Location, Date, and Time

Exam Content

Materials Provided

Materials Needed

Policies

Arriving

Departing

Academic Integrity

In short, don’t cheat. Keep your eyes on your own exam. Any violation will be punished as harshly as possible. You’ve been warned.

Advice for Studying

Like most mathematical courses, the most important thing you can do to study is exercise (practice) as much as possible. You have four resources for practice exercises which will be very relevant to the exam:

You have the solutions for each of these, but when using these effectively, you should attempt all problems before referencing the solutions. Reading a solution and thinking “I know this” is very different from starting with a blank page and writing a solution. You won’t have solutions on the exam. You will have a blank page.

Creation of your notes sheet should be a by-product of practicing. Anything you needed to reference in notes when doing the exercises should be written on your notes sheet.

Time spent reading notes is far less valuable than time doing practice exercises. Many students believe reading the textbook or notes is useful for studying. In fact, time spent reading for the sake of reading is completely wasted. The notes and textbook should be used to help you eliminate gaps in your understanding which are discovered through practice problems. (But often, the solutions will be more directly useful.)

Some very bad ideas:

For some general advice on being a good student, take a look at this post from Andrej Karpathy. (Andrej was a very successful CS student, now well known in the Deep Learning community.) I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but he has a very good perspective.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the exam cumulative?

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How long will it take to do the exam?

Is there a practice exam?

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Will the exam be curved?

We got our grades back, now will the exam be curved?

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