About Exam

Per the course’s syllabus, the exam will be released 20210804T000000-0400 and will be due 20210806T235900-0400. There are no extensions or late submissions allowed on the exam, 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 exam window working on the exam 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 72 hours you will have.

The exam itself will be comprehensive, and all of our six 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 assignments 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 exam will otherwise largely resemble a long assignment, and your answers should remain in general confined to a paragraph, maximum, unless the question otherwise specifies.

During the exam 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 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 on the exam. It is otherwise open-book, and you may reference any material to craft your answers.

A schedule of review sessions and final office hours sessions has been posted on the front page of the course website.

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 slides.
  • Attending or watching the review sessions or office hours.
  • Reviewing each lecture’s video, using its table of contents to focus on topics with which you’re less comfortable.
  • Reviewing each of the course’s assignments and your feedback thereon (we will not have finished grading everyone’s Assignment 6 before the exam).