(Last Mod: 05 January 2014 22:19:36 )
This course provides for the continuation of basic circuit analysis techniques developed in EENG281, by providing the theoretical and mathematical fundamentals to understand and analyze complex electric circuits. The key topics covered include: (i) Steady-state analysis of single-phase and three-phase AC power circuits, (ii) Laplace transform techniques, (iii) transfer functions, (iv) frequency response, (v) Bode diagrams, (vi) Fourier series expansions, and (vii) two-port networks. The course features PSPICE, a commercial circuit analysis software package.
Prerequisite: EENG 281.
Electric Circuits, 9th Ed.
James W. Nilsson and Susan A. Riedel
ISBN: 978-0-13-611499-4
Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011
The course has the following grading groups:
| Assignment Type | Each | Total | Weight |
| Homework (10) | 60 | 600 | 60% |
| Quizzes (3) | 20 | 60 | 6% |
| Hour Exams (3) | 60 | 180 | 18% |
| Final Exam | 160 | 160 | 16% |
| TOTAL | 1000 | 100% |
Please note that this is a the goal. Various things will almost certainly come up that will alter the final distribution of points. In general, each person's grade will be computed two or perhaps three ways and each person's raw score will be the highest among them. First, their percentage of the total points actually available, second, as a weighted percentage using the weights as above, and third, according to any new weights that might be announced.
Prior to each hour exam there will be a take-home quiz that will cover the same material. The intent is to give you the opportunity to work problems similar to those that will be on the exam in a less stressful and time-constrained environment. In addition, since these are due at the beginning of class the meeting prior to the exam when we are scheduled to conduct a review for the exam, it is hoped that you will be better able to come to class prepared to ask focused questions regarding material to be reviewed in class.
MasteringEngineering assignments will be due at 6:00AM on the assigned Due Date and all hardcopy assignments (homework and quizzes) are due at the beginning of class on the Due Date. It is not anticipated that anything will be submitted via Blackboard. In general, submissions will NOT be accepted late as this delays the ability to make solutions available or to get grading done in a timely manner. Exceptions will be made only by prior arrangement (with special case exceptions) for bonafide reasons and will generally have a 20% per day late penalty.
To be clear, circumstances that were known in advance and could be planned for will seldom constitute a bonafide reason for failing to submit an assignment on time. You are responsible adults on the verge of becoming practicing engineers. A key part of this is accepting the responsibility for good time management and the consequences for poor time management. If you choose to put off starting a project until just before it is due because you had three exams in two days or because you won't be back in town from a sports or interview trip until then, this is a choice you have every right to make -- but it IS a choice YOU made. Don't expect others to suffer due to poor planning on your part.
As a final note, don't push the submission deadline and put yourself in a position of having to submit in the last few minutes before the deadline expires. The MasteringEngineering site will simply not accept a late submissions. Furthermore, once class starts I will be very stingy about accepting homework from students that arrive late.
Keep in mind that the clock on the Blackboard or MasteringEngineering servers may not exactly match your watch, your computer's clock, or the official universal coordinated time maintained by NIST. Also, don't rely on the submission going perfectly smoothly. Give yourself a cushion and set your own personal deadline and treat that as though it were the official deadline. If you choose, for instance, midnight then if it ends up getting done a half hour late you are just fine. Also, if you routinely plan to get it done and submitted the day before it is due, then if you run into an unexpected hurdle, you not only have time to deal with it, but you also have the opportunity to consult with your instructor the following day and still be able to work on it and submit before the hard deadline.
First off, let's get past the notion that there is some ideal time for homework to be due. No matter what time is chosen, some fraction of students are going to find some reason to criticize it and some of those reasons are going to be reasonable, at least on the surface. However, nearly all of these criticisms implicitly assume that students will not be submitting until the actual deadline and ignoring the fact that students can submit at whatever time they choose, as long as it is before the deadline. Having said that, it is an inescapable fact that many/most students will tend to not complete assignments until just before they are due. With this in mind, the deadline for anything that is due and that is to be submitted electronically will be 6AM on the Due Date.
When something is to be submitted in hardcopy form, submissions will be accepted at the beginning of class on the Due Date. Note that this does NOT mean that you can print out files that were due electronically that morning and turn them in when you come to class. This only applies if the specified method of submission is hardcopy.
Why 6AM? The answer to this lies in why certain other obvious times were NOT chosen. If any time during the school day, say 8AM, noon, the beginning of class, the end of class, or 5PM, were chosen then students that procrastinated would be tempted to skip class (either this one or some other course) in order to finish the assignment and get it submitted. Another obvious choice is midnight, but this has two problems -- first, there is a good chance that other assignments will also be due at midnight and also, students routinely stay up late working on homework until well past midnight. Having an assignment due in the middle of this common work period is disruptive and often leads to students pushing the deadline too hard and submitting slightly late. By having the deadline be 6AM, few students will willingly plan to stay up that late (or get up that early) to work on an assignment, and thus will tend to naturally set an earlier "soft" deadline for themselves associated with when they prefer to call it quits for the night and go to bed. If the assignment ends up dragging on a bit later than that, they can deal with it without running them afoul of the "hard" deadline.
The next decision to be made is what day of the week assignments will generally be due. For this course, that will normally be Friday.
Why Friday? The real driving factor here is the Help Sessions that are held each Tuesday evening. If the assignments were due Wednesday, this might pump up the number of students attending the Help Session the night before, but it also encourages students to wait until then to start and penalizes students that really need some help to understand the concepts but who would then only have a short amount of time to get the work completed. The hope is that a Friday due date will place the Help Session at a time relative to the homework cycle that is not so close to the start of the cycle that students haven't had the opportunity to make a meaningful start at the assignment yet no so late that students can benefit from the Help Session before it is due. Another motivation for having assignments due on Friday is to remove that burden from the weekend load. There will almost certainly be plenty of other courses that expect/assume that the bulk of the work will be done on the weekend, so the goal here is to not compound that situation unnecessarily. Finally, the goal is to give the grader a reasonable opportunity to get submissions graded and results posted prior to class on Monday.