Spring 2020 Final Exam Information

Go up to the CS 2150 page (md)

Exam details

• The exam will be timed, and you have 2 hours to take it. It starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 30th, and ends at 9 p.m.
• You can use any of the information in the repo, the lecture recordings, or any of the work that you did for the course (such as labs). Due to the nature of the questions, we do not expect the lecture recordings to be of any help. As explained below, you can also view the Twitter announcement feed.
• You may NOT use Google or any other search engine. Or any other online reference site.
• You are welcome to use as much scrap paper as you would like. You can even print out diagrams (if you don’t have a printer, it won’t take all that long to copy them down). You can use Office programs as scratch paper as well (Excel, Word, etc.).
• The review session from Tuesday night was recorded, and is available in the “Online Meetings” tool in Collab; I discuss some of the exam design at the very start of it, and the types of questions that you will not see (recollection questions) and that you will see.
• If a question directs you to a URL to view an image, you are obviously allowed to view that image.

Collab details

• We will be using Collab’s Tests & Quizzes tool for the exam. There are a lot of peculiarities in this tool, some of which are very important to know.
• Did you take the sample practice exam? It’s in the “Tests & Quizzes” tool in Collab. It will help orient you to the details of Collab testing format.
• There is a table of contents at the top that will let you go to any part of the exam you wish. Unfortunately, each question is on a separate page (blame Collab, not me).
• Each section of the test has a header, such as “Graph question (1/2)” – this just means it’s one of two graph questions. Collab can’t seem to get rid of the header without causing problems with the table of contents. And the first section has no questions (Collab doesn’t allow you to delete it)
• IMPORTANT: Collab takes a while to load pages, or to respond to a button click. If you get impatient and click on that link again (or a different link), it will bring you to a page that says Data Discrepancy. You will then have to click the only button on that page, and then navigate back to where you were. The way to prevent this is to wait for the page to fully load before clicking on another link.
• We cannot control how fast (or slow) Collab will be during the exam time. There will be delays loading pages, starting the exam, etc. We have factored that into the amount of time given (2 hours).

Running into problems

• We have done our best to ensure that each question is clear in both what it is asking and how the answer should be formatted. There will be questions that ask for the contents of an array, as was explained in the sample exam.
• Spacing and capitalization matter for fill-in questions, and those questions specify the requirements for it. In general, don’t put any extra spaces in there.
• Should you have questions, you can submit a support request. HOWEVER, you have to use this in moderation – if everybody submits a support request because something goes wrong on Collab, there is no way that we will be able to respond to them all within the exam time frame. This will cause specific questions to have a big delay in responding as we process these, and it may be after the exam is over before we are able to get through them all. This is not us being lazy – there are only a few that can handle the support requests and there are 370 students.
• If you are running into a problem that you think everybody else is running into (Collab dies, etc.), you can post that on the slack workspace, which will allow us to see it quickly, respond to it quickly, and will keep the support request queue from filling up. Three is a #final channel on Slack that we will be monitoring.
• The Twitter announcement feed will be used to post any announcements during the exam, especially if any problems arise. You are allowed to view that twitter feed during the exam time.
• The last two questions on the exam are “short essay” questions that are NOT being graded. The first asks if you ran into any problems, had concerns about your answers, etc. Again, please use this in moderation and only if you have to. The second of these is for general comments and feedback about the online test format. Again, neither of these are being graded.