Midterm Exam

The Midterm Exam will be held in-class (1:30pm - 2:20pm) on Friday October 31st in (KNE 110). If you require DRS accommodations for the midterm exam, please schedule to take the exam with the DRS Testing Center.

What to bring

  • Yourself.
  • Your UW ID card.
  • A pen or pencil and eraser.
  • Water
  • A 1-page cheatsheet
    • Note: we will provide a reference sheet that includes some documentation that you won’t have to memorize or include on your own cheatsheet.
    • Note 2: This reference sheet may change between now and the exam date.
    • 1-page means a single 8.5”x11” (US Letter) sized piece of paper, front and back. Typed or handwritten.

Format

This is a hand-written test, meaning NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES of any kind allowed. Any math on the exam will be limited to simple arithmetic; we’re assessing for Python and programming, not for math!

Question types may include some of the following. Note: this is not an exhaustive list, nor will all of these formats appear. This list is meant to give you an idea of what might possibly appear on the exam.

  • Given a program, function, or code snippet and possible inputs, what is the output?
  • What is the value of variables X, Y, Z on line N?
  • Fill in the code: Replace the blanks on line N with an appropriate statement or expression
  • Evaluate expressions
  • Write a function that takes … and returns …

Topics

Every topic up to the lecture before the midterm is fair game for appearing on the exam. The short list of those topics is:

  • Variables, Statements, Expressions
  • For loops, range, nested loops
  • If statements and conditionals
  • Functions, function arguments, and return statements
  • Lists/Nested Lists
  • File input/output (I/O)
  • Dictionaries
  • Nested Structures

Practice

Warning

Exams from past quarters are either completely different, contain possibly outdated practices, or simply happened at different points in the quarter. When in doubt about whether a topic will be covered, if an answer key seems different than you expect, or if you think there’s an error in one of these example exams ask on Ed.

Here are some prior midterm exams along with their answer keys:

You can review individual exams by quarter: