CSE-6040 - Computing For Data Analytics

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Midterm 1 Practice Problems Release Notes

Practice problems will release along with Notebook 5.

The practice problems released are all past exams from the past few semesters. They are all accessible through your LMS and hosted in Vocareum like your notebooks. The assignment titled "Practice Problems for Midterm 1 - Untimed" contains all of the past exams we're sharing with you. There is also a "Practice Timed Exam for Midterm 1" which is the most recent past exam, and is setup like a test in Vocareum (with time limit), without the proctoring. Note: as you access that assignment through your LMS, there's a note about how we recommend using it and a couple of "watch outs".

The information listed below gives you a quick intro to the notebooks, and where available it gives you the exact point cap and time limit from when we offered it.

Suggestion 1: while we're releasing all of the solutions with the notebooks, we recommend you don't use those until you finish the whole practice exam, or if you get stumped on an exercise for an extended period of time. Learning how to resolve and hunt down those issues on your own is the skill you need to build in order to prepare for the exam.

Suggestion 2: You're free to discuss these practice exams openly and share your code with classmates. Connecting with others on Piazza may help you think through alternative approaches to problems.

PMT1-SP24 Solution

  • Point breakdown: 8 exercise; 15 points available; 11 points requred for 100%; Time limit 4 hours
  • Topic: Ranking poker hands
  • Key skills: Nested data structure, bitwise operations

PMT1-FA23 Solution

  • Point breakdown: 8 exercises; 13 available points; 11 points required for 100%; Time limit 4 hours
  • Topic: Email Centrality - In this notebook you will combine data sources to prepare for analysis by a fraud detection tool.
  • Key Skills: Basic Python data structures, strings, translating simple math into code.

PMT1-SP23 Solution

  • Point breakdown: 10 exercises; 18 available points; 13 points required for 100%; Time limit 4 hours
  • Topic: Mining for friends - In this notebook you will analyze data from Twitter and Foursquare to find groups of people with common interests.
  • Key skills: Basic Python data Structures, nested Python data structures, and string manipulation.

PMT1-FA22 Solution

  • Point breakdown: 9 exercises; 18 available points; 14 points required for 100%; Time limit 4 hours
  • Topic: Reddit API Data - In this notebook you will explore the returned payload of GET requests made against Reddit's REST API
  • Key skills: Navigating nested data, string processing, implementing mathematical functions.

PMT1-SP22 Solution

  • Point breakdown: 7 exercises; 14 available points; 11 points required for 100%; Time limit 4 hours
  • Topic: USDA food labels - In this notebook you will explore ingesting data from a raw JSON object, reformatting to a more useful form, extracting statistics, and performing some simple analytics.
  • Key skills: Navigating nested data, string processing, implementing mathematical functions.

PMT1-FA21 Solution

Note: the style of this exam is similar to what you can expect, but there are no test case variables. You can still complete the exam and debug using normal methods.

  • Point breakdown: 8 excercises; 16 available points; 14 points required for 100%; Time limit 3 hours
  • Topic: Chess Ratings - In this notebook you will process a .pgn file (popular format for storing chess game data) to compute the changes to players' Elo rating from match to match and from beginning to end of a chess tournament.
  • Key skills: String processing, building nested data structures, implementing mathematical functions, functional programming

Other practice exams/notesbooks (different formats, used only for covering specific concepts)

PMT1-SP20 Solution

Note: the content of this exam is similar to what you'll see, but there are no test case variables and the format is a bit older.

  • Point breakdown: 5 excercises; 10 available points
  • Topic: Caption Contest
  • Key skills: String processing, implementing mathematical functions.

PMT1-FA20 Solution

Note: the content of this exam is similar to what you'll see, but there are no test case variables and the format is a bit older.

  • Point breakdown: 7 excercises; 14 available points; 12 points required for 100%; Time limit 3 hours
  • Topic: US Congress partisanship
  • Key skills: Navigating nested data, control flow logic, implementing mathematical funcitons.
Updated: 2024-12-10