Midterm Review

Motivation

The midterm exam is intended to gauge your comfort and facility with the content from the first half of the course. Since the course topics build on each other, confirming you have a good grasp of the foundations and identifying which gaps to shore up now puts you on a solid path to be ready for what comes next.

Logistics

• The exam is Monday February 9th, from 7-9pm.
• There will be assigned seating, so keep an eye on this space to see your assigned room and seat. Yasmine will post an announcment to Ed sometime during Week 5 with specific seating information.
• Students with special circumstances (SCPD, OAE, athletic conflicts) should have received an email from Head TA Yasmine confirming you will receive special arrangements. If you have not received an email from her about this yet, reach out ASAP, as you are not in our records. You will receive a personalized room and seat assignment (if applicable) soon.
• This exam is on paper, using pen/pencil. You will write your answers directly on the paper exam.
• The exam is closed-book and closed-device.
  • We will provide a reference sheet to jog your memory about the Stanford library functions.
  • You may bring one page 8.5"x11" of your own notes. We won’t require you to make it handwritten this quarter, but will trust you that your font size is something reasonable (no microfiche (!)).
  • You are not permitted to bring scratch paper. The exam will have designated space for scratch work.

Coverage, practice materials

• Coverage. The exam will cover material from the start of the quarter through recursion, but not backtracking recursion. That means through lecture on Wednesday January 28 (with corrections at the beginning of Friday!), and through Assignment 3, but not later lectures and not Assignment 4.

• Format. Most questions will ask you to write a function or short passage of code that accomplishes a particular task. Other questions may ask you to read a provided passage of code and analyze or reason about its behavior. There may also be short answer questions to answer in prose.

• Practice. We will publish two practice exams below. For now, you have one, and the other will be held until the review sessions. You should do the first one before the review session, and then focus on the second one during the final stages of your preparation. They are both in PDF form, and have solutions included. We strongly recommend that you print these out, and take the exam in a realistic setting (i.e. timed, with only your reference sheet available). Then, go back and check your answers with the solutions and make notes of where to target your study!

• Practice Exam 1.

  • Solution
  • NOTE: This previous quarter exam included a backtracking recursion question, which I’ve cut, but you’ll see on the cover page it used to have a Problem 5 that is no longer there.

• Practice Exam 2 (Review Session Exam)

  • Solution
  • NOTE: This is the exam that SLs will go over during the review session on Friday, February 6th from 3-5PM in 200-203. It’s up to you if you’d like to try solving the exam yourself before the review session, or go in “fresh.”

• Studying both practice exams is strongly encouraged, because the actual exam problems follow templates that are similar to a mix of problems from them.

• Additional practice exercises

  • Revisit our section materials. We pack each weekly section handout with many more exercises that fit in the section meeting, so there are plenty of good options there. Section exercises are similar size and scope to those we use for exams (in fact, many section exercises originally appeared on exams in previous quarters).
  • The exercises in the textbook are another great source for practice.

• Review session A group of our fabulous section leaders will lead a review session leading up to the midterm on Friday, February 6th from 3-5PM in 200-203! It will be recorded and posted on Ed after the session for those who can’t make it in person.

Advice

We absolutely want you to come out on top! The lectures, sections, and assignments work together to guide you toward mastery of the course learning goals and the exams serve as an assessment of your progress. The absolute best outcome everyone has a great grasp on the material to nail the exam.

Read on for our advice on how to make that happen for you!

Miscellaneous Resources

• Syntax Reference Sheet
• Advice from Keith Schwarz about coding without an IDE
• Advice from Julie Zelenski about coding exams
• Yasmine’s exam taking advice

Reflection and Check-in Meeting

The final part of the mid-quarter diagnostic process is an optional reflection and check-in with your section leader. We plan to grade the midterm the weekend after the exam, and will release grades shortly thereafter. After you receive your grading feedback, you will be invited to sign up for a one-on-one IG with your section leader to reflect on your experience taking the diagnostic and your personal learning goals for the rest of the course. These check-in IGs are optional, but strongly recommended.

Final Thoughts

✨We want you to do well on this exam.✨

See this as an opportunity to show what you’ve learned and display your great efforts in the class so far. Always remember why you are here! Your efforts to build practice skills and real understanding will take you a lot further than a pristine transcript. If you work hard toward mastery and feel good about your understanding of computer science that is an achievement to be proud of—regardless of how many points you get relative to the other students in the course.