This post outlines what Exam 1 will be like.

Two different pieces are considered part of the exam. There’s the in-person Exam and the Practium.

Exam General Information

  • Modules covered: 2, 3, 4, 5 (module 1 is covered in that you will be using Python in the Practicum)
  • Study Exams are in the exam Box folder
    • Solutions will be released on the Friday before the exam. This is to encourage everyone to try the study exams before looking at the solutions.

In-person Exam

  • When: Wednesday 2/28, during regular class time
  • Is in-person only
  • It is a paper exam taken during class.
  • There will be multiple versions.
  • It will have no code writing and focus more on thinking like a data scientist.
    • It may have the results of calling the describe function on a data set, so know what that function does.
  • Bring a calculator.
  • We will print and provide a reference sheet for you at the exam. See what it is in the exam Box folder.
  • You may bring one piece of paper as a cheatsheet and can put things on the front and back.

Practicum

  • When: Friday, 3/1, starts 12:01am EST, ends 11:59pm EST
    • It should take your group around 2-3 hours to complete, but your group can take as long as you want. It must be submitted before the end of the day.
    • There is no class on this day, so your group has the time to work on this.
  • This can be done in a group. See details below.
  • It is a take-home, open book, open note, open internet, and open LLM exam.
    • Each question will have a variable you set to True or False to indicate if you used an LLM to help you on this question.
  • It focuses on coding and interpreting the results of that code.
  • Consists of a Jupyter Notebook and a data set
    • Recommendation: Discuss in advance with your group how you will create the final submission and who will submit it.
  • A Canvas announcement will go out at the start of the exam with a link to the Box folder containing all the files you need.
  • It is closed to any person outside of your group. So, do not ask someone to do it for you or ask on places like stackoverflow.
  • The act of submitting and being part of a submission means that you are upholding the Duke community standard that you contributed equally to this submission and only talked amongst yourselves when working on it.
  • Protect the integrity of the exam and your exam submission.
    • Take your exam:
      • in a secure location where only your group can see your screen or talk to you.
      • in a place where you will not be distracted or tempted to talk to someone outside of your group.
    • Only after grades have been published for the Practicum Update can you do the following. Doing any of these before grades are published will be considered a violation of the Duke Community Standard.
      • Discuss what you did on the exam.
      • Show your solutions to students outside of your group.
      • 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.

Group requirements

  • You will submit through the group submission process on Gradescope.
  • Your group’s members may submit notebooks separately, as a single submission, or broken up member subsets (e.g., a 3-person group could submit 2 notebooks where one person is solo and the others submit as a pair).
  • All members of a group must be listed in the notebook. There will be a 0-point test case with three variables for the NetIds of all those in the group. If you have fewer than 3 members, the notebook will state what to fill in for the other variables.
    • If you do not do this and we detect your notebooks as too similar to have been done in isolation, this is considered a violation of the Duke Community Standard.
  • Group Requirement: A notebook has no more than 3 people who contributed or collaborated on it.
    • 2 people have collaborated if one or both have given or received work/help on the Practicum. Notice these are “or’s.” That means if you share your Practicum with another person, even if that person did not give you anything in return you both are now considered collaborators and should include each other in your submission as a collaborator/group member.
    • This also means that if 3 people submit together and then 1 person shares that submission with a 4th person who then submits something too similar to have been done in isolation, all 4 are considered collaborators because it is impossible to detect who shared with whom. This collaboration is then considered a violation of the rules and, therefore, a violation of the Duke Community Standard.

Practicum Update

  • Your group will have the option to update your Practicum after seeing the results of your Practicum grade. If you choose to submit an update, your grade for the Practicum will be as follows:
    • Practicum (original): 15%
    • Practicum Update: 85%
  • When: Thursday 3/21 – Saturday 3/23
    • Note it is very after the original Practicum for the sake of avoiding Spring Break.
    • This is during Module 8.
  • It is your responsibility to work with your group to do the update.
  • For the update, you will do the following:
    • Update your original notebook as needed.
    • Add a new cell at the bottom of the type MarkDown and list all of the changes you made from your original submission. Not doing this means we may not grade your update properly.
    • We may grade outside of your changes.

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 study 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 or 2
  • N = E_full_credit * 0.6
  • U = E_full_credit * 0.2
  • Blank = 0

Unit tests in the autograder for the Practicum will earn you points up to, but not quite, the U level. Whether an S is 1 or 2 less points than an E depends on the exam part. Each exam part is out of 100 points. The goal is earning only S’s results in a low A. So, for example, if the Practicum has only 4 questions, an S would lose 2 points compared to an E, which means getting all S’s is a low A (92%), but still guarantees an A on the Practicum.