CS 145: Designing Functional Programs (Advanced Version)

Exams

There are two midterms, the first is worth 10% and the second is worth 20%, and one final exam, worth 40%.

Ideally, a midterm exam should serve a diagnostic purpose, to alert students to potential weaknesses in understanding in advance of a final assessment. However, final exams are limited to 2.5 hours in length, which is not much time in which to make a proper assessment. Besides, as with assignments, if midterms did not contribute to the final grade, some students would not take them seriously.

Exams are highly imperfect instruments of diagnosis and assessment, but they are the best ones we have. More accurate and fair methods would likely raise your tuition costs substantially.

You must bring your WatCard to all exams and check your assigned seat at the link below.

Pre-Assigned Exam Seating

The midterm and final exams in this course will use assigned seating with individual student names printed on the front page of the exam paper. You must sit in your designated room and seat at the exam paper with your name on it. Look up your exam information well before the exam so you will know where to go (record it elsewhere as well).

The information about your seating will show:

• the exam (e.g. CS 145 Midterm),
• the date and start time (e.g. 2018-10-01 19:00:00),
• the building and room (e.g. DC 1350) and
• the seat (e.g. B-4).

Please check all carefully.
For most rooms (but not the PAC), the seat code indicates the row letter and column number, from the front left corner of the room - for example, B-4 would be the second row from the front of the room and the fourth seat from the left when facing the front of the room.

Midterm 1

Midterm 1 Date: Thursday, October 8, 2026, 7:00PM - 8:50PM (1 hour 50 minutes)

• BRING your WatCard, pens, pencils and eraser.
• DO NOT bring books, notes, calculators, other electronics - no aids are allowed.
• Check your seating here. Building, room and seat will be available 3 business days before the midterm date.
• First two pages of the exam can be found here.

Coverage:

• Basics of Racket (arithmetic functions, define, and/or, cond, if, ...)
• Tracing functions (both complete traces and functional step traces)
• Counting the number of steps of a function application, finding a closed form of the number of steps in terms of the input size, proving a closed form by mathematical induction.
• Semantic (i.e., substitution) rules, evaluating expressions to values.
• Recursion on natural numbers.
• Structures (define-struct, creating and using structures).
• Trees (terminology, use)
• Functions (usually recursive) that consume and/or produce trees.
• Tail recursion (what it is, how to write functions that are tail recursive).
• ADTs

Midterm 2

Midterm 2 Date: Monday, November 9th, 2026 7:00PM - 8:50PM (1 hour 50 minutes)

• BRING your WatCard, pens, pencils and eraser
• DO NOT bring books, notes, calculators, other electronics - no aids are allowed.
• Check your seating here. Building, room and seat will be available 3 business days before the midterm date.