Midterm I Information

Material covered

The exam will primarily focus on the material that we have discussed in lecture from the beginning of the semester through the material on recursion.

• Students in Section A1 can access all of the relevant lecture materials in the Resource folder of our class Piazza.
• Students in section B1 can access all of the relevant lecture materials in the Lectures section of your course’s Blackboard site.

Exam details

• We will have only one administration of the exam:

  • the exam will be on Wednesday, 10/14, from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. This is the exam that all students should take unless specific alternate arrangements have been made.

• Students who have received permission for extra time should send an email to their instructor with relevant documentation.

• 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).

• You will have 90 minutes in length for the exam, and you will then have up to 15 minutes to scan your answers and turn them into a PDF that you will upload. More details on this process are provided below.

• There will be two separate Gradescope assignments for each of the exam times:

  • 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.

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

• The Zoom meeting for the exam will allow us 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 should take the exam by yourself in a quiet room, without assistance from others and without using resources of any kind. 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 taking 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 10-15 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.

IMPORTANT: Practice exercise
To prepare for this process, you must do the following set-up ASAP and do the practice exercise as soon as you are notified they are available on Gradescope:

1. Install a scanner app on your phone:

   • Gradescope includes recommended apps in its guidlines.

   • 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.

2. Use whatever pen or pencil you plan to use during the exam to handwrite some text on at least two separate sheets of paper. (It doesn’t matter what you write, as long as you have handwritten text on at least two sheets of paper using the pen or pencil that you plan to use on the exam.)

3. Follow the process described in the Gradescope guidelines to:

   • Scan your pages of handwritten text and turn them into a single PDF.

   • Review the scanned pages in the app and make sure that they are clearly readable.

   • Share the file from the app by choosing to mail it to yourself or by using one of the other options.

4. Login to Gradescope, go to the CS 112 page, and choose the assignment labeled Practice uploading scanned answers. Choose the Submit PDF option, and use it to upload the PDF that you created for your scanned answers.

5. Important: You will see a question outline along with thumbnails of the pages from your uploaded PDF. For each question in the outline, you must:

   • Click the title of the question.
   • Click the page(s) on which your work for that question can be found.

   As you do so, click on the magnifying glass icon for each page and doublecheck that the pages that you see contain the work that you want us to grade.

6. Once you have assigned pages to all of the questions in the question outline, click the Submit button in the lower-right corner of the window. You should see a box saying that your submission was successful.

Preparing for the exam

• One way to prepare is to review the pre-lecture materials and lecture notes and 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:

  • reviewing the questions from lecture. The online lecture notes include both the questions and–on the next slide–the answers.

  • redoing the lab exercises, the solutions for which are available on the Labs page.

  • some additional practice problems
    (Note: Solutions to these additional practice problems will be posted under Other Content on Blackboard as we get closer to the exam.)

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

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