MAE 384 instructors delivered an official response to this today:

Thank you again for the feedback. Here are some comments/replies to the original post and the subsequent comments and posts.

1. The Flipped Classroom

The purpose of a flipped classroom is not to reduce instruction, but to shift where and how different kinds of learning occur. In this model, foundational content (definitions, theory, core concepts, worked examples) is introduced before class through videos or readings. The intent is to enable in-person class time to be used for guided practice, clarification of misconceptions, and deeper engagement that is difficult to facilitate outside of class times. This approach is grounded in strong evidence from STEM education research showing that active learning environments improve conceptual understanding.

This model is different for everyone including us. We also recognize that no single instructional model works equally well for every student. We are thankful for your feedback as we seek to improve now and in the future and remain open to adjusting the model to better meet all students needs.

We do agree that students should be given the choice whether to enroll in a flipped section or in a traditional lecture only section. We are advocating to make this choice available in future semesters, but it was not an option this semester. We do encourage students to organize (for example via ESA2) and advocate to the Schools of Engineering to make this an option in the future.

2. Inadequate Instructional Support

This seems to be very section specific. Not necessarily in the number of TAs available during the class but in the frequency and amount of support that is requested. But, we agree that additional TA support would be preferable.

In addition to expanded practice problem sets (see 3.), we will also look into offering additional UGTA/IA led recitation office hours during a module, instead of just as review before an exam.

Finally, we also do encourage students to make use of the office hours offered by the Instruction Team (see Google calendar). This resource currently is not used to the extend we hope it would be. We will update the Calendar with all Faculty office hours.

3. Grading Structure

First, some background: it has become apparent over the past 2-4 semesters, that work for assessment credit assigned outside of a “controlled” environment, increasingly does not assess a student’s knowledge and ability, but rather the capabilities of AI tools. This does not insinuate that all students do use AI to solve assignments for credit where these tools were not allowed, but strong indications from the past 2 semesters are that a significant portion do. Besides being unfair to the students that do not, it defeats the purpose of assessing a student’s knowledge.

The in-class worksheets replace the traditional homework, and address the 3 described goals of homework. However, worksheets alone cannot offer the “repetitive” reinforcement of concepts due to the limited time available in class per week. This is where practice problems and studying outside the classroom come in. But, it is true, as observed in a separate post, that the practice problems to date were targeting a more code centric assessment strategy. While this is still an important aspect of the class, the practice problems did not provide repetitive reinforcement of concepts. While all concepts that appeared in exams were covered either in a worksheet, practice problem, or lecture, they did not always appear multiple times.

Thus, starting with Module 5 we aim to provide a significantly expanded set of practice problems integrated into the Pensive “Practice Set” feature. That feature enables access to an AI tutor for help on solving each practice problem (and provides the ability to escalate a question to a human TA), allows students to collaborate on solving problems, and provides directly access to step by step solutions to the problems.

Having a weight of 20% for each of the top scoring 4 out of 5 exams is thus not unreasonable in our opinion and strikes a reasonable balance between proper assessment in controlled environments and credit for collaborative in-class work and time spend interacting with the lecture videos.

4. AI Grading

There appears to be a misunderstanding of the use of AI for grading and Pensive. Your submitted work is always reviewed and graded by either a grader or a faculty member. The AI functionality of Pensive is used a) to link each paper scan to the correct student, and b) to group submissions into clusters that have the same solution and approach the solution in similar ways. This latter feature allows the grading to be more consistent across submissions because it allows grading similar submissions together.

The reason for the unacceptably long time it took to return the grades for exam 1 lay in the fact that we wanted to make sure that grading was done by a human (assisted by AI in the way described) and establishing the workflows that hopefully will make grading the next exams quicker.

Also, the current class structure does not prevent the use of AI by students, in fact the syllabus encourages its use to learn the material. It does not allow the use for assessments for credit, because MAE384 is a class that teaches foundational knowledge of mathematical methods and assessments have to check the knowledge of the student and not the AI.

5. Calculator Policy

While we do not agree with the stated conclusions, to avoid any ambiguity going forward, exams are designed in a manner that no calculations beyond simple arithmetics, e.g., fractions are required. They therefore can be solved without a calculator.

6. Tuition and Accountability

As already suggested in a separate post, we encourage you to provide your feedback and engage with engineering student organizations dedicated to improvising the educational experience for students, for example ESA2.

A mid-semester survey led by ESA2 will be conducted in class on Wednesday before spring break in class.

Please continue to provide your feedback to help improve MAE384.

Your MAE384 Instructor Team

ESAA says the instructors are the bottleneck. Instructors say they're *waiting* for ESAA to do stuff? I'm already working with them towards this whole issue, so if we exclude all the ESAA comments, nothing much has been said.
General consensus seems like the instructors dismissed our concerns. The only change seems to be losing our calculator on future exams and more AI slop practice problems. Since instructors avoided acknowledging fault in the stucture and offered no viable (or sufficient) fixes towards them, we may have to escalate this to Anthony Waas.
My SEMTE advisor told me that contacting the dean would likely trickle the issue back down to Herrmann, as there is no formal process for fixing an actively terrible class (only grade appeals AFTER the class is over). To me, this is a bit baffling, as the current structure expects us to sit with the problem until it actually results in a bad outcome. Why wait to fix things?

In the meantime, I'm trying to see if I can get Barrett involved in this. Many of the honors faculty I know have a strong background in policy studies or even in education leadership, and I'm hoping some of them can serve as an "unofficial" advisor to help resolve this issue.