Midterm 2

We will have an evening midterm on November 17th, from 6:00-7:20 PM. We will be in two different buildings: ARC 147 (the usual A lecture room) and JHN 102 .

We will share instructions for which room to report to closer to the exam date.

But what happens if...

I have a conflict with the exam time that I know about right now? Fill out this form by Wednesday November 12th.
I'm sick? Let Robbie and Miya know (before the exam begins); we'll schedule you for a conflict exam within a few days of the regular midterm. If you can't make it to a makeup exam (because your illness is extended or you're isolating for longer), we'll discuss other options.
[other emergency] happens Let Robbie and Miya know as soon as you know something is going to interfere with your ability to take the exam. These must be significant and beyond your control, but if they are we will accommodate them (an example of this might be you got into a car accident on your way to campus).

Exam Details

In-Exam Resources

The exam is closed-book and individual.
We will provide you with the Propostional Equivalences sheet and the Inference Rules sheet (the same as you got for midterm 1), but you are less likely to need them.
Additionally, we will allow each student one 8.5x11-inch-sheet (both-sides) of hand-written notes during the exam.

Hand-written means either really handwritten (like with pencil or pen) OR a facsimile of handwritten, e.g., you hand-wrote on an iPad and printed it out. If you use technology you may NOT use it to artificially shrink your handwriting. Similarly, you may recreate diagrams or lecture slides by rewriting and redrawing them, but may not just copy them using technology and print them.

You are not permitted electronic devices (e.g., calculators) during the exam; the exam will be set up so that you should not need a calculator.
We will not remind you of definitions we've used frequently.

For example, we won't remind you what divides means in a proof about divides (understanding what divides means is part of the point of the problem!), but we would remind you what the "Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic" is if we wanted to ask you about it. You can include definitions on your notesheet, if you are worried about not being able to remember them.

We recommend you consider writing proof templates on your note sheet! We will not provide those templates on the exam.

Topic Coverage

What you will see:

You are responsible for topics covered through lecture 20 (The end of induction); that was the lecture on Friday November 7th.
The exam will be focused on topics covered in lectures 11-20.

focused means we won't have problems that are specifically testing only content from lectures 1-10; we will not have you do a logical equivalence proof, for example.
But you cannot just forget everything from lectures 1-10; if we have you do a proof by contrapositive, for example, you'll have to take a contrapositive (which was first covered in lectures 1-10).

There will be at least one induction proof.
There will be at least two other proofs.
We will not have purely training wheels questions (like the translation-focused questions on midterm 1/the previous exams), but we might have training wheels topics as parts of problems (like negating a statement before writing a proof by contradiction).
There may be other question(s) not fitting into the above list.

What you will not see:

We will not require you to run the Euclidian algorithm. All algebra and other computations will be possible without a calculator.
We will not have any symbolic proofs (applying the logical equivalences). But we may still ask you to negate an expression or take a contrapositive, for example (just not to tell us the names of the steps you used).

Timing Logistics

You will have 80 minutes to do the exam; we will design the exam so that with studying and preparation, we would be comfortable giving the exam in a 50-minute exam slot.
You aren't used to writing proofs in a time-constrained environment! We don't want time pressure to be extremely intense the first time you're having to work quickly, hence the extra time. But the time limit is still there (and there will be a time limit on future exams as well)! We strongly recommend taking the practice exam under exam conditions (e.g., writing all the answers with pencil and paper; timing yourself) to make sure you're close to the time target.

Preparing

Homework 6 Feedback

Feedback on what you've done right/wrong on previous problems is one of the best ways to learn. You'll have HW1-HW5 feedback and solutions well before the exam.

If you do not use late days on HW6, we intend to return HW6 feedback to you on Sunday November 16th; we will release solutions to HW6 on Ed on November 16th as well.

Practice Sessions

Section on November 13th will include chances to talk about review problems; since it is not the day of the exam, section participation will work as it normally does that week (you can either participate in-person or do the problems and email them to your TA).

Lecture on the day of the midterm November 17th will be a chance to ask questions (no new content will be presented).

Practice Materials

In past quarters, 311 had one big midterm (usually in week 7) instead of two midterms; that means we don't have an old exam to show you that's a perfect match to what you will se on your exam.

We wrote a practice exam; here are the solutions. You should not take this exam as a guarantee of what you will see on your exam (the exact number and types of problems may be different), but it should give you a sense of what we think is a reasonable length. Many of these problems are drawn from old midterms, but some are new for this practice. We strongly recommend taking this exam under test conditions (e.g., print it out on paper, do it with just a reference sheet and one page of notes, time yourself) so that you have a sense of whether you're working at about the right speed.

Below are old midterms for 311. Since these were the only midterms given during those quarters, your exam will not focus on many of the topics shown here. You still should find them helpful.