CSE 373: Data Structures and Algorithms (Winter 2016)

Midterm Exam Information

Exam Policies

  • Closed book
  • Closed notes
  • No calculators or other electronic devices
  • Begins promptly at 2:30 and ends promptly at 3:20
  • Additional details are in the midterm exam instructions

Topics Covered

The midterm covers all the course material up through and including the UNION-FIND and its implementation using Up Trees with UNION by weight and path compression. Topics include stacks, queues, simple proofs by induction, logs and exponents, geometric series, asymptotic analysis, dictionaries, AVL trees, union-find, disjoint sets and hash tables. All material covered on the exam will have been discussed in class or covered on an assignment, though you may be asked to apply ideas in slightly new ways.

Exam Format and Sample Midterms

Our exam will consist of various types of short-answer questions. You may be asked to write or read Java code or pseudocode. Below are several sample exams from prior offerings of CSE 373 but please understand these caveats:

  • We are having one midterm this quarter. Many previous quarters had two midterms. Only pay attention to questions that cover material on the topics we have discussed in lecture.
  • 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.
  • 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. We think you will find the actual exam somewhat familiar compared to the sample midterms, but some differences are likely.

Sample exams:

Additional Study Suggestions

  • Re-work problems from lecture and assignments.
  • Practice all the operations on stacks and queues, binary search trees, AVL trees, the UNION-FIND ADT, hash tables.
  • Practice analysis of algorithms and review big O, Omega, and Theta. Remember how to do simple induction proofs, and the basic mathematical ideas covered in A3 and the 2nd lecture.
 University of Washington, Winter, 2016