Quiz
Basics
(info below is from the course site)
- When is it released? When is it due?
- released on TBD
- due by noon on Thu 11/15
- That sounds like a lot of time. How does that work?
- We give you a couple of days for this assessment because we know that everyone is busy at different times, and we want to be accommodating of that. This does not mean you will spend days on the quiz.
- The quiz is open-book. What does this mean exactly?
- from the quiz instructions: “you may use any and all non-human resources during the quiz, but the only humans to whom you may turn for help or from whom you may receive help are the course’s heads”
How should I study?
- I think the best thing to do is to get a sense for the types of problems that will be on the quiz. (For this, take a look at past CS50 assessments!)
- It’s also a good time to sharpen your research skills.
- And make sure you know what resources are out there!
What are some tips/strategies?
- Do some reviewing as per the points above.
- Plan to do the quiz in chunks and schedule your time accordingly.
- What worked for me was scheduling a 4-6 hour chunk on one day and then another 4-6 chunk the next.
- Another thing I did was make a “table-ish list” of all of the questions, and, every time I’d go through the whole test, I’d mark down any problems I had “officially attempted.” So whenever I’d start to feel stressed by one particular question, I could just look at that page and think, ok, I’ve at least tried a lot of this. (You can see exactly what I did here.)
- As with any exam, don’t spend too much time on any one question. I would work through all of the questions first and jot down:
- A) if you think you know it, the answer
- B) else if you’re not completely sure where to start, what you think the question is asking
- i.e. “I think I need to figure out which of these pieces of code will work for negative inputs”
- C) else, anything you remember that might be relevant and some strategies for tackling it
- i.e. “I vaguely remember hearing about recursion in lecture (?) but not sure what week; maybe can control-F some lecture notes first and then do some Googling”
- To make sense of lines of code, you can:
- write out what you think the program/code segment is doing as pseudocode
- go line by line and comment the code
- this can work really well when there are small details that matter or functions you haven’t seen before (since it will force you to Google them)
- copy it into your IDE and play around with it
- remember to use print statements!
- And remember that for some of the questions, the best (and even only) course of action is Googling!!
Past Assessments
(note that CS50 used to have both a quiz and a test)