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Teacher Information
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 Evaluator: funrater
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Date: 1/18/2009
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Course: cee 3104 (Fall 2008)
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Vikesland is a great professor. This class was not my favorite by FAR, but he made it super easy. I had to put little effort into anything, which was helpful with my other classes. He is really lax and cares about students. He even gives lots of extra credit that isn't difficult to obtain. Just get this professor, whether you're into environmental engineering or not.
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5
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Evaluator: ahr
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Date: 1/3/2008
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Course: CEE 4114 (Other)
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I loved this class! As someone studying public health from a social science perspective, this was my first engineering class. I thought Dr. Vikesland was well-prepared for each class and planned engaging case-studies and assignments. The reading was reasonable and on-topic. I totally wasn't expecting it to be a good class, but I think it's one of my top five, EVER. I still reference stuff I learned in that class.
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5
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Evaluator: lord_aqua
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Date: 5/29/2003
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Course: CEE 3104 (Spring 2003)
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All things considered, I thought this guy was a pretty good teacher, and he’s fairly new to the school. As an ECE this was the only civil engineering class I have ever taken, so I really didn’t know what to expect going into it. One of my civil engineering friends told me that the guy was going to be an ass, and for the first few weeks I thought he was right, but that all changed…
He told us the first day of class that we would have homework due once a week or so, and that he would be giving us unannounced open notebook quizzes, but he also said that there would never be a quiz and homework due on the same day, (he broke that promise once, but the quiz was trivial so I didn’t think anything of it). So since this class met twice a week, I had a pretty good idea of when a quiz would be, and unless I managed to give my homework to a friend the other day, it pretty much meant that I was required to go to every class, or else take a 50/50 chance of losing 2 points off my final average since the 10 quizzes he planned to give comprised 20% of the final grade.
I thought I was in a freshman class when he told us that we were expected to read through the chapters and take our own notes on the material covered in class, and that’s what the quiz would be based off of, and we would either hand in our handwritten notes for the quiz grade or reference them during class for the quiz. Well soon enough, it became obvious that the whole take your own notes from the book thing was not necessary, as anything that was on the quizzes came from the notes that he gave during class the previous day, and he never actually asked us to turn in any of our notes for a grade. Towards the end of the semester when scheduling and laziness set in, he ended up resorting to passing around attendance sheets, group work, or double counting our homework for the last 5 or so quiz grades, and he even dropped the lowest one.
I thought the homework sets were fairly trivial, at most 6 or 7 problems once a week that were mainly plug-n-chug and took no more than 2 hours.
His tests on the other hand were kind of hard, he doesn’t allow you to bring in your own formula sheets, and he didn’t always supply you with the formulas you needed, or they would be in the most general form and you would have to think up on your own how to tailor them to work for a particular problem. When it came to the chemistry stuff, he expected us to memorize the chemical compositions and structures of various compounds discussed in class, which of course sucked.
On a positive note, there was almost always one problem that nearly the entire class did bad on, so he gave us the problem to rework as either a take-home or as group work during class, so that helped redeem all our grades a bit.
He would prepare templates for us to print out prior to the day’s lectures with big blank gaps so that we could write down whatever he was writing on the overhead. He really seems to like using different color markers to write stuff down with for no apparent reason. So he basically spent the entire class recopying his own notes onto the transparency templates for us, and we spent the entire period copying them down. He would go fast at times, or stand somewhere where half the class couldn’t see what he was writing, but he would go back to something if anyone asked.
I really don’t know what we were supposed to get out of this course, but overall, compared to other legitimate 3000 level classes I have taken, taking this one with Vikesland did not require much effort at all, and I still got a good grade out of it.
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5
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Evaluator: hokie3j
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Date: 4/23/2003
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Course: CEE 3104 (Spring 2003)
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He´s a decent teacher, but I found myself sleeping in his class a lot. He reads right from the notes on his overhead, and is not too stimulating. I got the grade I wanted though, which is what counts for me.
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4
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* Evaluations on this site are the opinions of the users of this site, not those of www.ratevtteachers.com or Virginia Tech.
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