There is one cumulative take-home final examination planned for this class.
The examination will be completed remotely. In a previous COVID semester, one of the most common student concerns for remote education was the integrity of assignments: 61% of students agreed with the statement "I am worried about others cheating and my grade looking worse by comparison." As a result, we are taking aggressive, experimental measures to help ensure that student grades reflect mastery of the material.
A distinct examination may be created for each student. This may involve not only usual techniques, such as selecting a subset of questions or answers from a larger pool, but also software-specific approaches. For example, for problems on the examination involving the analysis or manipulation of a program (e.g., "Create a test suite for this Python program that maximizes branch coverage ..."), a different random program may be constructed for each student.
We may also employ similarity-checking software (e.g., Turnitin) for essay questions. Students who are worried about false positives may want to spend additional time ensuring that their submitted prose reflects their own ideas in their own voice.
The examinations will be open book, open notes, read-only internet. In essence, you can use any resource except another live human. You can view Stack Overflow or Reddit, but you can't make new posts. You can use generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) as long as you use a free version.
The exam is not yet available. It is planned to be released around 25% of the way through in the semester.
The exam will likely be submitted as a PDF on Gradescope. You can submit as often as you like. We will grade the last submission you make before the deadline. (This means you can submit the exam when it is partially completed, "just in case", and then update that submission later when you finish it.)
The dates for the examination are posted well in advance. Since the examination is untimed (i.e., you can work on it whenever you want, for as long as you want) and has a checkpoint to help you stay on track, no time accommodations or late submissions are available. For example, if there is a possibility that you might become sick on the last day of class when the exam is due, you should complete and submit the exam earlier in the semester.
If you are unable to complete and submit the coursework in time due to illness or extenuating circumstances, other administrative measures (such as receiving an Incomplete in the course and completing the work in a later semester) may be appropriate.
All topics in the course can be represented on the exam. This includes the lecture material and slides, the required reading, the homework assignments and their materials and reading, and so on.
Exception: The "Trivia" and "Psychology" slides with colored borders and the Optional Reading are not part of the exam, but may be part of extra credit questions.
General philosophy:
Previous semesters featured a more traditional exam setup with matching questions, multiple choice questions, calculation questions, short answer questions, and so on.
However, this became infeasible with (1) the availability of Generative AI assistance; (2) the course philosophy that students should be able to use such AI tools because they can in the real world; and (3) the course structure that allows for fully remote students (and thus precludes proctored in-person exams).
Questions that required students to provide relevant quotations from the readings or source material while applying software engineering concepts in context were effective (i.e., students could pass them but AI did not do well). However, those questions were perceived by many students as taking a long time. This created a tension with the timed examination format.
As a result, we have switched to an untimed take-home essay exam centered around a case study. This single cumulative exam covers the material previously covered in two exams (a midterm and a final). It is intentionally longer than the exams in previous semesters, but you have as much time as you want to work on it.
This means that the prior exams for this class are not indicative of the exam for this semester, especially in terms of format.
Note also that in previous semesters the material was often covered in a different order, the exams may have been given in person or via another take-home method, and many other things may have changed. It is often very tempting for students to read the previous exams and then worry: "Oh my, this previous exam is very long and has strange rule X and covers topic Y that I've never heard of. Will my exam be like that?" No, it will not. The previous exams are provided as a courtesy and as a source for practice: they are not strict guidelines.
When asking questions on the forum about previous exams, we strongly recommend that you include a screenshot of the question, rather than just saying "Q3 of F24". Including a screenshot helps makes sure that the answer will have enough context to help other students as well.
When asking questions about the current exam, you must make your post private and visible only to the course staff.
The previous exams below are everything we have. We know that some of them only have blank versions or only have answer key versions or are cut off slight. We are sorry: this is all we have.
The most indicative prior exams are from Fall 2025 and Fall 2024 — they were written by the same instructor team and featured the same rules for using generative AI. However, they are still not indicative of untimed exams. The exams below are everything we have. We know that some of them only have blanks or are cut off. We know some student would love additional detail. Unfortunately, the material below is all we have.
The next most indicative prior exams are those written fairly recently by the same instructor team. These are even less indicative. The exams below are everything we have. We know that some of them only have blanks or are cut off. We know some student would love additional detail. Unfortunately, the material below is all we have.
Exams written by other instructors and exams written a long time ago are much less indicative (but may still be useful for practice). The exams below are everything we have. We know that some of them only have blanks or are cut off. We know some student would love additional detail. Unfortunately, the material below is all we have.
See above for which semesters are the most indicative. The exams below are everything we have. We know that some of them only have blanks or are cut off. We know some student would love additional detail. Unfortunately, the material below is all we have.
Note that provided answer keys need not be exhaustive: they often list "one possible answer" rather than "all possible answers".
"Producing items by means as simple as saying, writing, or typing them can yield substantial memory improvements relative to silent reading. We review the research on this production effect and outline some important extensions and boundary conditions. We also evaluate the evidence that production enhances the distinctiveness of items in memory during encoding, thereby facilitating their later retrieval. There are issues to resolve and areas to explore, but production offers a practical means of enhancing some forms of long-term, explicit memory."
Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E. Bodner. The Production Effect in Memory. Memory, Vol 26, Issue 4, 2017.