Final Exam Information -- Fall 2007

General Information

No aids are permitted (not even calculators) during the exam. Also, no electronic devices of any kind are permitted in the exam (discmans, walkmans, mp3 players, phones, pagers, palms, etc.).

A reference sheet will be provided. At a minimum, it will contain the information in the sheet shown, plus possibly more information relevant to specific questions.

You are required to bring your Watcard with you to the final exam.

Location

Look up your assigned room, row and seat at https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs-marks/db/examSchedule.

In order to minimize running around and ensure that we have enough exams in every room, it is important that you end up in the correct location. We will have lists posted in each room in case you can't remember your assigned location.

Topic Coverage

Up to, but not including, the lecture on history. Note that the focus will be on material not covered on the midterm and from the later part of the course, though you are still responsible for knowing the earlier concepts already tested. (See the timetable.) This includes the material covered in the readings, the lectures, the labs, and the assignments.

Types of Questions

There will be a combination of question types. You can expect:

You will have to be able to write, read and trace code. You should be able to recognize whether or not code will compile, run, and produce output or an error. You will have to write code in the appropriate Java syntax, though we will be reasonably lenient with the occassional missed semicolon or other similar errors.

You are expected to be familiar with the classes you have used often (Board, Scanner, String, FileReader, FileWriter, PrintWriter, JFrame, JPanel, ActionListener). We will provide a reference sheet for anything else we think you will need.

You are also expected to be familiar with the provided case scenario, since some of the final exam questions will be based upon it. The text description is available here, and the diagram of the classes (a simplified UML class diagram without relationship arrows other than inheritance) is available here. You can look at the code here. The JavaDoc for it is available here

For those that are not familiar with reading and understanding UML diagrams such as the one provided above, here are some useful resources:

Practice Materials

Analysis of past terms suggests that students who have not done assignments and/or labs do poorly on exams.

Review Session

There is a review session scheduled for Sunday, December, 16. It will be at 2pm in MC 2066.

You will get the most out of this session by doing practice questions beforehand, and then getting the tutors to help you understand the trickier parts of the course. The questions that they are planning to go over are here. There will not be enough time to go over all of them, so you should try them before the review session and let them know during the review session which questions you would like to see.

Consulting Hours

The tutors and instructors are available for consultations via e-mail and in person. We are happy to meet with you to explain concepts and help you through difficult study material. Please take advantage of this if you are struggling; there is no good reason to fail this course.

Consulting will likely get very busy a few days before the final. Don't let that stop you from seeing us, but understand that you probably cannot (re-)learn the entire course in one or two days. Sooner is also better than later because it allows time for you to digest and integrate what you learn.

The tutors regularly scheduled consulting hours will end on Tuesday, Dec. 4th.

The tutors will be holding the following final exam consulting hours,

Office Hours

The instructors will be available by appointment.

Leila will have office hours on Monday December 10 and Monday December 17 from 10am-12pm.

Illness and the Final Exam

Students who are sick for the final exam, and present a valid doctor's note, will be expected to write the make-up exam on Friday, December 21, from 9-11:30am. (See exam regulations, especially pages 5 and 6 for how postponed exams are handled, since that may affect when the make-up exam is held. Page 8 has the section on how cases of illness are to be handled.)

You must also email ctkierst@cs.uwaterloo.ca to notify the course administrative staff that you are planning on writing the make-up exam so that a sufficiently large room can be arranged, and enough copies of the exam can be printed.

Students who are still sick at the time of the make-up exam will have to bring their doctor's note to the Math Undergraduate Office and fill out the necessary paperwork there. Since this is the last offering of the course, it is very important that you write this exam if at all possible.

Preparing for a CS Exam

Students in CS 133 frequently ask how to prepare themselves for an exam. Often they think that reading over course notes, lab notes and assignments will prepare them properly. The CS 133 staff think otherwise. Simply reviewing material makes it too easy to be lulled into complacency. Our premise is that working through examples gives you a much better idea of which topics you are familiar with and which ones need more work.

One suggestion is to set up a study group in which each of you makes up a couple of questions that the rest of the group answers.

The textbook also contains a number of questions that are good for practicing.

The bottom line is that the best way to study is to write programs.

Practice. Practice. Practice.