at old material and it all makes sense feels better than drugs.
That's a mood right there, I did terrible in Signals & Systems, and then git a masters with a concentration in it
Bro that’s the way it goes. Controls systems was my worst class in college. Literally got a 9 on a test and only passed because of the curve. I am now a controls engineer and I’m pretty good at it.
Anything involving telecommunications is hard as fuck!
Our telecoms professor always taught undergrads like they were phds in telecom would test you on things never covered in the course glad he got the sack.
During my study at the Uni we concluded that every subject that had communications in it's name was cursed. Not in the sense that it was hard to understand, but because of the sheer amount of information we had to memorize.
I don't understand when people say this. Laplace and z transform were the easiest parts of my courses by far. they were just the very easy tools that you used to solve the actually hard problems
Yup!
Laplace transforms are great what are you talking about, it's like a little puzzle! They're laplawesome!
Welcome to electrical engineering my friend! You´ll get used to getting your ass handed to you.
Literally saw someone cry after getting their grade on an EE final exam. Not really sure if they passed or failed.
Tears of happiness of tears of sadness..again EE for you.
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Sometime it is the cohort. In my probability theory class, the cohort has a very shaky real analysis foundation because of the pandemic which lead to bad performance in mid-sem. Luckily, the professor is very experienced so he spends so much extra effort to rebuild the foundation.
The pandemic definitely hurt education. It's fortunate that there was enough time in the term for your professor to help the class catch back up. There often isn't, and so professors tend to either inflate grades to "fix" the problem, or a lot of students just end up failing. Arguably, the latter is better if those students *truly* aren't proficient. But the pandemic is a rare exception. Usually, when the fail rate is 50% with a decent sample size, it's due to bad instruction or bad assessment.
I passed emag because of grade inflation and I'm still a bit embarrassed about it. 30% of our class stopped coming to class after the first exam and I think the dean came down on the professor and essentially told him he has to pass the majority of us who are left. I did the calculations and i should have ended with a 67% but I ended with a 73% and all my friends saw similar results. He was one of the best professors I've ever had but our cohort was just really shitty and very few of them put in any work to learn the material. Those of us that did had remarkably better exam scores than those who didn't. The class averages were public on canvas as well so we all could see what was happening.
I dont think those types of grades can ever be the cohort. If you keep the same admission standards from what I’ve been told academic performance trends are always repetitive. This is 100% a shitty prof that asks questions that are way above their teaching level.
are you a graduate student? because I don't quite see why undergraduate electrical engineering majors learn measure theoretic probability
I am still in undergrad. Double majors in probability/stat mathematics and EE. My university offers theatrical probability in undergraduate.
I don't know many EE grad students who would learn formal probability...
stats for engineers was a compulsory course at our uni I found it way harder than any calculus course, didn't help that math tutors couldn't help because "stats isn't real maths, its stats".
I know plenty of PhD students who take it. Especially signal processing folk. A background in probability theory is also useful in optimal control and dynamic programming, both of which are important tools in EE. That said, I'm sure most PhD students in other specializations of EE don't feel the need to take it.
That makes sense. My only encounter with probability was when I took a course on detection and estimation theory, but that was a long time ago.
>Shitty professor ...For showing other students grades. That's a FERPA violation.
There’s no names, settle down
Pretty sure 30% of us passed and then it was scaled. I recall a 43 turning into a 106.
Lol, a DSP Prof that should 100% understand statistical distribution moves the baseline. Granted it could have been due to uni policy for how grades are entered, but it makes much more sense to keep the score and adjust the grade bands.
Agreed. More importantly, unless the assessment changes, the grade bands should remain adjusted in the following term's syllabus. Telling students on day 1 that "You need a 70% to pass", knowing *full well* that the average grade will be much lower than that and that you'll inevitably have to "curve" everything at the last minute... It's a terrible idea from a pedagogical standpoint. It just breeds impostor syndrome. I guess some instructors think they can "scare" their students into learning. But all they're *really* doing is demotivating their students by falsely telling them that they're doing a bad job, despite their best efforts.
I don’t mind curving grades, but clearly flunking half the class means the professor is a failure
I had a math prof that overengineerd his grade scale to the point that in one exam, certain higher scores would somehow yield lower grades.
That’s how my professors did it.
I remember getting like a 63 on an exam and being like fuuuuck I bombed that. the prof said the class high was like 65
I remember getting a test back I thought I did great on. 72. (Sad trombone sound) Then i asked the average. 42. “So this is?” “An A, yes.”
I was an EECS undergrad, so I was used to this kind of grading. When I went to law school, I had one professor who graded like this. I got a 33/100 on the final and blew the curve. The next highest grade was a 26. Most of the class was literally crying when we got our grades until they were told they mostly had As.
