Final Exam Details

As originally scheduled and announced on the syllabus, our final exam will be in our regular classrooms on Tuesday, December 12, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in our regular classroom, HIB 100.

The final will cover the whole course. You may bring with you to the exam one page of notes (8 1/2 by 11 inches, both sides), on which you may place any information you think will help you on the exam. Computer-printed pages are fine. You should bring a pen or pencil. And do bring your student photo ID. You may not bring any electronic devices. You do not need a bluebook or Scantron form.

Here are some review strategies:

• One excellent way to review, as we've mentioned before, is to go back and retake the quizzes and midterms. They're all available on line. Don't just glance over the problems and solutions and say to yourself, "Yeah, that looks right." Make copies without the answers, sit down with a pencil, and actually write out your own answers to each problem. It's the active work that leads to learning.
• You should also go back, read, and make sure you can do all the problems from the lab assignments, especially any problems where you let your partner take the lead and didn't insist on understanding all the aspects of the solution. As time permits, actually code up some of the solutions to those problems.
• Additional opportunities for coding practice are available at codingbat.com/python; most of these problems are about the same size as exam questions might be. You can also use pythontutor.com to visualize exactly what's happening in memory as you execute your code.
• The above review activities are all active and thus likely to be the most productive. You could also go back and re-read the Emailed course notes, the comments that sometimes appear with the answers to the quizzes, the instructors' answers to questions on Piazza, the assigned sections of the textbook, and selected UCI Replay recordings of the lectures.

We will have a review session on Monday, December 11, from noon to 2:00. Because large rooms are hard to find and not everyone will be available at that time, we'll hold the session virtually, on Piazza. Anyone can look at Piazza later and see all the questions and answers.

The review session will consist of my answering as many questions as there's time for. The ideal strategy for you would be, before the review session, to go through all the materials suggested on this page so the session can focus on your unresolved questions. Log in to Piazza at the appointed time, check out what has already been asked, and ask your questions. From past experience, this works out quite well.

We also recommend a good night's sleep before the exam.

Good luck!