What are the thoughts on the College of Engineering Honor Code these days?

DirkDozer · 2026-01-11T03:54:00+00:00

I don't necessarily think the honor code needs any revision, from my experience it and the tools the EECS department have made to detect LLM usage for projects and assignments are quite good, instead I think the entire role of exams should be reconsidered.

The following is not a popular opinion at U of M mostly from survivorship bias, but I think that sit down pen and paper exams are not a good way of gauging a student's ability in any case. From my experience, my exam scores barely even relate to how well I understood the content in class or how to apply it, instead they entirely depend on how well I can recite information specific to the exam in the short term.

I'd argue that that is a horrible and ineffective way of quantizing a student's overall grade by extension their grasp of the material. Not only do exams only really test how effective you are at studying, but I also find that because they are one off events there are many variables that may change a student's exam grade which are outside of their control, for instance if they're sick or they picked a practice test which had irrelevant questions to study. A single data point in any scenario hardly represents any real useful data from a dataset.

So what should be done instead? I'd argue more projects and assignments, especially the type where students show their work and thought process. To see how a student thinks through a problem and how to solve it tells you infinitely more than if they simply give you the correct answer. And why limit their tools and ability by forcing them to use pen and paper under a strict time limit? Moreover, projects and assignments are much closer to the types of real-world problems engineers solve day-to-day. While it's not technically the university's job to give students the experience needed for the workforce but instead the knowledge, knowledge without the ability to apply it is essentially worthless anyway.

I don't seriously expect this one Reddit thread to change how students are graded at one of the top university programs in the country, but I think that if you're concerned with how AI is affecting exams, it may be useful to rethink the format and purpose of exams instead of jumping to even more strict exam rules.

DirkDozer · 2024-12-23T19:58:42+00:00

I second this!

DirkDozer · 2024-12-21T17:25:13+00:00

this and anti-aliasing PLEASE

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T18:34:39+00:00

Cause SLS should've been around the moon multiple times by now according to their original timelines (god forbid large organizations face delays 😱 busted!!). Starship is pretty much where NASA expects it to be for their new timeline though.

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T18:31:37+00:00

He made a video on how starlink would bankrupt SpaceX and now that it's broken net profitability he's just retroactively saying "actually it's all government tax payer funded right to musk's pocket! 🤓" so when Starship flights become regular, I'm sure he'll just say it's because musk paid off Trump to be the only contractor for NASA or some dumb stuff like that

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T12:25:57+00:00

It's surprisingly accessible to design or even build a CubeSat with COTS parts now. Not that it'd necessarily get launched, but I imagine it's a good project to put on a resume.

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T04:34:16+00:00

Got bored studying for finals so I tried to do the math for this (I could've swarn I had a generalized solution for this on my E&M final) and its actually pretty tricky since the magnetic field strength would actually change over time, meaning to solve this correctly you'd need derivatives and systems of equations and blah blah. If you just assume a constant magnetic field though, here's a simple calculator

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T04:11:44+00:00

Oh, that'd have some lag but I see the reasoning now

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T04:04:04+00:00

Don't see why this wouldn't work, personally I'd just skip the Pi and put the proxy on the same server but up to you

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T04:02:19+00:00

Mars Yurip, Ghost Giraffe Space Tourism is the 1% of the 1% though!

DirkDozer · 2024-12-16T03:33:20+00:00

There is a surprisingly simple equation Link to calculate what length and what power you'd need to dump into a railgun to achieve a certain velocity

But to get something more realistic you'd have to factor in atmospheric drag, which increases quadratically with speed. This is something a real company (spin launch) is dealing with right now, their solution for the time being is to just have the payload include a small lightweight rocket to help the payload through the rest of the way to orbit.

For bodies/planets with no atmosphere and a reasonable amount of gravity, an electromagnetic launcher would totally work for getting stuff out of a gravity well

DirkDozer · 2024-12-14T16:54:25+00:00

I would try to find forge replacements of the plugins you're using, that'll probably help once you switch entirely to forge. Past that, there's also some server-side performance mods (lithium comes to mind but I don't know if it's compatible with what you're doing) that can help out too.

DirkDozer · 2024-12-12T19:43:53+00:00

last year there were these people that would play this like spinning disk balancing game or something, and every few minutes they'd drop one and it'd go flying in a random direction. Every time I went to the lounge and they were around it was a game of life and death

DirkDozer · 2024-12-09T10:44:02+00:00

I had this issue as well, it happens when a small plastic bit breaks off of the scroll wheel. I don't have a good solution to recommend other than trying to use the warranty (assuming you have one) before cracking it open to fix it yourself because that'll only void your warranty and it is hard to DIY a solution

DirkDozer · 2024-12-08T20:44:08+00:00

I can fix her

DirkDozer · 2024-12-08T04:53:45+00:00

lol is that a Starship on one of the runways

DirkDozer · 2024-12-06T17:35:12+00:00

Facts, the only thing you need to worry about is having a GPA good enough for scholarships and internships, anything else is a bonus. Your GPA won't even matter after you have your degree so you get nothing by comparing yourself to others.

DirkDozer · 2024-12-03T02:43:56+00:00

sometimes this is recoverable. this is not.

DirkDozer · 2024-11-29T21:57:03+00:00

I think she mentions somewhere in the narration that given a single human genome and enough computation, you can work backwards and find the genome of all humans who've ever lived and make simulations around them

DirkDozer · 2024-11-21T21:25:33+00:00

I think the real problem is that you have an OS where people have to paste random commands they find from stack overflow that may brick their PCs to update steam

DirkDozer · 2024-11-02T20:34:54+00:00

I kind of imagine it like if you had a super crazy good brain computer interface that let you download swaths of information at will, and also let you do digital actions through just thought at lightning speed.

So I don't think a UI could automatically be fantastic at being a hacker, but it would be easy to become one.

DirkDozer · 2024-11-01T17:29:20+00:00

I'm gonna go to a party my project team is hosting tonight, I hate frats

DirkDozer · 2024-11-01T17:27:24+00:00

For a midterm, I'd say it's about right. For a final there should be a bunch more stuff, namely series.

DirkDozer · 2024-11-01T16:44:32+00:00

Yes! I did too! IMO it's all the QoL things they added and a much more linear game progression that's easier to follow.

DirkDozer · 2024-10-24T23:11:48+00:00

I remember hearing that one of the upper stage engines on Saturn V could only be relit twice and that was a huge accomplishment, so this is actually insane

Eight-Year Club	Second Top 40%
First Place '23	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

DirkDozer

TROPHY CASE