Remote assessment

Our switch to remote instruction has presented new and significant challenges for our students and faculty, including in the area of student assessment. In particular, the interrelated and significant issues of equity and integrity, which are routine considerations under normal circumstances, have taken on heightened significance in the context of remote learning.

  • Our commitment to equity means that, to the best of our ability, we ensure our assessment practices do not unfairly disadvantage certain students relative to others.

  • Our commitment to integrity means that, to the best of our ability, we ensure students maintain ethical practices during assessment and that individuals whose practices are unethical are held accountable for violating community standards.

In the Spring 2021 academic term, assessment will necessarily occur remotely.

For each midterm, and the final, you will be given a take-home exam.

  • It will be similar to the format of homework.
  • It will include a few exercises (questions) and you will be given a starter code.
  • You will have the luxury of using IntelliJ (compiler, debugger, visualizer, etc, included).
  • You will be allowed to refer to your notes and other course materials/resources.
  • You will submit your solution through Gradescope.

See the section on policies for what is not allowed!

The format and style of take-home exams, as noted, will be similar to the homework and to class activities, which generally involves:

  • Write object-oriented Java (following good programming practices) for implementing data structures/algorithms.
  • Understand the function and time/space complexity of operation of data structures/algorithms (through discussion style question).

Every effort will be made to ensure a "prepared student" will finish the exam well within the allocated time.

Dates and topics

The final exam is scheduled for

  • Section 1, Tuesday, May 11, from 9 to 12 AM ET.
  • Section 2, Thursday, May 13, from 6 to 9 PM ET.

We will hold the take-home final exam for both sections on Tuesday, May 11. Read on for more information!

For the date of midterms, refer to the posted Schedule

Topics covered in each exam will be posted to the course discussion forum and it generally involves:

  • Write object-oriented Java (following good programming practices) for implementing data structures/algorithms.
  • Understand the function and time/space complexity of operation of data structures/algorithms (through discussion style question).

Each midterm is expected to take no more than 70 minutes to finish; the final is expected to take 2 hours and 30 minutes. However, we will give you a window of 36 hours, for each examination, to account for all sort of individual challenges you may be facing: time difference, other exams, etc.

You may not ask for extension under any circumstances; the idea is that, during these 36 hours, you will be able to put the expected time towards working on the exam.

You may not use a late-day towards a take-home exam.

For each exam, we will release the questions on 9:00 AM (EST) on the day of examination, through a link on the course homepage and an announcement on the course discussion board. You will have until 9:00 PM (EST) the day after the exam was released to finish and submit your work. Again, no late days/extensions allowed!

We will not have a lecture on a day we have midterm scheduled so you can put the lecture time towards working on the exam.

Grading and feedback

We will grade your submission similar to homework (a mix of automated and manual grading through a well-defined rubric) and release the grade/feedback once we are done grading all submissions.

We may run some automated tests on your submission, behind the scene, but you will not receive a feedback from Gradescope upon submission.

Policies

We expect you to abide by our Academic Integrity Policies (as highlighted in the Course Syllabus), in particular:

You must work alone on the exam.

  • Do not discuss the questions/answers with other students.
  • More to that point, if you need to ask any clarifying question about the exam, please make a private post on Campuswire.
    • I will review the questions at certain designated times.
    • Please expect my answer, in most cases, will be "you must figure that out on your own".
    • If it turns out a point truly needs clarification, I will answer it and then make the post public so everyone would have access to it.

The exam is open book so feel free to use your notes and other course material. However, you should not get help from other students/individuals/resources (including online resources other than those posted on the course homepage).

Sample Exams

We have been doing take-home exam since the switch to remote online teaching. Here are a few samples we have: