End-course summary for Reservoir Geomechanics (resgeo202)

by Jens-Erik Lund Snee and Gader Alalli

Department of Geophysics
Stanford University

June 2017

Thank you all for contributing to a successful and thought-provoking Reservoir Geomechanics
course. We appreciate the great questions and answers that you posted on Piazza, which added to
everyones learning outcomes. This report is intended to give you a chance to see how many students
enrolled, the backgrounds of your fellow students, and the final grade distributions.

End-course survey
If you have not yet had the opportunity to fill out the end-course survey, please do so as soon as
possible. This information will help us improve the course for future offerings. The survey is located
at the bottom tab on the left-hand menu on your course page for Reservoir Geomechanics, and it
can also be accessed by following this link: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/
jfe/form/SV_0MwHZw9bMzPHGER?a=3d7c0bd51ea9e0be767e09409189e06c.

1 Enrollment
A total of about 6400 students enrolled in this fourth offering of Reservoir Geomechanics. Of those,
about 1370 followed through all the way to receiving Statements of Accomplishment. The enroll-
ment numbers as a function of time are shown in Figure 1.
This course drew students from at least 119 countries (out of 193 recognized by the United
Nations). Figure 2 shows a partial list of the countries represented and the number of students
enrolled from each. The five countries with the highest number of enrollments, in descending order,
were the United States, Colombia, Mexico, India, and Egypt.

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 Figure 1: Enrollments in Reservoir Geomechanics over winter and spring 2017.

Figure 2: Student geographic locations.

Figure 3: Student ages.

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 Figure 4: Maximum educational attainment reported by students.

Figure 5: Student genders.

Based on self-reported information, the majority of students were fairly young, educated at a
bachelors or professional degree level, and male. Figure 3 shows the age distributions, which have
two modes at about 23 and 27 years old. The vast majority of students were between 2040 years
of age. The most common maximum degree attained was a bachelors degree (41.3%), but a close
35% of students have attained a masters degree (Figure 4). Appreciable numbers of students also
reported having earned, in descending order, secondary degrees (10.2%), doctorates (5.9%), and
associate degrees (5.6%). Finally, as Figure 5 indicates, the vast majority of students identified as
male (76% male, 23.7% female, and 0.3% other; 180 students did not report a gender).

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 Figure 6: Number of unique users per day on the discussion board.

2 Discussion board participation

As you can see in Figures 6 and 7, participation in the discussion board usually spiked near the
beginning of each week, when one homework assignment was due and a new one was made avail-
able. A slight tapering over the course of the spring is evident in the amplitude of the spikes in
both numbers of active users (Figure 6) and questions posted (Figure 7). This may have been due
in part to attrition with respect to completing the assignments, and in part to the release of the final
assignment two weeks before its due date, which meant that some students completed all work and
stopped participating on Piazza about two weeks before others did.
In total, over 550 unique posts were made on the discussion board, with over 3000 total contri-
butions, including answers and replies to posts. Of just the answers (not replies), about 340 were
made by the instructors and about 440 were made by students. The average response time was about
1.3 hours. A number of students were quite active on the discussion board, both posting and an-
swering questions. Over twenty students posted over twenty contributions each, and nearly twenty
students each viewed over 400 posts. Nine students each answered at least ten questions.

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 Figure 7: Number of questions posted per day on the discussion board.

3 Grade distributions
Figures 8 through 15 show the classs performance on all questions in each assignment, as well as
the number of students who attempted each question. Green and red indicate the proportion of
correct and incorrect answers, respectively. Because most questions in this class were graded on a
true/false basis, no grades between 0% and 100% were typically assigned.
As Figures 815 indicate, the students who attempted each question generally got those ques-
tions correct. Even the hardest questions, and those that generated the most discussion Piazza, were
answered correctly by a majority of students. The hardest questions, based on the proportions of
incorrect answers, were probably Homework 3 Question 2.c. (which asked which principal stresses
might change due to viscoplastic creep in the Barnett Shale, Figure 10) and Homework 4 Question
1, Case 4 (which asked which stress states are possible at given values of Shmin and SV ; Figure 11).
The hardest assignments, based on the proportions of incorrect to correct answers, appear to have
been Homework 3 (Estimating Rock Strength from Geophysical Logs) and Homework 7 (Building
a Geomechanical Model). The easiest assignment appears to have been Homework 6 (Constraining
Stress Magnitudes from Wellbore Failure). Overall, the class did quite well on the assignments, and
most people who attempted all assignments received Statements of Accomplishment.

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Figure 8: Grades for Homework 1. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

Figure 9: Grades for Homework 2. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

Figure 10: Grades for Homework 3. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

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Figure 11: Grades for Homework 4. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

Figure 12: Grades for Homework 5. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

Figure 13: Grades for Homework 6. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

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Figure 14: Grades for Homework 7. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

Figure 15: Grades for Homework 8. Green and red bars represent the proportion of correct and incorrect answers, respectively.

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