This post outlines what Exam 1 will be like.

There is a Sakai quiz called “Prepare 04.E: Exam 1 Logistics” that will count towards your Prepare 4. It is due Wednesday, 2/8.

Exam Logistics

  • Modules covered: 1, 2, and 3
  • Practice Exam (Link)
  • The exam consists of 2 parts.
    • Part 1 is in-person only.
    • Part 2 will be take-home. It is open book, open note, open internet, and closed to people.
  • Timeframe:
    • Part 1: During class Wednesday, 2/15.
    • Part 2: Open Thursday, 2/16, 12:01 AM, and close Saturday, 2/18, 11:59 PM.
    • The exam will close at 11:59 pm regardless of when you started.
  • There will be no class on Friday, 2/17.
  • The Exam Retake 1 will be during Exam 2. Your Exam 1 Part X score will be the max between this exam and the retake per part.
  • The exam must be done individually. It is a violation of class policy if you collaborate in any way with another person (in or not in the class) on the exam. You can only talk to the teaching staff about the exam.

Part 1

  • Is in-person only.
  • It will cover mainly probability.
  • It is a paper exam taken during class.
  • There will be multiple versions.
  • We will give you one reference sheet (TBA).
  • You may bring one piece of paper as a cheatsheet and can put things on the front and back.
  • You will not need a calculator. Instead, you will show your work and simply write the final numerical equation that would get that final value. There will be no need to calculate the final value by hand.

Part 2

  • It will be take-home. It is open book, open note, open internet, and closed to people.
    • This means you cannot receive help on this exam from anyone, including (but not limited to) communicating with a person while taking the exam, such as asking someone through the Internet (like stackoverflow) to receive help.
  • It will cover mostly coding and some probability.
  • It is a Jupyter Notebook and a data set.
  • You will get the zip files inside a Sakai Quiz.
  • You will submit it on Gradescope.
    • During your testing period, you can submit as many times as you want to Gradescope. We will take the submission you mark as active, which is your last submission unless you change it using the history.
    • Gradescope will have tests, but they are sanity checks only. That means they are checking if the variable is the correct type and within the correct range. The vast majority of the points will be from hand grading. See the grading section below.
  • You will have 2 hours.
    • We do not expect you to need the entire 2 hours. However, it is not uncommon to get lost in a data set, and we wanted to account for that.
  • You can rely on the Sakai Quiz timer to tell you how much time you have left.
  • We will use your logged start time in Sakai to track if you submitted it to Gradescope on time.
    • If you submit after your allotted time, we will use the last submission within your allotted time. That includes marking it as zero if you do not submit within your time limit (so you will need to rely on the retake for your exam).
    • We recommend you submit to Gradescope periodically (after each problem) so you are not scrambling at the end trying to open Gradescope.
  • You do not need to do anything with Sakai after you retrieve your zip file from the quiz.
  • Protect the integrity of the exam and your exam submission.
    • Take your exam:
      • in a secure location where no one can see your screen or bother you.
      • in a place where you will not be distracted or tempted to talk to someone.
    • Only after grades have been published can you do the following. Doing any of these before grades are published will be considered a violation of the Duke Community Standard.
      • Discuss the exam.
      • Show your solutions to other students.
      • View other solutions.
  • If you have a question during the exam, ask it as a private new message on the class forum. Or in helper hours.
    • We cannot help you debug your code. If it appears as if the notebook or autograder is not working, but it turns out to be your own code that has a bug, you will be graded according to your submission.
    • We will do our best to always have someone checking the forum. However, we cannot make promises someone will instantly answer your question.
    • The exam is tested for readability, so the wording should be straightforward.

Grading Scale and Points Allocation

For the questions that do not have a clear correct or incorrect answer or where partial credit is warranted, the following rubric will be used.

  • E (Exemplary) – Work that meets all requirements and displays full mastery of all learning goals and material. And the code is clean and easy to read (see the practice exam for examples of what this means).
  • S (Satisfactory) – Work that meets all requirements and displays at least partial mastery of all learning goals as well as full mastery of core learning goals.
  • N (Not yet) – Work that does not meet some requirements and/or displays developing or incomplete mastery of at least some learning goals and material.
  • U (Unassessable) – Work that is missing, does not demonstrate meaningful effort, or does not provide enough evidence to determine a level of mastery.

The number of points earned is distributed across the problems based on the number of learning goals they are testing. The rubric will be converted to points as follows:

  • E = full credit
  • S = E_full_credit – 1
  • N = E_full_credit * 0.6
  • U = E_full_credit * 0.2
  • Blank = 0

Unit tests will earn you points up to, but not quite, the U level.