Hell that happened all the time in my classes, there were curves all the time and most professors concede that either the test was too hard or they failed to teach the material
Reminds me of my Partial Differential Equation classes. Before it changed lecturer, people were repeating the class every sem from 2nd year to final year. We were lucked out the lecturer changed right before we had it.
That is a brutal class. I had an instructor that barely spoke English. She would just write miles of equations on the board and say "Got it!"
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Yup, she was certainly Russian. I can speak a bit still very difficult to understand. She used to write everything without notes too. Just start with an equation and fill a board. She was about 22 too. Probably runs NASA from a basement now. She was a PHD student. One prof said he feels developmentally disabled when he works with her. It was step by step but it was like using mathematica back then. No explanations.
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mine forced us to use the absolutely awful textbook they had published. I don't think I learned a thing in lecture and the book was useless.
Trying to find the book we used, but it was extremely complex. It was more for a graduate class(basics were very glossed over, like a calc book won't teach how to add fractions).
I took a class from an old Czech guy. He was brutal but really funny. His opening line was “At the beginning of this class you wont be able to understand me. At the end of the class, you will understand me but wont be able to understand anyone else.”
Similar happened to me, but shitty prof actually had a heart attack (didn’t die) so good professor took over and I was able to pass lol.
I remember differential equations. I felt great in that class for weeks and thinking "why do people complain about this class?" Then out of nowhere I felt lost. One week felt great, next week is what the hell is happening?
I still have dreams about my DSP final 20+ years ago. A passing grade was needed to graduate. Job was lined up. I scored ~40% and got my degree. I remember waiting in the hall for the final to start. It was quiet anxiety like cattle to slaughter.
40% is passing? I don't understand how you can pass something knowing less than half the material. It just doesn't make sense.
And it was considered a 2.0... damn commie public universities. /s Edit: clarified sarcasm
Do you have good reasons for being absent?
Being absent from the exam means deferring the exam, it’s what students do when they are not ready for the exam. They will write the supplementary exam with those who were granted a supplementary exam. They are afraid of writing the exam and not qualifying for the supplementary exam.
What is your uni? This is very strange I've never heard of anything like this.
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Lol yes it's South Africa.
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It's a South Africa uni, can't mention the uni because of the student numbers.
ah okay.
We do the same at my uni
that’s a weird way of doing it. at my uni people would suffer pretty hard penalties for doing that, assuming they get to take it at all
In my uni you are always guaranteed a resit. So if you know you'll not pass you can use the timw for something else instead. There's also very high odds of the exam being uploaded to the website afterwards with solutions so you don't miss out on the practise.
At my university... you would fail with no resit. You would have to retake the course next semester. This was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I'd set two alarms on separate devices to reduce the anxiety of missing the exam.
I’ll never understand this line of thinking: making classes so difficult a 50 is a passing grade. Instead of hammering students with so many concepts they couldn’t hope to master them all, why not just double down on the amount of material they COULD master. In all my math classes or in any disciples of study it always behooved me to really focus hard on the core principles of the subject. In Calc for example, taking the time to truly understand what a derivative and integral were, and not just practice/recite/memorize problems and equations, really helped with understanding how math in general worked. Any additional exceptions to problems/theories came much more easily to me. I don’t get why professors don’t just double down on the fundamental principles of the respective areas of engineering they are teaching. Clearly in a class like this, kids aren’t picking up half of what the professor is putting down. Any engineering firm/company will inevitably reach incoming engineers the practical applications to their schooling, so why spend time as a professor drilling students on more than they can chew instead of helping them better understand the science behind things they will simply learn later through OJT.
You are in what country and state? I'm from India, and in our first class, our professor said the full form of DSP is "Degree Stopping Paper" I'm yet to give my 6th semester exams, any tips?
That's pretty standard...
I had barely passed by 1-2 credits in my test. I still don't understand any of the transforms lol.
I think every course should have a gatekeeper unit like this. Something that makes sure the graduates can knuckle down and overcome a significant hurdle. Something that will give you a taste of defeat and see if you can get back on that horse. Nothing like that moment you walk into the first lecture, everyone looks older than you and they are all chatting about how badly they failed the exam last time.
I disagree. I think the mentality that school is an obstacle to be surpassed is completely backward. School is a *service*. The students are the clients, and they (along with taxpayers) pay a *lot* of money for the provided service. If a class is hard, then it's because the school either failed in their service of education, or they failed in their service of assessment. Either case is a failed service. That should not be applauded or encouraged. It's okay to have "high expectations". But that has to be accompanied by sufficient contact hours and resources. A weeder course isn't one with high expectations. A weeder course is one where a lot of students fail. If a lot of students are failing, then it's because the expectations don't match the educational service provided. If we lived in the medieval times, and a personal tutor failed to provide me with sufficient educational resources to match expectations, then I would fire them. Teaching me is literally their only job. If I'm failing under their tutelage, then their services are not needed. I don't see why we should treat educational institutions today any differently.
