The exam will cover everything from semi-structured data and XML through the material on distributed databases. When it comes to the material from PS 3: Part II, we won’t expect you to know fine-grained details like the Berkeley DB API, but we could ask you about higher-level concepts.
Remember that you can access all of the relevant pre-lecture videos and lecture recordings in the Lectures section of the course’s Blackboard site, and that all of the relevant lecture notes are in the coursepack.
The exam will be held during lecture on Monday, November 18 in the same locations as the first midterm:
You must bring your BU ID to the exam, and have it verified when you turn in the exam.
You may use one 3-inch by 5-inch index card with handwritten notes (both sides). However, you must use a card that we provide. These cards will be distributed in lecture. If you aren’t able to get one then, they are available in the CS office (CDS 639) on weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm.
You may not use any other materials or devices during the exam. In particular, you should turn off and put away cell phones, watches, and other devices.
Once you leave the exam room, you may not return, so please use the restroom ahead of time.
The exam will include questions similar to the ones posed in the pre-lecture and in-lecture exercises–both the Top Hat questions and the open-response ones.
In addition, there will be questions that ask you to solve problems similar to the ones from the problem sets.
One part of the exam will contain multiple-choice questions. We strongly recommend that you bring a pencil and eraser for use on at least this part of the exam. There will be a “bubble sheet” for the multiple-choice answers that will be graded automatically by Gradescope. You will need to ensure that your final answer for each question is the only one that is bubbled, and thus we recommend using pencil so that you can erase answers as needed.
For the other parts of the exam, you must use either pencil or a pen with blue or black ink.
One thing that we highly recommend is to review the relevant lecture materials and make a summary of the key points in your own words. “Boiling down” the material in this way is a great way to ensure that you really understand the key concepts.
We also encourage you to do practice problems. Options include:
redoing the Top Hat pre-lecture questions
redoing the Top Hat questions from lecture and the extra-practice questions that are found in the coursepack; solutions to some of those extra-practice exercises can be found in the corresponding lecture folders on Blackboard
redoing the lab exercises, the solutions for which are available on the Labs page
(Note: Solutions to these problems will be posted under Other Content on Blackboard as we get closer to the exam.)
Feel free to post questions on Piazza (using the midterm_exam2 tag)
or to email the course account (cs460-staff@cs.bu.edu).
Last updated on November 20, 2024.