Exam Policies
- Closed book
- Closed notes
- No calculators or other electronic devices
- Begins promptly at 2:30 and ends promptly at 4:20 on Tuesday
Topics Covered
The final exam is cumulative but more weight (probably roughly
two-thirds) will be given to topics covered since the second midterm.
So, review all topics covered in lecture or homework assignments
except a few topics clearly marked as optional (notably AVL deletion
and the details of the proof for the lower bound for comparison
sorting). The main topics that came after the topics covered by the
midterms are preserving software abstractions, minimum spanning trees,
everything about sorting, locality, and our introduction to
parallelism.
Exam Format and Sample Exams
Our exam will consist of various types of short-answer questions.
You may be asked to write or read Java code or pseudocode. It will be
similar in style to the midterms, but covering different topics
and with the potential for slightly different styles of questions.
Below we have repeated the sample midterms from the study
guides for the two midterms. Because our final exam is cumulative, it
makes sense to provide questions from old midterm exams. In addition,
some of these exams have questons about topics like locality. For the
topics since the midterms, we have provided a few additional sample
questions, but we do not have as many available.
Please understand these caveats:
- Topics covered on these exams may not be the exact same topics
covered on our exam; please see above for the topics covered on our
exam. We did not study B trees, leftist heaps,
or skew heaps. We did not study the definition of a full tree.
-
The sample exams are provided as a study guide, not as
any guarantee of the format of our actual midterm in terms of
length or type of questions. In particular, they are from a
different instructor since Dan has not taught CSE373 before, and
every instructor brings a certain style to exam-writing.
Sample exams:
Midterm 1:
Midterm 2:
Some additional questions:
unsolved
solved
Note:
- This (re)includes some additional questions posted for Midterm 2 as well as some questions on topics that came after the second midterm.
- Unfortunately, we do not have as many questions because old final exams are not publicly available and coming up with good exam questions is difficult.
- We encourage students to post their own questions for others on the discussion board or send the staff suggestions.
- We may also try to add some more questions, time permitting.
Additional Study Suggestions
- Re-work problems from lecture and homework.
- Do additional problems from the textbook.
- Review your notes and all lecture materials.