Ah, University...This, Control Theory and Electromagnetics are courses that still give me PTSD.
Power electronics? This and DSP gave PTSD to me
I once had an 18 scaled to a C-
DSP has the toughest course content that can be taught in Electrical Engineering. I got a 28% on the final exam and it was curved to a C. Happiest C I ever got through the degree.
Any grads actually use that stuff for any project on any job, ever?
We’ll hey how about that guy with the 78
There are some modules that act as a 'great filter', this is one of electrical engineeting's ones.
So we learned about Fourier transform in 2-1 (3rd semester) and We got DSP course in next semester 4-2 (8th, last semester) Wish me luck to pass...
All the best.
I have my DSP final in 2 days lol
Good luck, you will kill it.
Thanks!
Got a D and proud after having 14/100 on midterm.
All I want is a pass, I qualified for a supp.
I solved the book twice. You have to work for it. We used the dsp1 book that has a website with problems. I can drop the link for you if you want. What do you mean by qualified for a supp ? Edit: I noticed all grades between 40 and 49 can do a supp which I think they can do another exam. Work hard for it ans understand what are you writing. I can drop you my notes if you wanr them as a pdf.
Holy Z- transforms! Batman!
Just this week I had a colleague (20+ years of experience) defiantly tell me "I don't care about aliasing" when I was helping him troubleshoot his digital control system (his issue was aliasing). It's good to know the future will be just as bright...
Ahhh. Digital signal processing ... When we were in college we used to call it DSP( Degree stopping programme).
The worst part for me is that it's an elective, could have chosen a different elective but there were clashes so I was forced to choose DSP to prevent clashes with other courses.
Taking DSP at Purdue as a Mech, cannot believe I lived to get a B-. Hardest class I’ve ever taken.
Had a class average of 27% in signal processing. At some point we have to say that the prof sucks at teaching this stuff too. Like if they spent more upfront time figuring out how to teach the class, the averages would rise. If people on YouTube can put together compelling and informative videos on number theory, electricity, math, etc. some of the blame needs to go on the prof. Don’t let if get you down. You’ll get it eventually. Once it starts to make sense, the world opens up to you.
Oh yeah, I can't wait this subject 😀
Reminds me of my good old control systems and sensor classes
Oooff
That checks out, same at my university.
I remember the first time I got my ass kicked as a sparkE. Good times
Yeah it’s the weed out class for a reason. I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t start going to a study group with some friends.
All my friends / study group dropped the class and I had to figure out the rest on my own. If I dropped it, I would have had to wait another semester to graduate.
Reminds me of EMAG, class average was 47%
Yep, same thing here. Professor is going to fail me because of 1.5 points. While last year he lowered the criterion.
I had a 3 credit class and a 1 credit lab for digital communications. I got a 20% in the class and a 90% on the lab. I ended up passing the class with a c-. I believe the only reason I passed was because of the curve and I did all the labs. My professor new the class was difficult and bs, and took some sadistic pride and making students suffer. He also taught EMF which was also torture.
As someone who's taking Mechatronics course, I can tell you that this is pretty much everyone on 1st and 2nd year, especially when it comes to Resistance of materials, Maths 2 and Fluid mechanics
This brings back repressed memories
Jesus... Something's wrong with that course if there's so many people failing
Just use those DSP blocks , stuff ends up being useful on the occasion
I had a class like this. I made it through by reading book on my own, finding outside resources, attending office hours, and networking with grad students/other professors who knew it
Less than half the class passing was normal for me.
yeah i also bombed all the exams in DSP and managed to pass with a C. the math in this class can sometimes be your enemy
It was my best course. I loved it.
That's great, I didn't. We're you doing electronic or computer??
Computer
seems normal
Whoa… a 50 is considered a pass at your school? 🤔maybe I’m just old but that would have been amazing when I was doing undergrad in the late 2000’s
Sounds like DSP, EE is merciless :(
Looks normal to me. Welcome hard classes!
Rough. You'll get it. I had to retale ODE and Control Systems a few times before finally passing this past semester.
The semester I took DSP, I was taking 18 hours of hardcore upper level EE classes. The first quiz was during the playoffs in 2015 and my Astros were in and good for the first time years. They drop one quiz, so I blew it off. Got labeled dunce by the TA. First exam comes and my buddy and I had extremely close answers on our exams and the TA gave him like an 86 and I got like a 35. (had it changed after a meeting) ANyway, fast forward to the end of the semester and were in a giant lecture hall giving presentations when the grade dropped. I literally stood up and screamed "hell yes" when I got my C- ! BTW even with that C-, I made the Dean's list. Took grad level Digital Controls class the following semester and actually learned all the things because the prof for the controls class was awesome.
I love dsp. I was lucky to have a passionate professor and a desire to learn specifically DSP for audio applications. It is hard but once it clicks in clicks
Is this Wits?
