Culminating assessments are designed to give you an opportunity to engage with all the material covered during course up to the time of the assessment. Unlike take-home assessments, which primarily emphasize the most recent concepts, culminating assessments give similar levels of focus to all topics.

While culminating assessments will include solving problems, and may have the look and feel of an exam, they are not graded on correctness or accuracy. Your grade on a culminating assessment is based only on your completion of the required elements (outlined below). Culminating assessment are graded S or N - no grades of E or U will be given.

Simulated Final

Simulated Final

The last culminating assessment will be a simulated final. This assessment will look similar to a traditional CSE 143 final exam, but you will not be graded on the accuracy of your answers. Instead, you will be asked to compare your responses to a published key, annotate your answers to indicate areas you made mistakes, and record videos discussing your work.

Format

The simulated final will be conducted in Ed, and will consist of a series of problems of two types: mechanical problems where you answer questions about or predict the results of executing provided code; and programming problems where you write code to satisfy a given prompt. The assessment will also include a “cheat sheet” of notes that may be helpful in completing these problems.

To best simulate the circumstances of a traditional final exam, we recommend adhering to the following procedures:

  • Spend no more than 110 minutes working on the assessment (even if that means you do not complete all problems).
  • Complete the entire assessment in one sitting.
  • Do not use any outside resources (notes, sample code, the textbook, internet searches, calculators, etc.) while completing the assessment.
  • Do all of your work in the Ed lesson for the assessment, and do not write, run, or debug code in any other environment.

These procedures will help to create a reasonable simulation of a traditional final and to provide the most accurate indication of your current level of mastery. They are highly recommended, but are not strictly required, and you will not be penalized for failing to follow these procedures. However, the further you stray from these suggestions (e.g. by taking extra time or by utilizing outside resources), the less useful your performance will be in helping both you and the course staff evaluate your current mastery and provide meaningful support going forward.

Requirements

To receive an S grade on the simulated final, you must complete the following three steps:

  1. Make a good-faith effort to complete the simulated final

    Work on as many problems as possible on the simulated final, ideally by following the procedures outlined above. You will not be graded on how many problems you attempt or complete or on the accuracy of your responses. However you must attempt enough of the problems to indicate a good-faith effort, and the activity will be most useful if your give your best possible effort.

  2. Annotate your work based on the provided key

    After you have completed the assessment, compare your responses to the provided key. Annotate your work in Ed using the feedback utility to indicate where you made mistakes and what those mistakes were. You must include enough annotations to make clear that you have thoughtfully considered your work and where your responses were incorrect. Again, you will not be graded on the accuracy of your responses, so it is in your best interest to be honest and thorough in your annotations.

    There is also a slide on the Simulated Final on Ed asking you to reflect on the experience taking the exam. You should complete those questions as part of this step as well as annotating your specific solutions.

  3. Complete a video reflection

    The last step of the simulated midterm was meeting with your TA, but since we are at the end of the quarter and scheduling is a bit more complex, we will ask you to make a video discussing your work that your TA will look over. Your video should include the following three components (in any order):

    • You should start by describing how the exam went overall. Guiding question: What parts went well and what parts were more challenging?
    • The video should show you walking through your solution to at least two problems on the exam and discussing the annotations you left when comparing your solution to the provided key. Guiding question: What parts of those problems worked well? What mistakes did you make and what led you to make them?
    • Highlight what aspects of your exam you want your TA to provide feedback on or any questions you still have after the exam. Be sure to think carefully about what you would like your TA to focus on when they review your work. Your TA will provide written feedback addressing questions from your reflection.

    The video does not need to be extremely long or well produced, but should answer the three components above with enough detail so your TA can provide adequate feedback. There is no minimum required length of the video, but you should keep your video shorter than 15 minutes in length. See the section below for tips on how to record a video.

Timeline

  • Week of November 29 - December 5

    Prepare for the simulated final however you see fit.

  • Monday, December 6

    The simulated final will be released.

  • Friday, December 10

    The key for the simulated final will be released and you may annotate your work if you have already completed the simulated final.

  • Before December 14 at 11:59 pm

    Submit your simulated exam, annotations, and video reflection as described above.

