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Stanford CS 106B - Exam Strategies and Tactics

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Eric Roberts Handout #27CS106B April 24, 2009Exam Strategies and TacticsThis handout was written by (a) Julie Zelenski, (b) Julie Zelenski, (c) Julie Zelenski, or (d) all of the above.The exams in the CS106 courses can be challenging and even a bit intimidating.Hopefully you have been keeping up in lecture and doing well on the assignments, butmay be unsure of how to make sure your skills will translate well to the exam setting.The practice midterm gives an idea of what to expect and this handout gives some sageadvice gathered from our current and past staff members. We hope you will find our tipsuseful when preparing for and conquering this upcoming challenge!The rationale behind pencil and paper examsStudents often suggest that exams should be done more like assignments: using acompiler, having code completion and searchable documentation, being able to run, test,and debug, etc. The logistics of an online exam add serious challenges in terms offairness and security, but we did try this experimentally and it didn’t work they way we’dhoped. For a start, much valuable time was lost to dorking with details (proper #includes,syntax issues) that we don’t even count in an exam situation. In a time-restrictedsituation, immediate feedback from the compiler can be more of an impediment than anadvantage. Imagine this, you read the first problem, have a good idea how to solve it,write your solution, and trace its operation and feel good. In a paper exam, you thenmove on to the next problem. In an online exam, you compile and test it. Suppose itexhibits a bug—even though it may only be a minor issue, you can see your answer iswrong so you hunker down and rework and retest until perfect. Writing your firstsolution took 20 minutes and would have earned, say, 17 of 20 points. You spent another20 minutes debugging to earn those remaining 3 points. Bad deal! The rest of your examalso suffers because you used up so much time. We had students who never made it pastthe first or second problem in the online exam. Being confronted with clear evidence ofbugs made it impossible to move on. We tried again and warned students about thiseffect, but resistance was futile. Given the limited time available, we want you to writeyour best answer and move on and paper seems to be the means to encourage exactlythat.We know that writing on paper is not the same as working with a compiler, and weaccount for that in how we design and grade the exam. We are assessing your ability tothink logically and use appropriate problem-solving techniques. We expect you toexpress yourself in reasonably correct C++, but we will be quite lenient with errors thatare syntactic rather than conceptual.How to prepare for the exam•“Open book” doesn’t mean “don’t study”. The exam is open-book/open-notes andyou can bring along the reader, your notes from lecture, course handouts, and printoutsof all your assignments. We don’t expect you to memorize minute details and theexam will not focus on them. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare.There certainly isn’t enough time during the exam to learn the material. To do well,you must be experienced at working problems efficiently and accurately withoutneeding to repeatedly refer to your resources.• Practice, practice, practice. A good way to study for the programming problems isto take a problem (lecture or section example, chapter exercise, sample exam problem)and write out your solution under test-like conditions, e.g. on a blank sheet of paper– 2 –using a pencil with a short amount of time. This is much more valuable than a passivereview of the problem and its solution where it is too easy to conclude “ah yes, I wouldhave done that” only to find yourself adrift during the real exam when there is noprovided solution to guide you!• Get your questions answered. If there is a concept you’re a bit fuzzy on, or you’dlike to check your answer to a chapter exercise, or you wonder why a solution iswritten a particular way, get those questions answered before the exam. Swing by theLaIR, come to office hours, or send an email and we’re happy to help.How to take the exam• Scan the entire exam first. Quickly peruse all questions before starting on any one.This allows you to “multitask”—as you are writing the more mundane parts of oneanswer, your mind can be brainstorming strategies or ideas for another problem in thebackground. You can also sketch out how to allocate your time between questions inthe first pass.• Spend your time wisely. There are only a handful of questions, and each is worth asignificant amount. Don’t get stuck on any particular problem. There is muchopportunity for partial credit, so it’s better to make good efforts on all problems than toperfect an answer to one leaving others untouched.• Consider the point value of each question. Divide the total minutes by the totalnumber of points to figure the time per point and use that as guide when allocatingyour time across the problems. You may want to reserve a little time for checkingyour work at the end as well.• Leverage the materials you bring with you. If you know of a function in the readeror a handout that would help, you can simply cite the source and use it. You do notneed to rewrite it. If you have a function you wrote for an assignment that you wouldlike to use, you can copy it from your assignment printouts (hence, why we suggestyou bring them).• Style and decomposition are secondary to correctness. Unlike the assignmentswhere we hold you to high standards in all areas, for an exam, the correctness of theanswers that dominates the grading. Decomposition and style are thus somewhat de-emphasized. However, good design may make it easier for you to get the functionalitycorrect and require less code, which takes less time and has fewer opportunities forerror. Comments are never required unless specifically indicated by a problem. Whena solution is incorrect, commenting may help us determine what you were trying to doand award partial credit.• Answer in pseudocode, but only if you must. If the syntax of C++ is somehow inyour way, you can answer in pseudocode for partial credit. There is a wide variation inthe scoring for psuedocode. Some pseudocode is vague and content-less and does littlemore than restate the problem description (“I would recursively try all thesubsequences to find the longest”) and thus


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