CSE-6040 - Computing For Data Analytics

Midterm 1 Fall 2024 Release Notes

Stats and grade discussion: stats and grades were discussed in the place listed below. If you have questions you can follow-up with instructors on Piazza.

• GT/OMSA students: Presented during Skills OH session on Oct 3 at 630pm (est); 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 (#761 for GT, #137 for VMM)

Post-exam survey: Please share your study strategy, what you've liked so far, and what we could improve. This information helps ensure we're investing time in the aspects of the course that most benefit you. Survey Link (GT only).

Access to your Midterm 1:

• Access Workarea: You can access this from your LMS (Canvas or EdX) via the same page you entered during the exam.
• Access Submissions: You can access that from Vocareum directly labs.vocareum.com
  • If you haven't logged in here before, enter the email address you used and reset password
  • Once you're in, you should be able to navigate to any of your assignments and see your submissions
  • Note: if you see only one assignment, log out and log back in. That's a common bug for first-time logins.

Solutions: Midterm 1 Solutions!

General post-exam reminder: Now that midterm 1 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 office hours (Thursday evenings)
• Python Student Success Service (Tutoring; GT only)

Version History

1.0.0 - 27 Sept, 2024 - Initial Release.

Scoring cap, time limit, etc
Midterm 1 is finally here... (available 27 September, 2024 12:00 UTC). There are 10 exercises worth a total of 18 points with an 13 point cap, so you have to get 13 for 100% (no extra credit, sorry). The time limit is 4 hours. The points, time, and threshold were determined by a data-driven process based on internal testing.

Exercises are independent
The exercises are all independent and can be solved in any order. They are also not ordered in terms of difficulty, so feel free to skip around. The relative difficulty is indicated by the point values - i.e. a 3 point exercise is more complicated to solve than a 1 point exercise.

Demo Cells
Each exercise has a demo cell to help illustrate what the problem is asking for. The demo cells are not a complete test of your solution. It is certainly possible to get the correct response for a simplified demo problem and miss corner cases in the real test. We will not give any credit for solutions that do not pass the test cells as run by the grading script, even if they seem to get the correct result for the demos.

(New) See AI Search policy

See AI Search Policy page.

Debugging
If you run a test cell (pass or fail) the last test case will be made available to you in the form of test case variables. See Using Test Case Variables for a short example on how to use them for debugging. You will also see reminders about these helpful variables we have provided above each test cell and in some AssertionError messages. If your code fails to run, you should check the entire traceback to determine which portion of your code is failing to execute. Prints are also quite useful for debugging, just make sure you're using them judiciously or you could run into...

Excessive Printed Output
This exam will run your code multiple times against randomized test cases. Count on any print in your code getting executed at least 20 times (if not more). This means that you should not print entire data inputs, print inside of loops, or leave prints in your submissions. If you run into sluggish behavior on printed outputs see the Vocareum Troubleshooting Guide for the steps to get your notebook back into a workable state.

Troubleshooting
The time limit includes a buffer for dealing with minor platform issues. Anything that is resolved by following the steps listed in the Proctoring Troubleshooting or Vocareum Troubleshooting guides does not warrant any accommodation. Take the time to familiarize yourself with those procedures prior to starting the exam as they may be useful in the future. If you are facing platform related difficulties beyond what's covered in the guides (or you need help getting through them) please make a private Piazza post to the instructors with the details of your issue and we will help resolve it.

Potential Bugs
We take bugs in the exams very seriously. As such we will investigate all reported bugs. However, the overwhelming majority (>99.9%) of reported bugs are issues with student solution code. If you think you have found one please follow the steps listed in the Piazza Bug Report Template to report it. Please keep moving on in the exam after you submit the report.

"Passed" showing in the notebook, but no points from the autograder
This could happen for a number of reasons. See the Vocareum Guide for a breakdown of the potential causes. If you believe it is a bug (after eliminating other explanations) feel free to raise it.