Exam

Exam spec is here

Requirements to sit the exam

During the duration you sit the exam, you must have access to a stable internet connection for pushing to gitlab and receiving emails.

By sitting or submitting an assessment on the scheduled assessment date, you are declaring that you are fit to do so and cannot later apply for Special Consideration.

If, during an exam you feel unwell to the point that you cannot continue with the exam, you should take the following steps:

1. Stop working on the exam and take note of the time
2. Make contact immediately with cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au and advise them that you are unwell
3. Immediately submit a Special Consideration application saying that you felt ill during the exam and were unable to continue
4. If you were able to advise cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au of the illness during the assessment, attach screenshots of this conversation to the Special Consideration application

Date, Time, and Duration

The final exam will be a 4 hour exam that begins at 1pm (AEST) and ends at 5pm (AEST) on Wednesday the 5th of May.

Students outside of Asia-Pacific region, or students with ELS requirements, may have their exam time altered and communicated by Hayden privately.

Exam Structure

The exam will be worth 100 marks. those 100 marks will make up the 30% value of the course.

• 15-25 marks: Short answer questions
  • Similar to tutorial and lab questions
  • All short written responses, no diagrams will be drawn
• 75-85 marks: Programming questions
  • Similar to tutorial and lab questions
  • Some of these questions may be HTTP-based questions (e.g. Flask)
  • You will be expected to use pytest and coverage in the exam, and we will award marks for your testing and coverage. We will provide details of this on a per-question basis, and will provide instructions of the commands to run for each question.
  • You are welcome to use pylint, but we will not award marks for pylint compliance.
  • A list of all available installable packages will be provided in the exam repo in a file requirements.txt

There is no hurdle for the final exam.

Programming questions will have a basic sample input/output. They will contain a basic pytest for you to sanity check your work. However, you will either be required to write your own tests, or encouraged to write your own tests.

Platform to complete exam

The exam can be distributed via gitlab, and operationally be very similar to the release and submission of a single lab repo.

The exam must be completed locally or via vlab. Regardless of where you complete the exam, you must:

• Ensure you push the work you want submitted to your gitlab master branch
• Ensure that your code works as expected in the vlab environment

If working locally, you must have access to an API client (such as ARC) for certain questions

Understand that you will only be allowed to use libraries that are listed in this file and this file . You are also allowed to use built-in libraries. They are all you will need for the questions we ask.

Technical issues relating to your local environment are not grounds for special consideration.

There will be no gitlab pipelines or runners that are run on your code when you push to gitlab. We will provide instructions for how to run pylint, pytest, and coverage locally.

Communication & Help during the exam

This exam is an open book exam, meaning you are able to use the internet and other resources to their full extent. The one exception to this is that you are prohibited from seeking help from other students during the exam. Any communications (physical, digital) after you or another person has started the exam time will result in a 0 mark (FAIL) for the course.

Further, a cheat sheet and python docs will be included/linked to you in repository you're provided.

If you have questions or clarifications needed during the exam, you can make a PRIVATE post on our forum (linked in sidebar). Do not message lecturers or tutors on MS teams. Do not email lecturers or tutors about issues that are not of a sensitive nature.

When posting a message to the forum, it's important that you are detailed in your description of your issues. If you are having technical issues:

• Make sure your most recent code is up on gitlab
  
• Show screenshots of the issue (code, terminal, etc)
• Explain how you produced it
• Whether you're running it locally or in vlab

Failure to comply may result in delays in responding to your queries.

Clarifications made during the exam will be made at the top of the spec released on gitlab. After each clarification, an email will be sent to all students in the course notifying them that a clarification has been made.

Submission

The exam will operate like other assessments in this course. At the end of your exam, we will be taking your most recent push to the master branch of your exam repository as your exam submission.

Preparation

• Review previous tutorials and lab questions to stay confident with both theory and practical elements of the course.
• A simplified sample exam paper can be found be clicking here.
• A few older exam questions can be found here. Your exam is structured differently, so don't read into the questions too much.