Record a Video

Your video will be submitted as a link to some online service like Youtube, Google Drive, or Dropbox.Make sure it is accessible to anyone with the link. In other words, you should make the video public or many services (e.g., Youtube) have a notion of an “Unlisted” video that is accessible to anyone that has the link but not listed publicly. Either option is fine as long as it is viewable by your TA.

Tip

You can always check if your video is link-viewable if you open the link in a private/icognito browser.

To make the video, you can use CamStudio (Windows only), Quicktime or any other screen recording software (you can even use Zoom!). You do not need to stand in front of a projector or anything. You can just record what your computer displays (with the exam) and what you say (discussing the exam). Then you can upload your video to some service listed above and share the link with your TA.

As a reminder, we are not looking for you to spend a lot of time making the video high-quality. We are focusing on the content of the video and your reflection, not for some high-quality video production. You can do it all in one take if you want, or, you can splice together separate videos into one. Again, we are just looking for the content requested here. As long as you make an honest effort to answer all of the things we asked for (as listed in the Requirements section), you will receive credit for the simulated final.

Topics

The questions on the final exam will be selected from the following.

  • Binary Tree Traversals
    • What is it? Perform pre-order, in-order and post-order traversals on a tree
    • What’s an example? traversal2
  • Binary Search Trees
    • What is it? Given a set of values, add them to a binary search tree
    • What’s an example? Mew/Pikachu/Zubat/Ditto from Old Exam Database
  • Polymorphism mystery
    • What is it? Given a set of classes with inheritance relationships, a set of variables declared using those classes, and a set of method calls made on those variables, write the output (similar to section 11/21 problems)
    • What’s an example? FeeFieFoFum
    • Note: In the case the answer is an error, you will be asked to identify if the error is a run-time error or a compiler
  • Comparable programming
    • What is it? Write a complete class and make it Comparable based on a given set of comparison criteria.
    • What’s an example? Location
    • Note: You will not be asked to extend another pre-existing class like some problems seen on past exams
  • Collections programming
    • What is it? Write a method that uses one or more class from the Java Collections framework (with focus on Sets, Maps and Lists).
    • What’s an example? commonHobbies from Old Exam Database
  • Binary tree programming
    • What is it? Add a method to the IntTree class from lecture
    • What’s an example? numEmpty
  • Binary tree programming
    • What is it? Add a method to the IntTree class from lecture. Similar in spirit to the previous question but more challenging
    • What’s an example? completeToLevel
  • Linked list programming
    • What is it? Add a method to the LinkedIntList class from lecture
    • What’s an example? removeRange

The following topics are guaranteed NOT to be explicitly tested on the final exam:

  • detailed knowledge of Big-O (some questions may ask you to solve them within a certain big-O limit, but mainly this is just to ward off extremely inefficient answers)
  • detailed knowledge of search/sort algorithms
  • tracing or writing code with 2-D arrays
  • catching exceptions
  • priority queues
  • input/output streams
  • abstract classes
  • inner classes
  • implementing an Iterator class
  • implementing a “generic” class (one that accepts type parameters such as )
  • hashing
  • extending a pre-existing class for the Comparable problem

Resources

Below are some helpful resources for studying:

  • Cheat Sheet: This is the cheat sheet that will be provided with the exam
  • Old Exam Questions: A database of old exam questions (note: currently missing Inheritance but it will be there soon).
  • Course Calendar: Practice problems from lecture and quiz section on the calendar
  • Practice-It: Many practice problems from the book
  • Final Strategies: Note this was written in the context of an in-person and timed exam, so some of this is not fully relevant!

Simulated Midterm

Simulated Midterm

The first culminating assessment will be a simulated midterm. This assessment will look similar to a traditional CSE 143 midterm exam, but you will not be graded on the accuracy of your answers. Instead, you will be asked to compare your responses to a published key, annotate your answers to indicate areas you made mistakes, and meet with your TA to discuss your work.

Format

The simulated midterm will be conducted in Ed, and will consist of a series of problems of two types: mechanical problems where you answer questions about or predict the results of executing provided code; and programming problems where you write code to satisfy a given prompt. The assessment will also include a “cheat sheet” of notes that may be helpful in completing these problems.

To best simulate the circumstances of a traditional midterm, we recommend adhering to the following procedures:

  • Spend no more than 60 minutes working on the assessment (even if that means you do not complete all problems).
  • Complete the entire assessment in one sitting.
  • Do not use any outside resources (notes, sample code, the textbook, internet searches, calculators, etc.) while completing the assessment.
  • Do all of your work in the Ed lesson for the assessment, and do not write, run, or debug code in any other environment.