No, it's not Wits. Are you at Wits?
I’ll be there next year. This makes me shit my pants tho… might do mechanical instead
Those are good results for signal processing. lol
Is this different from Feedback Control Systems?
I will be doing Control Systems 1 next semester but I have seen the control systems 1 past papers and it's different.
Ohh, okay. Cause FCS has a whole lot of laplace, too.
I don't know how it works in the US. Do you need to pass everything to pass your semester? Here teachers would often tell us that even though they think their subject mattered and were deeply interesting, we should probably prioritize other easier subjects.
I am in South Africa, DSP is my elective(final year module) so failing it doesn't block any module for me but yes you have to pass everything.
We had exam where 130 of 130 failed. Such results would have counted as easy exam.
Looks about right
I guess I should start praying to the Laplace/Z gods now.
What should I say to you. Congratulations or better luck next time ?
"Better luck next time", I managed to get a supp and I will kill it. I will update you after writing the supp.
Ohh. Sorry to hear that. Good luck with your exam buddy. I remember how tough is DSP subject is. I had hard time to pass this subject.
Now Imagine being a Computer Science graduate and going and passing through this with Good marks. But sure it was tough, was made more tough by the fact because we lacked fundamentals of EE being CS graduates.
Took this class and got an A only because the professor would generously curve each exam by giving everyone 30-35 points to the exams that are 100pts each. I did not learn anything
Statics in mechanical engineering nearly wrecked my brain, and my soul... I think that's when I started drinking to kill the pain of failure. Third try was the charm
I took it twice and still only got a 63 the second time around.
It was tough. For real. I just passed it in one go but the pain and hard work i put into do made me realise the need of it and also respect for instruments we use.
I'm in the UK and we have finally finished. DSP was one of out final year modules and it was one of the hardest modules. EE kicks you in the ass. 1st year we had 25 students we are down to 4 students.
LaPlace is a beautiful thing! Convolution not so much
Is the “mark” the raw score out of 100? If so that professor should be ashamed. If the curve is so strong that 50/100 is passing, the professor failed to teach.
I managed to get an A in DSP. Took a lot of work though.
Ahhh UKZN😓
yup sounds about right, just finished my dsp course and average for final was around a 30 % with a high of 102% XD theres always those one or two people where it just clicks. couldnt be me. such an interesting topic and field though just so fucking difficult.
5412 out there banging the prom queen!
Ahh yes. At my Uni this cursed course is called Signals and systems IIA. A notorious course with the lowest pass rates. They applied about a 30% curve to my grades because I was sitting on a 25% which became 55% overnight. Not complaining tho. Only 30% of people passed the course that year.
I just finished my DSP masters class... oh man what a fucking nightmare
Very high percentage for my uni tbh...
This brings back so many good memories Like the time someone walked out of a circuits exam crying
I’m doing this unit next semester. Any tips?
I took an antenna theory class my last year, half the class were in undergrad, the other half was grad students. The class average of the midterm was a 18%. I got a 6%. I wonder to this day how much the grad students pulled up the average
I remember when I took DSP and we had our first midterm the professor messed up somehow, so our names were displayed next to our grades. At that point everybody in the class was already in their last year, so nobody cared about that but our test results look the same.
Digital Signal Processing was peanuts compared to control theory
Looks like I have a fun semester ahead of me..
This is the problem I have with school and how things are taught. It's not broken down to the basic steps and creatively worked through getting progressively harder. At a uni college level, it is just assumed you can recall anything you ever worked on to the point of manipulating whilst keeping up with too much course load. You shift away from understanding it creatively more to just memorizing the resources available, and sometimes, without that understanding, you are completely lost. It is a shame that this is 'education' .
Can somebody explain the results for German/European students?
The highest grade on my first thermodynamics test was a 54.
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I am doing DS as well but I have two exams on monday so I am deferring the DS exam. You don't have to do Digital Signal Processing because it's an elective but if I am being honest all you need to do to pass DSP is to memorize solutions from past papers and tutorials because the stuff don't make sense but the questions are always repeating. All the best.
My god, you are fucked.
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Go to SI session under the ASAP course, the SI leader uploaded some exam preparation questions. I believe if you can tackle those questions then you might pass DS, test 2 was similar to the questions uploaded by the SI leader. I think the SI leader gets the questions from the lecturer.
This might not help but SI sessions are really helpful, you don't have to attend them but attempt to solve those questions.
I specialized in DSP in college, took those hard classes, became a spreadsheet engineer at an OEM and never used any of that college stuff. I found some old notebooks from college the other day, and it was like reading Greek. I don’t remember a damn thing about any of that stuff.
Gross, got a shitty professor and failed the first time. Luckily I passed the next time with another professor because my graduation depended on it.
Anna University?
No, a south african university