About Exam

Per the course’s syllabus, the exam will be released 2023-08-02T00:00:00-04:00 and will be due 2023-08-04T23:59:00-04:00. 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 are very strongly encouraged to not wait until the last moment to submit.

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-hour window.

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 from the teaching fellows), other than by posting to Ed (which will be restricted to new private, Test-related threads only) for clarifications or administrative questions (we cannot answer content-based questions). This includes, other than use of Ed, a general prohibition on asking any questions in online forums. Collaboration between students is not permitted at all on the test. Violations of these rules will be treated harshly by the course.

It is otherwise open-book, and you may reference any material to craft your answers, subjecto the constraints of the academic honesty policy. Each question will offer a place to cite your utilized sources.

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.
• 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 (note that we will not have finished grading everyone’s Assignment 6 before the exam).