ES200 – ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES: SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Instructors:

  1. Munish Kumar Chandel (Solid Waste)
  2. Virendra Sethi (Air Waste)
  3. Amritanshu Shriwastav (Water Waste)

Session: 2019-2020

Prerequisites: N/A

Course content and structure:

  • Module A: Air Quality
    34% ( (7+7) 2 Assignments + 20 Final exam)
    Key concepts of air pollution and air quality management

  • Module B: Solid Waste Management and Climate Change
    33% (10 Assignment + 23 Final exam)
    First part: Different aspects of municipal solid and biomedical waste management.
    Second part: Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, and how different technologies could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Module C: Water Quality Management
    33% (10 Assignment +23 Final exam)
    Water as a resource, water issues, water quality, and health, conventional water treatment and wastewater treatment, Alternate methods for water/wastewater methods.

Feedback on lectures:

All three of the instructors used slides in the lectures. These slides were made available on Moodle. Professor Virendra Sethi was really enthusiastic and made every possible effort to make the lectures more interesting and engaging.

The course content mostly consisted of environmental topics. The content of the course is not very interesting or engaging. There are certain things which you will find very trivial and there would be things which you have to take it as they are. The content is not very intellectually stimulating and you may lose out interest in the classes. Although, it’s good to attend the classes and listen properly as it will significantly reduce the time you need to invest in this course, just before exams, to achieve a good grade in this course.

Feedback on tutorials and exams:

There were no tutorials for this course. However, for each of the modules, you had one assignment (two in the case of Air module) which carried some weightage in your final evaluation. The assignments were based on topics covered in class, some extra reading material uploaded on moodle (along with the lecture slides), and a few references from the internet. The assignments were pretty easy and required you to frame subjective answers to some of the problem statements.

There was only one final exam for this half-semester course. The exam consisted of three parts, one for each module. The questions were based on the lecture slides, reading material uploaded, and the assignments given. The Water module part was a bit harsh on the marking scheme, you had just a few MCQs of 3 or 4 marks each with a negative marking of -2 or -3. The grading wasn’t very lenient and they did not entertain a lot of cribs. Although, the Air module Instructor was a bit generous here and gave you the liberty to write your cribs on a sheet of paper and submit it to him.

Difficulty (on a scale of 1 being very easy to 5 being very hard): 1

Textbooks & References:

There was no specific textbook or reference with which any of the instructors strictly adhered. However, each of the instructors individually provided you with information about different references you can use.

Grading Statistics:

AA 58 AB 87 BB 74 BC 54 CC 36 CD 15 DD 3 FR 6 II 4 PP 298 W 1 Total 636

Additional Comments & what you learnt from the course:

This is a compulsory course for every student in our college. The course appears as a core course in the seventh semester in the Department of Electrical Engineering. I was not sure about a Minor and hence didn’t take one in my third semester. Thus, I picked up this course in my third semester to save my credits in the seventh semester for some advanced courses in my own department or any other department. I knew of some people who have done the same, picked it up as an Institute elective, and later retagged it.

Reviewed by – Anjali Yadav (anjaliyadavay3008@gmail.com)