Quizzes

Introduction

As discussed in the syllabus, 20% of your grade will be from quizzes. We’ve decided to have one quiz in the middle of the term and one during finals week, each worth 10% of your grade. The quizzes will be online, and you will have a 24 hour window to choose a 60-90 minute slot during which to take the quiz.

Why quizzes?

We think quizzes are important for you to get the most out of 341. Homeworks are great, but “work at it until you are done” is different than “review and study until you’re confident you have the ideas down.” Also, homeworks are simply of a different style -- mostly writing code -- that does not work as well for some of what we’re trying to teach.

Administration

Quizzes will be administered as timed assignments through Gradescope. The time limit for completing the quiz once you open it will be two hours, and you will have at least 5 days in which to find a slot to take each quiz. The first quiz will be posted no later than Monday, November 1, at 1:30pm and will be available until Sunday, November 7, at 5:00pm. The second quiz will be posted no later than Friday, December 10, at 1:30pm and will be available until at least Friday, December 17, at 11:59pm. For each quiz, each student should find a two hour period during that time when they can take the quiz.

The quizzes are "open everything", including class slides, your notes, any resources you want to refer to on the internet, such as the OCaml documentation. (The quizzes will not require knowledge of any obscure libraries, but if you want to double check the parameters to some of the well-known functions from modules like String and List, you are free to do so.)

The quizzes must be completed individually. You should not talk to anyone except course staff about the quiz during the entire period in which it is available, as other students may not have completed it yet. This policy includes any form of posting questions on the internet. So while "open everything" means you are allowed to look up information, even on sites like Stack Overflow, you are not allowed to ask new questions about the quiz on such sites. (We do not expect Stack Overflow to be useful for completing the quizzes.)

Send email to cse341-staff (at cs) if you encounter any problems. Unfortunately, we cannot promise instant responses during the entire quiz period, so if you are unsure about a problem, please explain your question and what you think the answer is on your submission. As long your assumption does not significantly reduce the difficulty of the problem from what was intended, we will try to allow your interpretation.

Preparation

The first quiz will cover units 1 through 3. The best preparation is to review the lecture and section slides from those units, and homeworks 1 through 3.

Our quizzes will be conceptually similar to exams from previous quarters, except that they are administered online and count for less of your grade. You can review old exams if you want more preparation, but we do not expect that you need to review these to do well on the quizzes.