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Midterm 2 Fall 2025 Release Notes

Stats and grade discussion:

Stats and grades will be discussed in the place listed below. If you have questions you can follow-up with instructors on Piazza.

  • GT/OMSA students: Presented during Bootcamp OH session on Oct 2 at 630pm ET; Recording will be posted within 24 hours
  • VMM students: Recording of session will be shared by Friday evening
  • Everyone: Powerpoint will be posted in Piazza in the post-exam pinned post (#1174 for GT, TBD for VMM)

Access to your Midterm:

  • Access Workarea:
  • GT Students: Click on link through Canvas like when you started the exam (no Honorlock required)
  • EdX Students: Access submissions via the below instructions
  • Access Submissions: You can access that from Vocareum directly labs.vocareum.com
  • First time logging in: If you haven't logged in here before, enter the email address you used and reset password.
  • Common bug: If you see only one assignment, you need to log out and log back in, then you should see everything.

Solutions:

  • Official Solution
  • TA solutions covered during the post-exam bootcamp sessions can be found in the piazza post mentioned above

General post-exam reminder:

Now that midterm 2 is over, it's a good time to review all of the resources the class offers and assess how useful they are. As a reminder, the major resources are:

  • Piazza (pinned notebooks threads for homework questions, private posts for help on specific things)
  • Bootcamp which includes (all can be found on the pinned Piazza post):
  • Live sessions (1-2 week) walking through Colab notebooks, past exams, test-taking strategies
  • Colab notebooks and supplemental resources
  • Recordings and documentation for everything above, allowing you choose the content that's most useful for you
  • Notebook Review Sessions (Thursday evenings)
  • TA Office Hours (1:1 TA Sessions)

Version History

  • 1.0.2 - 2 Nov, 2025 - Improve ex6 tester
  • 1.0.1 - 1 Nov, 2025 - Fix typo in ex7: Example weight in instructions has been corrected to .81 instead of .82
  • 1.0.0 - 31 Oct, 2025 - Initial Release.

Scoring cap, time limit, etc

Midterm 2 is finally here... (available 31 October, 2025 12:00 UTC). There are 11 exercises worth a total of 21 points with a 13 point cap, so you have to get 13 for 100%. The time limit is 4 hours. The points, time, and threshold were determined by a data-driven process based on internal testing.

Exam Overview

Midterm 2 is available starting 31 October, 2025 12:00 UTC. The exam closes 5 November, 2025 12:00 UTC

  • 11 exercises, 21 total points, 13 point cap (you need 13/13 for 100%)
  • 4 hour time limit
  • Exercises are independent - solve in any order, difficulty indicated by point values

Important Notes

  • Demo cells illustrate problems but aren't complete tests - your solution must pass the actual grading script
  • Test case variables are available after running test cells to help with debugging
  • Avoid excessive printing - your code runs 20+ times, so comment out prints before submitting
  • Remember: copy/paste is disabled - Try these strategies to help mitigate that:
    • Use your OS-native screenshot app to look at instructions and variable names as you scroll down. Take the screenshot, then leave the app open and refer back to it as needed.
    • Use ctrl+/ to highlight and comment out multiple lines of code at once. Remember SQLite queries are stored as python strings, so careful when you comment things out, you're commenting out parts of a string
  • Hotkeys are allowed:
    • (GT Students) Honorlock may warn you, but it is allowed. You can close the warning and keep working. We recommend trying to limit the flags from that, as they're not a true violation, but Honorlock may make you keep accepting a consent pop-up.
    • (EdX Students) Hotkeys are allowed, Proctortrack has no issues with them.

Policies & Resources

Common Issues

  • "Passed" but no points: See the Vocareum Guide for potential causes
  • Platform issues: Time limit includes buffer for minor problems covered in troubleshooting guides