There will be an in-person, timed exam in CSE 122 this quarter. The exam will be done in two parts during the last week of the quarter – the first will be taken in Wednesday’s lecture and the second will be taken in Friday’s lecture. The exam will be on the following dates:

  • Final dates: Wednesday, Aug 16 and Friday, Aug 18

Exam Rules and Information

Seating Chart

Logistics

The following points outline the rules and expecations that we will use during the final exam.

  • Masks are recommended during the exam for students and staff.
  • You will have an assigned seat and you must sit in that seat. If you arrive for the exam and find someone else in your seat, ask them to move because we will move students to their assigned seats. We will take pictures of the room to help us verify that students sit in their assigned seats (please contact us if you have a concern about this). 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 of their grade (e.g., if a student goes to the wrong room or refuses to move when asked to).
  • We may ask to check your UW ID card during the exam so please have it ready.
  • Each part of the exam will be 60 minutes. We will distribute the exam early and you can read and fill out the cover page of the exam, but you should not look at the exam questions until you are told to begin. At the 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 Us on the exam as penalty. Students who do not close their exam booklet when time is called may also receive this Us penalty.
  • You must work alone and may not use any computing devices of any kind including calculators or digital copies of the textbook. Cell phones, music players, and other electronic devices may NOT be out during the exam for any reason.
  • You are allowed to bring in one 8.5x11 inch piece of paper with your own notes for reference. You may use both front and back sides and it may be handwritten or typed.
  • There will also be a reference sheet written by us on the exam. This reference sheet may also include any rules/regulations about using a particular class that should be followed so anything on there supercedes what may be on your reference sheet in terms of material you can use. This provided reference sheet is linked on this page below, so you know which information you do not need to include on your own reference sheet.
  • 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.
  • If you are sick, you should not attend the exam. You must contact Melissa before the exam begins to arrange an accommodation for a make-up exam due to sickness. You do not need to provide medical documentation or proof of a negative test. If you’re sick, you need to stay home.

Policies

The following policies concern the expectations and requirements of the answers you write on the exam.

  • Space will be provided for your answers. If you need additional scratch paper, raise your hand and a TA will give it to you. You are not allowed to use your own paper during the exam outside of your single reference sheet.
  • Unless a coding question specifically mentions otherwise, the code you write will be graded purely on external correctness (proper behavior and output) and not on internal correctness (code quality). So, for example, redundancy or lack of comments will not reduce your score. You are, however, required to declare all data fields as private, to use generics properly, and to declare variables and parameters using interfaces when possible.
  • For the Stacks & Queues programming problems The cheat sheet mentions important restrictions on stacks and queues that you must follow.
  • Unless otherwise specified, you should write each solution as a public method. You may define helper methods as part of your solution.
  • You don’t need to write any import statements in your exam code.
  • You are not allowed to use advanced material to solve exam problems. In general, you are restricted to the classes and methods listed on the provided reference sheet. You are not allowed to use break, continue, a return from a void method, try/catch, or Java 8 features.
  • For standard Java classes such as Math and String, you are limited to the methods listed on the cheat sheet. You are not allowed to use the Arrays or Collections classes or other standard classes and methods that aren’t included on the cheat sheet.
  • Please be sure that your answer is clearly indicated. This is particularly important if you provide more than one answer or if you have notes in addition to your answer. You can draw a box around the answer you want to have graded and you can draw an “X” through anything that you do not want to have graded.
  • While writing code on something other than a computer is not a common experience, it is still important that you express your ideas unambiguously with correct Java code. We do not grade pseudocode (i.e., an English explanation instead of code). Obviously without a run button, things like syntax errors are harder to spot. Something like a minor syntax error will not necessarily lead to a reduced grade. However, solutions that do not use proper syntax will have to rely on the grader’s interpretation of what the solution is saying. To ensure that the grader’s interpration of your solution matches what you wanted to do, it only helps you to write a syntactically correct solution. Submitting a regrade request after you receive your scores saying “I meant to write this” will not be accepted because we can only grade what you wrote.
  • You do not need to turn in scratch paper unless you have all or part of an answer on that sheet of paper (you can take the other sheets of paper with you). If you have a sheet of paper with all or part of an answer, please write your name on that sheet of paper, staple the entire sheet to the end of your test (not in the middle) with a single staple in the upper-left corner, and clearly indicate under the corresponding problem that your answer is attached on an extra sheet of paper. A stapler will be available during the exam.

Exam Content

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

The questions on the exam will focus on the following topics.

  • Data Structures
    • Lists: ArrayList
    • Sets: TreeSet, HashSet
    • Maps: TreeMap, HashMap
    • Stacks and Queues
    • 2D Arrays
    • Nested Collections
    • For each loops and Iterators
  • Object Oriented Programming
    • Writing a class
    • Encapsulating fields and instance methods
    • Interfaces

Topics guaranteed to not be on the exam

  • PrintStream
  • The Optional class
  • JUnit Syntax
  • Third Party Libraries
  • Image manipulation
  • Inheritance between interfaces
  • Comparable

Exam Resources

  • Studying Tips We strongly suggest that you try to solve all of these problems yourself, on paper, without a computer, and without looking at the answer key until you’re done. A very important skill to doing well on the test is being able to look at your solution and figure out if it works without relying on a computer or the answer key since you will have neither of those available during the test.
  • Provided Reference Sheet will be provided as the last page of the exam.
  • TA Exam Strategies
  • Resource Bank with a checklist for exam preparation and all practice material links for each topic in one place. These materials include:
    • Sample Final 1 (Sample Final 1 Solutions)
    • Sample Final 2 (Sample Final 2 Solutions)
    • Sample Final 3 (Sample Final 3 Solutions)
    • Past Quizzes: The quiz questions we have been using this quarter are designed for our course. These are great examples of the format and concepts we will ask on the exam.
    • Past Section Materials: The section resources are great study problems for the exam content. In particular sections 11, 13, and 14 are targeted for exam review.
    • Past Lecture Examples
    • PracticeIt!
      • Note: Practice-It! has many full exams from past courses, but these do not necessarily line up to our course content. Please take the practice exams there with a large grain of salt since they do not necessarily line up with the CSE 122 exam. If you are curious what is and will not be on the exam, re-read the section above.