# Examinations

There are two examinations planned for this class.

The examinations will be completed remotely. In a previous COVID semester, one of the most common student concerns for remote education was the integrity of assignments: 61% of students agreed with the statement "I am worried about others cheating and my grade looking worse by comparison." As a result, we are taking aggressive, experimental measures with exam creation and delivery to help ensure that student grades reflect mastery of the material.

A distinct examination will be created for each student. This will involve not only usual techniques, such as selecting a subset of questions or answers from a larger pool, but also software-specific approaches. For example, for problems on the examination involving the analysis or manipulation of a program (e.g., "Create a test suite for this Python program that maximizes branch coverage ..."), a different random program will be constructed for each student by the examination server (which will also compute a per-student answer key).

One goal of this process is to reduce the cost/benefit tradeoff for cheating: if completing two exams requires twice as much work and the risk is increased (e.g., the course staff have twice as many datapoints on which to spot suspicious patterns), the incentive to cheat is lessened.

The examinations will be open book, open notes, read-only internet. In essence, you can use any resource except another live human. You can view Stack Overflow, but you can't make new posts.

The dates for the in-class examinations are posted well in advance. To request a rescheduled examination (e.g., for reasons other than a documented one as above, etc.), you must notify us via email at EECS481Staff@gmail.com (privately) at least one week before the date of the examination. Note that requests need not be granted.

### Advice From Former Students

Read what former students had to say about reading quizzes and examinations.

# Logistics

On the day of the exam, you will be able to choose any two-hour window you like to take the exam. (That is, you can pick any 2 hours within the 24-hour day.)

In addition, you can practice using the exam interface using a previous semester's exam. Note that this practice is about the interface and not about the content, so there is only one practice interface trial even though there are two exams per semester. See below for practicing the content.

The interface auto-saves your work every five minutes and you can also save and submit as often as you like. We will grade your last submission before the two-hour deadline.

### Warning: Late Submissions

Because these exams are normally completable in 80 minutes and we are giving 120 minute slots (with 5 extra minutes for technology or network difficulties) within a 24 hour window, we will be very strict about time constraints. Late submissions will not be accepted without significant documentation of an accepted excuse. Please plan ahead accordingly.

# Where is the Exam?

A pinned note on Piazza has the Exam 2 information.

# On-Line Exam Tools

- Reset U-M Authentication — many exam errors are related to U-M authentication and this fixes most of them
- Check Your Exam 1 Submissions — report all submissions (including auto-saves) received by the exam server
- Check Your Exam 2 Submissions — report all submissions (including auto-saves) received by the exam server

# Exam Topics

Each exam covers everything up to and including the day of the exam, except any lecture or reading on the day of the exam itself. Students sometimes wonder if certain lectures, like guest lectures or end-of-term lectures, are included: yes, all types of lectures fair game for the exam. (The "Trivia" and "Psychology" slides with colored borders and the Optional Reading are not part of the exam, but may be part of extra credit questions.) This means that something in the lecture the "day before" the exam is fair game. This also means that the second exam is cumulative and may include material also covered in the first part of the exam (but it is likely to focus more on new material).

General philosophy:

- I favor questions that ask students to compare, contrast, evaluate, apply, restate, recognize or draw implications from keywords — rather than simply defining them. Since you can make use of notes, a question that just asks you to repeat the definition of branch coverage (or whatever) does not give us a good picture of your mastery of course concepts.
- Multiple choice questions, especially multiple choice questions with tricky distractor options, are fair game for exams.
- I favor asking students to "invert" concepts or otherwise take them apart to show master. If we always did things in A-B-C order in class, the exam is likely to have some C-B-A questions. Informally, I typically phrase this as "if I cover addition and negative numbers, the test will be on subtraction: you haven't seen it before, exactly, but should be able to do it".
- I am wary of asking for very low-level details that you are likely to forget in a few months anyway (e.g., "what is the exact formula for the Maintainability Index?"). However, my view of what is likely to be useful later in life (e.g., code coverage) may differ from that of a frustrated student.

# Previous Exams

Note that in previous semesters the material was covered in a different order, the exams may have been given in person or via another take-home method, and many other things may have changed. It is often very tempting for students to read the previous exams and then worry: "Oh my, this previous exam is very long and has strange rule X and covers topic Y that I've never heard of. Will my exam be like that?" No, it will not. The previous exams are provided as a courtesy and as a source of example problems: they are not strict guidelines.

When asking questions on the forum about previous exams, we strongly recommend that you include a screenshot of the question, rather than just saying "Q3 of S20". Including a screenshot helps makes sure that the answer will have enough context to help other students as well.

Previous Midterm Exams (i.e., Exam #1) and answer keys:

- Winter 2022 — Exam 1 (blank)
- Winter 2022 — Exam 1 (key)
- Fall 2021 — Exam 1 (blank)
- Fall 2021 — Exam 1 (key)
- Winter 2021 — Exam 1 (variant 1) (blank) — (some problems are cut off)
- Winter 2021 — Exam 1 (variant 2) (key) — (some problems are cut off)
- Fall 2020 — Exam 1 (blank) — (some problems are cut off)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 1 (variant 2) (blank)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 1 (variant 2) (key)
- Winter 2020 — Exam 1 (blank)
- Winter 2020 — Exam 1 (key)
- Fall 2019 — Exam 1 (blank)
- Fall 2019 — Exam 1 (key)
- Winter 2019 — Exam 1 (blank)
- Winter 2019 — Exam 1 (key)
- Winter 2018 — Exam 1 (blank) — (do not worry about question #1 from this exam)
- Winter 2018 — Exam 1 (key)

Previous Final Exams (i.e., Exam #2) and answer keys:

- (we are not secretly hiding or reserving any previous exams or answer keys: this list is everything we have)
- Winter 2022 — Exam 2 (blank)
- Winter 2022 — Exam 2 (key)
- Fall 2021 — Exam 2 (blank)
- Fall 2021 — Exam 2 (key)
- Winter 2021 — Exam 2 (key) — (some problems are cut off)
- Fall 2020 — Exam 2 (blank) — (some problems are cut off)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 2 (variant 1) (blank)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 2 (variant 1) (key)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 2 (variant 2) (blank)
- Spring 2020 — Exam 2 (variant 2) (key)
- Winter 2020 — Exam 2 (blank) — (this one is intentionally more difficult than usual)
- Winter 2020 — Exam 2 (key) — (this one is intentionally more difficult than usual)
- Fall 2019 — Exam 2 (blank)
- Fall 2019 — Exam 2 (key)
- Winter 2019 — Exam 2 (blank)
- Winter 2019 — Exam 2 (key)
- Winter 2018 — Exam 2 (blank)
- Winter 2018 — Exam 2 (key)

Note that provided answer keys need not be exhaustive: they often list "one possible answer" rather than "all possible answers".

# Review Sessions

If there is sufficient interest, the TAs will organize review sessions for the exam. This will not happen automatically. Demonstrate your interest via the forum or your discussion section.

# Study Aids

### Practice Reading Your Notes Out Loud

"Producing items by means as simple as saying, writing, or typing them can yield substantial memory improvements relative to silent reading. We review the research on this production effect and outline some important extensions and boundary conditions. We also evaluate the evidence that production enhances the distinctiveness of items in memory during encoding, thereby facilitating their later retrieval. There are issues to resolve and areas to explore, but production offers a practical means of enhancing some forms of long-term, explicit memory."

Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E. Bodner. The Production Effect in Memory. Memory, Vol 26, Issue 4, 2017.