Examinations

There are two examinations planned for this class.

The examinations will take place in class during the normally schedule class time on the dates indicated on the syllabus. You are responsible for attending class on those date to take the exams. See the course syllabus for information on scheduling conflicts.

Advice From Former Students

Read what former students had to say about reading quizzes and examinations.

Using Notes and other Logistics

You may bring one page (two sides) of 8.5 by 11 paper containing your notes. They may be laser printed (in a small font), manually written, or any combination. They may include direct reproductions of slides or parts of slides. If you studied with a partner, you and your partner may use the same cheat sheet (but, of course, you must take the test individually).

Exam Topics

Each exam covers everything up to and including the day of the exam. This means that something in the lecture the "day before" the exam is fair game. This also means that the second exam is cumulative and may include material also covered in the first part of the exam (but it is likely to focus more on new material).

General philosophy:

I try to avoid multiple choice questions. I favor short answer, short coding (often by filling in parts of an already-available program), and the occasional matching question.
I favor questions that ask students to compare, contrast, evaluate, apply, restate, recognize or draw implications from keywords — rather than simply defining them. Since you can make use of notes, a question that just asks you to repeat the definition of branch coverage (or whatever) does not give us a good picture of your mastery of course concepts.
I favor asking students to "invert" concepts or otherwise take them apart to show master. If we always did things in A-B-C order in class, the exam is likely to have some C-B-A questions. Informally, I typically phrase this as "if I cover addition and negative numbers, the test will be on subtraction: you haven't seen it before, exactly, but should be able to do it".
I am wary of asking for very low-level details that you are likely to forget in a few months anyway (e.g., "what is the exact formula for the Maintainability Index?"). However, my view of what is likely to be useful later in life (e.g., code coverage) may differ from that of a frustrated student.

Previous Exams

Previous Midterm Exams (i.e., Exam #1) and answer keys:

Previous Final Exams (i.e., Exam #2) and answer keys:

Note that provided answer keys need not be exhaustive: they often list "one possible answer" rather than "all possible answers".

Review Sessions

If there is sufficient interest, the TAs will organize review sessions for the exam. This will not happen automatically. Demonstrate your interest via the forum or your discussion section.

Study Aids

Practice Reading Your Notes Out Loud

"Producing items by means as simple as saying, writing, or typing them can yield substantial memory improvements relative to silent reading. We review the research on this production effect and outline some important extensions and boundary conditions. We also evaluate the evidence that production enhances the distinctiveness of items in memory during encoding, thereby facilitating their later retrieval. There are issues to resolve and areas to explore, but production offers a practical means of enhancing some forms of long-term, explicit memory."

Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E. Bodner. The Production Effect in Memory. Memory, Vol 26, Issue 4, 2017.