Final Exam Information

Material covered

The exam will cover the entire semester. It will only include topics that we covered in lecture and/or on the assignments.

Exam details

• The exam will be held on Friday, December 18, 2020 from 6:00-8:00pm EST

• All students must take this exam, unless you have made explicit arrangements with your instructor.

• The exam will be conducted in the context of Gradescope and Zoom. However, all of your work must be handwritten on blank sheets of paper (lined paper is fine).

• The exam will be 2 hours in length, and you will then have and additional 15 minutes to scan your answers and turn them into a PDF that you will upload.

• Most of the problems on the exam will be similar in format and difficulty to the problems on the midterm exams. There will not be any multiple-choice questions. A few problems may require a bit more work than the typical midterm problem, but they should still be doable in the time available.

• As with the midterm exams, there will be two separate Gradescope assignments:

  • The first assignment will contain the questions themselves, along with a timer that will show you how much time you have left.

    You may only view the questions for the exam that you are actually taking. If students who have permission for the alternate exam, view the questions for the main exam, Gradescope will record the fact that you have done so. Any student who attempts to view both exams will receive a grade of 0 on the exam.

  • The second assignment will be used to upload your scanned answers.

• The Zoom meeting for the exam will allow the staff to provide guidance during the exam, and it will also allow you to ask questions using the Chat interface. The URL for the Zoom meeting will be posted on Piazza in advance of the exam.

• You may use one 8.5-inch by 11-inch sheet of handwritten notes, with notes on both sides of the sheet.

• You should take the exam by yourself in a quiet room, without assistance from others and without using resources of any kind except your sheet of notes. Although we can’t prevent you from consulting other resources, attempting to do so will likely cause you to run out of time.

• You should have your phone charged and ready to assist with scanning and uploading your solutions at the end of the exam, but you may not use it for any other purpose during the exam.

• Aside from your phone and the machine on which you are accessing the exam, you must turn off and put away all other electronic devices.

• You may not communicate with anyone during the exam except the course staff.

• We reserve the right to conduct a separate one-on-one oral examination with any student to verify the student’s understanding of the material.

Writing, scanning, and submitting your answers

• You must hand-write your answers on blank sheets of paper. You should have 15-20 sheets of paper. You may not use a tablet or other electronic device to compose your answers.

• At the end of the exam, you must scan the pages containing your handwritten answers and turn them into a single PDF that you will upload. Gradescope provides guidance for how to do this here.

  • In addition to the apps that Gradescope recommends, CamScanner is another good app for scanning. It works on both Android and iOS.

  • You are welcome to use another scanning app, as long as you are comfortable using it to turn multiple pages of handwritten answers into a single PDF.

This is the same process that we used in midterm 2. You can find more details and a practice exercise here.

Please make sure that you practice the process of scanning multiple sheets of paper and turning them into a single PDF.

Preparing for the exam

• One way to prepare is to review the lecture notes, lecture videos, and assignments, and to make a summary of the key points in your own words. “Boiling down” the material in this way is a great way to ensure that you really understand the key concepts.

• We also encourage you to do practice problems. Options include:

  • redoing the questions posed in lecture. The online lecture notes include both the questions and–on the next page–the answers.

  • reviewing lab exercises and comparing with the solutions provided.

  • the practice problems for midterm 1 and midterm 2

  • some practice problems on topics covered in the final third of the course.

  When working on practice problems, try to come up with your answers on paper, rather than through a trial-and-error approach in your programming environment. This will be give you an experience that is similar to the one that you have during the exam.

• Feel free to post questions on Piazza (using the final_exam tag) or to email course instructor or TF.