CS 303 midterm

This page contains an outline of the midterm exam for CS 303. This covers the first chapters in Building Blocks for Theoretical Computer Science up through Induction.

Goals

The goal of the midterm is to evaluate you on the most important topics from the first half of the term.

Q&A

• What can you use? Anything except other people or AI's (no chatGPT or the other ones).
• Does everyone have to take both parts (even if you had 100% on the quizzes)? Yes, TBA what the cutoffs are.

Exam part 1

For the "regular exam" portion of the midterm, you will have the regular class periods on Friday March 24 (10-10:50am, 1-1:50pm). It will be q1-q4 for the first hour and q5-q8 for the second hour. There will be auto-graded questions just like the ones on the quizzes. There will also be the following short answer / essay questions that will be looked at manually.

• Truth table (first hour) - write a truth table for two logical formulas and conclude whether they are logically equivalent or not.
• Logical formula (first hour) - given a logical formula, prove that it is either unsatisfiable, valid (always true), or can be both true or false depending on the settings of the variables.
• GCD (second hour) - demonstrate the Euclidean algorithm to compute the gcd.
• Modular exponentiation (second hour) - demonstrate the modular exponentiation algorithm.

I may make small changes to quiz questions and/or the short answer questions when I am making the exam. The goal would be to ensure that you really understand the concepts and not "just" how to solve the exact questions we have seen before.

Grading Notes

For the short answer questions, if you put something that is not correct you lose at least a point for it. Even if you are doing the problem the right way, be careful about phrasing and notation.

Exam part 2

The second part of the exam is a 15 minute interview slot with the instructor. You will be asked to explain solutions from the regular exam, from the hw assignments, or questions that are similar to these. The goal is to (a) verify that the work you are submitting is your own (you demonstrate the skills live that you have been turning in work for), (b) have an adaptive portion of the exam where you can be given hints if needed and see if you can get some partial credit.

First draft of the outline for this part is as follows.

1. HW problem a: I pick a HW problem that you got full credit for, pull up your submission, and ask you to explain how to do it.
2. HW problem b: I pick a HW problem that you did not get full credit for, pull up your submission, and ask you how to finish it or fix any problems.
3. Exam part 1 short answer: I pull up your submissions for the part 1 short answer and ask you to explain at least one.
4. Exam part 1 auto-graded: I make up a new question or two from each of the auto-graded quizzes and ask you to solve them or how to solve them.

The second part will be the week of March 26 - March 31. Students enrolled in the face to face section will be required to do this part of the exam in person; those enrolled in the online section can do this either online or in person. We will schedule the interview time slots early next week.

No google, yes calculator. Just you.