There will be one in-person, timed exam in CSE 123 this quarter. The exam will be held at the following date and time:

  • Tuesday, March 12 at 12:30pm in KNE 120 and KNE 220

Exam Rules and Information

Logistics

The following points outline the rules and expecations for the final exam.

  • 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.
  • You will have 110 minutes to complete the exam. 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 exam questions as a penalty. Students who do not close their exam booklet when time is called may also receive this penalty.
  • You must work alone and you 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 one sheet of paper, no larger than 8.5 x 11 inches, with your own notes for reference. You may use both the front and back sides of the paper, and notes may be handwritten or typed. Your reference sheet may include any content you choose.
  • There will also be a provided reference sheet written by us for the exam. You do not need to include information that is on the provided reference sheet on your own note 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.
  • No one will be allowed to leave the exam room in the last five minutes of the testing period to avoid disruption during the final moments of the exam. If you finish your exam during the last five minutes, please remain quietly in your seat until time is called.
  • If you are sick, you should not attend the exam. You will need to contact Brett and James 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, please stay home.

Policies

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

  • The exam will be conducted on paper. All answers must be written legibly and in the provided booklet. If an answer cannot easily be read or found, it will not receive credit.
  • You will need to bring your own writing implement to the exam. Reponses must be written in pencil, blue ink, or black ink.
    • You may use other colors or writing implements (e.g. highlighters) to make notes, but your responses must be written in pencil, blue, or black.
  • Space will be provided for you to write your answers. If you need additional scratch paper, raise your hand and a TA will bring some to you. You may not use your own paper during the exam other than your single reference sheet (see above).
  • Please be sure that the answer you want graded is clearly indicated. This is particularly important if you provide more than one answer or if you have notes in addition to your final answer. You can draw a box or circle around the answer you want graded, and you can draw an “X” through anything that you do not want to have graded. When in doubt, we will grade the first response written in the indicated space.
  • Answers must be written as proper Java code—we will not grade pseudocode (i.e., an English explanation instead of code) or comments.
  • 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. 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, responses that do not use proper syntax will have to rely on the grader’s interpretation of what the response is saying. To ensure that the grader’s interpration of your response matches what you intended, take extra care to write as syntactically correct a response as possible.
  • Unless a coding question specifically mentions otherwise, the code you write will be graded purely on behavior and not on code quality. So, for example, redundancy, poor names, or lack of comments will not affect your score.
  • Unless otherwise specified, you should write each solution as a public method. You may define helper methods as part of your solution if you wish.
  • You do not need to write any import statements in your exam code; you may assume all necessary classes are imported.
  • You may not use extraneous material to solve exam problems. In general, you are restricted to the classes and methods listed on the provided reference sheet, along with any general Java concepts or syntax covered in class. You may not use break, continue, a return from a void method, try/catch, or Java 8 functional features.
  • For standard Java classes and interfaces such as Math, String, ArrayList, Set, etc. you are limited to the classes and methods listed on the provided reference sheet. You may not use the Arrays or Collections classes or other standard classes and methods that aren’t included on the provided reference sheet.
  • 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 at the exam.

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:

  • Inheritance (including abstract classes and interfaces)
  • Polymorphism
  • The Comparable interface
  • Linked lists
  • Recursion (including exhaustive search/recursive backtracking)
  • Binary trees (including binary search trees)

The following topics are guaranteed to not be on the exam:

  • Hashing
  • Runtime analysis
  • Huffman encoding

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.
  • A reference sheet will be provided as the last page of the exam. In general, you are only allowed to use methods and classes shown on the provided reference sheet on the exam.
  • TA exam strategies
  • 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 17 and 18 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 123 exam. If you are curious what is and will not be on the exam, re-read the section above.

Practice Exam

Review Session