CSE 6040 - Exam Prep

This will give you some insight into the role of exams in the class as well as suggest preparation tips. For rules and rules FAQ, please go directly to those pages.

Exam preparation will be broken down into these 3 components:

1. Exam Intent - What is the purpose of these exams?
2. Exam Preparation resources - What resources we're providing you
3. Exam Study Plan Suggestions - What resources we're providing you

Exam Intent & Key Considerations

Knowing the exam philosophy may not be directly useful to you, but hopefully it should provide some peace of mind. We put a great amount of effort into the exam process and continuously work to improve it.

• Exams are designed to test your mastery of the concepts introduced in the course material. You will be asked to apply your skills on a new problem which may require using functions/methods not covered in the notebooks. Don't worry, we will point you in the direction may provide examples.
• Exams account for 50% of your total grade. The homeworks account for the remaining 50%. Assuming you complete all of the required homework, you need to score an average of 60% on the exams to get an overall grade of "B", or only 20% to "pass" the course. (You can do the math yourself for the other grade outcomes.) The difficulty of the exams reflects this weighting.
• The exam exercises are independent, and are not ordered in terms of difficulty. Feel free to solve the exercises in any order. The point values indicate our estimation of the relative difficulty of the exercises.
• You may not have to complete all exercises on the exam in order to score 100%. We will post a "cutoff" for achieving 100%. Ex: there may be 18 possible points but the scoring cap is 15 points, meaning that your score will be X/15 with a cap of 100%
• The time limit, exercise point values, and 100% cutoff are determined by our internal testing. These are revealed a few hours before the exam is released. The exam is in development/testing until very close to the release date, so this information is not available earlier.
• The time limits include a small cushion of time for technical issues, so please review the Release Notes and Rules page before each exam so you know how to quickly begin troubleshooting.
• SUBMIT AFTER COMPLETING EACH EXERCISE! Points are not locked in until they're submitted and the autograder awards points. This takes minimal time so there is no reason to not do this.

Exam Study Prep Resources

Materials to review:

• Practice exams - we will provide 5-6 past exams ~2 weeks before the exam for you to work through. They'll be visible in your LSM and setup to run in Vocareum. Notes on using them here: Practice Problems - General info
• Practice exam notes - We'll provide you notes for the set of practice exams that give you a recommendation on which ones to look at, as well as some top-level info no the topics covered. For some we will also provide TA walkthroughs of the solutions. These pages are located under the Exam Prep header on the course website, and will open up when the respective problem sets are released.
• Test case variable walkthrough - The exams all have a structure setup to make it easier for you to debug code and see what you're working with. You'll see this in the practice exams, but we highly recommend that you watch this walkthrough video as well.

Exam Study Plan Suggestions

Exam Study Plan Suggestions (also linked above)

This provides information on suggested study plans, as well as some feedback we've received from students in that past. We cover things ranging from specific timing (when to start prep), all the way to how state of mind can affect your performance.