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CS 415 - Programming Languages - Exams

Overview

This course will have two midterm examinations and one final examination. The final examination is cumulative.

Materials

By a decisive in-class vote, you are allowed to bring only one page of notes (front and back) -- hand-written by you.

The exams are not open book. You may not use electronic devices of any kind.

Hints from Wes For Midterm 1

Not enough people were interested in a midterm review session. Instead, I have decided to provide "follow along" examples: You can use these to help you study for Midterm 1. Note that Midterm 1 officially includes everything in the class up to but not including semantic analysis (i.e., everything before Scope).

Hints For The Final

The final exam is Thursday, May 10 from 1400 to 1700 in MEC 214 (that's the same room we always have class in).

In general, all of the topics covered in the course (either in lecture, in the written assignments, in the programming assignments or in the required reading) are fair game. The following list of topics is not necessarily exhaustive (although it is close); you are responsible for all of the material.

The topic weights are largely based on what you said in class during the topic survey. There are two changes: typing and opsem are both big topics despite student desire for them to be marginalized. However, within those two topics "basic questions" (e.g., "what is operational semantics?") will be worth proportionally more points than "advanced questions" (e.g., "give an opsem rule for this new pyscho for loop").

The "big" topics won't necessarily be huge parts of the exam time-wise or space-wise, they'll just be worth more points. For example, it's not clear that there are huge detailed questions we can ask about garbage collection, but whatever we do ask will be worth more points than you would think, etc.

The final exam is not open book but allows two page-sides of notes (not necessarily hand-written). Don't go overboard with the cheat sheat -- if you're bringing in something that requires its own index, for example, you'll probably lose more time looking stuff up than you save by having it written down.

Practice Exams

Here are some practice exams from other similar courses at other universities. These courses are not exactly the same as this one, so these practice exams may not be indicative.