These procedures will help to create a reasonable simulation of a traditional midterm and to provide the most accurate indication of your current level of mastery. They are highly recommended, but are not strictly required, and you will not be penalized for failing to follow these procedures. However, the further you stray from these suggestions (e.g. by taking extra time or by utilizing outside resources), the less useful your performance will be in helping both you and the course staff evaluate your current mastery and provide meaningful support going forward.

Requirements

To receive an S grade on the simulated midterm, you must complete the following three steps:

  1. Make a good-faith effort to complete the simulated midterm

    Work on as many problems as possible on the simulated midterm, ideally by following the procedures outlined above. You will not be graded on how many problems you attempt or complete or on the accuracy of your responses. However you must attempt enough of the problems to indicate a good-faith effort, and the activity will be most useful if your give your best possible effort.

  2. Annotate your work based on the provided key

    After you have completed the assessment, compare your responses to the provided key. Annotate your work in Ed using the feedback utility to indicate where you made mistakes and what those mistakes were. You must include enough annotations to make clear that you have thoughtfully considered your work and where your responses were incorrect. Again, you will not be graded on the accuracy of your responses, so it is in your best interest to be honest and thorough in your annotations.

  3. Schedule and attend a check-in session with your TA

    After you have completed and annotated your simulated midterm, you will attend a 10-15 minute, one-on-one session with your TA to discuss your work. (Your individual TA will tell you how they will schedule your sessions later.) In this session, you will go over some of the problems on the assessment and discuss both how you could have improved your work on those problems and how you can improve your mastery of the material going forward. You should come to your meeting with a plan for what you would like to discuss and/or specific questions you would like answered. Note that, in the 10-15 minute meeting, you will likely not have time to review every problem on the assessment. Be sure to decide ahead of time which problems or concepts you would most benefit from discussing.

Timeline

  • Week of November 1 - 5

    Prepare for the simulated midterm however you see fit. Look for communication from your TA on how to schedule your one-on-one session. (Each TA will set their own process and schedule.)

  • Friday, November 5

    The simulated midterm will be released.

  • Sunday, November 7

    The key for the simulated midterm will be released and you may annotate your work if you have already completed the simulated midterm.

  • Week of November 8 - 12

    Schedule and attend your one-on-one session with your TA. You will need to complete and annotate your simulated midterm at least 24 hours prior to your session to ensure your TA has time to review your work. Be sure to follow your TA‘s procedure for scheduling and attending your session.

Topics

Material from Weeks 1 to 5 will be covered on the midterm. The actual midterm will have 6-8 total problems. Those problems will be from the following kinds of questions:

  • ArrayIntList programming (add a method to the ArrayIntList class from lecture)
  • Collections programming (write a method that uses Java collections such as Lists, Sets, and Maps)
  • Stack and Queue programming (write a method that uses Stacks and Queues)
  • Linked list node programming (write a few lines of code to change a “before” picture of some linked nodes into an “after” picture; this is NOT the problems where you have to use loops and writing for the LinkedIntList class)
  • Recursion tracing (look at a piece of recursive code, and write its output) – Not covered yet
  • Recursion programming (write a method that uses recursion) – Not covered yet
  • The following topics are guaranteed to NOT be required to solve any problem on the midterm:
    • programming with inheritance (extending a class, etc.)
    • Inheritance/Polymorphism mystery
    • writing an interface (though you might have to write a method that accepts a parameter of interface type, such as List, Set, Map, etc.)
    • testing, debugging, commenting
    • grammars
    • implementing Comparable (though you may have to be a client of TreeSet and/or TreeMap which require the elements to be comparable)
    • implementing sorting algorithms (though you may have to be a client of TreeSet and/or TreeMap which maintains the elements in sorted order)
    • hashing

Resources

Below are some helpful resources for studying:

  • Cheat Sheet: This is the cheat sheet that will be provided with the exam
  • Old Exam Questions: A database of old exam questions
  • Course Calendar: Practice problems from lecture and quiz section on the calendar
  • Practice-It: Many practice problems from the book
  • Midterm Strategies: Note this was written in the context of an in-person and timed exam, so some of this is not fully relevant!