About Test

Per the course’s syllabus, the test will be released 2022-12-07T00:00:00-05:00 and will be due 2022-12-12T23:59:00-05:00. There are no extensions or late submissions allowed on the test, so please plan accordingly. Gradescope will not accept late submissions, nor will the course accept submissions outside of Gradescope.

You may spend as much time during the test window working on the test as you’d like. You should expect to spend a few hours on it, but it will certainly not be designed to take the full block of time you will have.

The test itself will be comprehensive, and all of our seven main topics are fair game to show up. You should expect questions that will require typically longer answers than those we’ve posed in the course’s quizzes so far, and you should also expect questions to generally be more conceptual than mechanical; we are interested in seeing how you might apply the lessons of the course to problems both familiar and unfamiliar! That said, the format of the test will otherwise largely resemble a long quiz, and your answers should remain in general confined to a paragraph, maximum, unless the question otherwise specifies.

During the test itself, it is not permitted to solicit or receive help from any humans (including the teaching fellows), other than by writing to the course’s head teaching fellow and instructor directly for clarifications or administrative questions. This includes a prohibition on asking any questions in online forums. Note that we will not be able to answer any content-related questions. Collaboration between students is not permitted at all on the test. It is otherwise open-book, and you may reference any material to craft your answers.

A schedule of review sessions and office hours will be posted after Project 6’s deadline.

Ultimately, how best to prepare depends on how you learn best. But allow us to recommend that you prioritize your studies by:

  • Reviewing each lecture’s notes.
  • Reviewing each lecture’s source code.
  • Reviewing each lecture’s slides.
  • Watching the review session.
  • Reviewing each project’s specifications, sample solutions, and distribution code.
  • Reviewing each of your submissions to the course’s quizzes and your feedback thereon.
  • Reviewing each of your submissions to the course’s projects and your feedback thereon (we will likely not have finished grading everyone’s Project 6 before the test).
  • Reviewing each lecture’s video.