Exam

There will be one in-person, timed exam in CSE 121 this quarter. The exam will be on Wednesday, December 11th from 12:30-2:20 in KNE 130.

Exam Rules

The following points outline the rules and expectations that we will use during the final exam. You are expected to read and understand these rules prior to taking the exam.

Materials

You must bring two things with you to the exam:

  1. Your UW ID card.
  2. A writing implement. Responses must be written in pencil, blue ink, or black ink.

You may bring one sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper with your own notes for reference.

  • You may use both the front and back sides; it may be handwritten or typed.
  • We will additionally provide you with the CSE 121 final reference sheet.
    • We are providing this ahead of time so know what information you do not need to include on your own reference sheet.
    • You are restricted to using the Java methods on this reference sheet.

You may NOT:

  • use any electronic or computing devices during the exam. This includes calculators, cell phones, music players, smart watches, and any other electronic devices.
  • bring any additional paper (including scratch paper) outside of your single reference sheet.

Assigned Seating

This exam has assigned seating. You will have an assigned seat and you must sit in that seat.

Students are expected to make a reasonable effort to sit in their assigned seat.

  • Students who demonstrate an egregious disregard for the seating assignments will receive a penalty to their grade.
  • Examples of disregard include (but are not limited to) if a student goes to the wrong room or refuses to move when asked to.
  • If you arrive for the exam and find someone else in your seat, ask them to move and/or contact a member of course staff.

We will take pictures of the room to help us verify that students sit in their assigned seats. If you have concerns about this, please contact Brett & Matt via email.

Seating assignments will be posted during the last week of class.

Behaviour and Etiquette

We will ask that you observe proper exam-taking etiquette.

  • Please be quiet during the exam. If you have a question or need assistance, please raise your hand.
  • When you have finished the exam, please turn in your exam quietly and leave the room.
  • You should not leave the exam room in the last 5 minutes of the testing period to avoid disruption during the final moments of the exam.

The Exam Itself

The exam is 110 minutes long.

  • We plan to distribute the exam early. During that time, you can read and fill out the cover page of the exam. However, you should not flip the page or look at the exam questions until you are told to begin.
  • At end when time is called, you are required to stop writing and close your exam.
  • Students who look at the exam before being told to begin and students who make changes to their exam after time is called will receive grade penalties on the exam.

The exam will be conducted on paper.

  • All answers must be written legibly and answers must be clearly indicated.
    • If it is unclear, you should draw a box or circle around the answer you want graded, and an “X” through anything you do not want graded.
    • This is particularly important if you provide more than one answer, or provide notes in addition to your final answer.
    • When in doubt, we will grade the first response written in the indicated space.
  • By default, your answers should be written in provided space within the exam booklet.
    • If you need additional scratch paper, raise your hand and a member of the course staff will provide it to you. You should not bring your own paper (outside of your own single reference sheet).
    • If a sheet of scratch paper has all or part of an answer, please:
      1. Write your name and the corresponding problem on that sheet of paper.
      2. Staple the entire sheet to the end of your test with a single staple in the upper-left corner (a stapler will be provided).
      3. Clearly indicate under the corresponding problem that your answer is attached on an extra sheet of paper.
  • If an answer cannot easily be read or found, it will not receive credit.

Code Style and Writing

Unless a question mentions otherwise, the code you write will be graded purely on proper behavior and output. We will not grade on code quality.

Answers must be written as proper Java code—we will not grade pseudocode (i.e., an English explanation instead of code) or comments.

  • There is one exception: you may abbreviate System.out.print as “S.o.p” and System.out.println as “S.o.pln”.
  • You should otherwise NOT use any abbreviations on the exam.

Please make very effort to make your Java code syntactically correct.

  • In the case of a syntax error, the grader will attempt to interpret your intended behaviour.
  • In cases where it is unambiguously clear what you meant, your score will likely be unaffected.
  • However, if the intended behaviour is not unambiguously clear, then it is likely that your score will be reduced.

You do not need to write any import statements in your exam code (and may assume that the correct import statements exist).

You may choose to define any additional helper methods as part of your solution.

Allowed and Forbidden Features

For standard Java classes such as Math, Random, Scanner, Arrays, and String, you are limited to the methods listed on the provided reference sheet. You may not use any other standard classes and/or methods.

You may not use extraneous material to solve exam problems. In other words, the forbidden features policy still applies for the final exam. Please familiarize yourself with the list of forbidden features before the final exam.

Illness

If you are sick, you should not attend the exam. You will need to contact Brett & Matt before the exam begins to arrange an accommodation for a make-up exam due to sickness. If you’re sick, you need to stay home.

Exam Content

There will be 6 questions on the exam. Each of the 6 questions will be marked with one ESN grade, meaning you will receive 6 ESN marks for the entire final exam. Some questions may have sub-parts, but they will all be clearly marked as part of the same question.

The exam will focus on the following topics:

  • Console output (using System.out.println and System.out.print)
  • Variables, datatypes, expressions
  • Control structures: methods (including parameters and returns), loops, conditionals
  • Random number generation (using Random)
  • User input (using Scanner)
  • Arrays (including 2D arrays)

Exam questions will be a combination of multiple choice, code tracing, debugging, and programming questions.

Exam Resources

Broadly speaking, we suggest you become familiar with the following resources:

  1. The final exam reference sheet that will be provided as the last page of the exam. You are only allowed to use methods and classes shown on the provided reference sheet on the exam.
  2. The final exam resource bank (coming soon — after the Nov 22 lecture!)

Synchronous Resources

The last week of lecture is primarily dedicated towards final exam review and preparation. In addition, quiz section 18 is dedicated to final exam review.

In addition to lecture and section content, the course staff plan to run a final review session (which will be live in-person and recorded). Stay tuned for an announcement in Week 11!

Past Exams

Here is a list of actual final exams from prior offerings of CSE 121. We strongly suggest that you solve all of these problems yourself in a final exam environment: doing them timed, on paper (without a computer), and without looking at the answer key until you’re done.

Other Practice Material

Outside of past exams, we suggest looking at these additional practice resources in this order:

  1. Past quizzes: the quiz questions we have used this quarter are designed for our course, and are great examples of the format and concepts we will ask on the exam.
  2. Past section materials: the section problems are great study problems for exam content throughout the course.
  3. “Extra Review” materials: these are extra problems that were not part of the section materials for any specific day, but cover general topics.
  4. PracticeIt!

We do not recommend using prior CSE 121 (or CSE 142) final exams for review, as they covered a different set of topics.