Midterm 1 Practice Problems Release Notes
PMT1 = "Practice Midterm 1 problems"
These practice problems are all past exams. While we encourage you to go through as many of them as you have time for, the most important part of this process is how you study. Relying too heavily on the solutions, AI, or Piazza threads to solve problems may rob you of the experience and skills built by solving them on your own (as you will have to do on the exams).
If you have questions or want to collaborate on these, check the pinned "PMT1" Piazza post.
Exams now include debugging exercises
Starting Spring 2026, we began including debugging exercises as part of the exams. In Spring this accounted for ~20% of the points, now in Fall 2026 you can expect that to be closer to 30-50%. The below exams from prior to Spring 2026 do not have debugging exercises included, but they still serve as good exam practice, as the normal solution development process includes 'debugging'.
Practice Exam Solutions
Solutions, walkthrough videos, additional TA solutions
PMT1-SP26
- Point breakdown: 9 exercises; 2 x 3 pointers, 3 x 2 pointers, 4 x 1 pointers; 12/16 point cap; 4 Hours
- Topic: The Impact of Skategate on Figure Skating¶
- Key skills: data structures, math as code, string parsing + cleansing
PMT1-FA25
-- The TA Walkthrough solution presentation for this exam was split between 2 TAs, so the solution pages below represent the exercises that each TA presented. Students will need both for a complete solution.
- Point breakdown: 11 exercises; 2 x 3 pointers, 5 x 2 pointers, 3 x 1 pointers, 1 x 0 pointer; 19/19 point cap; 4 Hours
- Topic: Golf Performance Analytics.
- Key skills: string manipulation, regular expressions, JSON processing, data validation, statistical analysis
PMT1-SP25
-- The TA Walkthrough solution presentation for this exam was split between 2 TAs, so the solution pages below represent the exercises that each TA presented. Students will need both for a complete solution.
- Point breakdown: 9 exercises; 2 x 3 pointers, 5 x 2 pointers, 2 x 1 pointers; 13/18 point cap; 4 Hours
- Topic: Creating a Recommender System.
- Key skills: lists and sets, nested data structures, math as code, basic algorithm concepts
PMT1-FA24
-- The TA Walkthrough solution presentation for this exam was split between 2 TAs, so the solution pages below represent the exercises that each TA presented. Students will need both for a complete solution.
- Point breakdown: 10 exercises; 2 x 3 pointers, 4 x 2 pointers, 4 x 1 pointers; 4 Hours
- Topic: Professor Vuduc Writes a Pop Song
- Key skills: string processing, nested data, sorting