Final Exam Postmortem

Math 10 -- D. C. Smolarski, S.J.
Santa Clara University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

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Problem References

  1. Cf. Practice Prob. 5, n. 4, Final Review, n. 5
  2. Cf. Practice Prob. 3, n. 7, Final Review, n. 4
  3. Final Review, n. 6
  4. Cf. Midterm II, n. 7 for 3 of the questions.
  5. Cf. Practice Prob. 5, n. 1, Final Review, n. 9
  6. Cf. Midterm II, n. 9, Final Review, n. 10
  7. Final Review, n. 8
  8. Final Review, n. 7
  9. Final Review, n. 2
  10. Final Review, n. 14
  11. Cf. Midterm II, n. 8 -- slightly modified.
  12. Cf. Practice Prob. 6, n. 3.

NOTES:

General:

Prob 1: Some people were confused because of the missing nodes.

Prob 4: The "selection sort" statement is false. The swapping of adjacent elements is the method used in bubblesort.

Prob 7: Templates deal with an interdeterminate variable datatype when defining a class or a function. The datatype is determined when the class or function is actually used. (Notes N23)

Inheritance -- see Notes N14 -- deals with one class "inheriting" everything from another class.

const variable parameter modifiers -- see Notes M1.

Prob 8: See Notes 8, "Warnings," #1.

Prob 10: A great number of people obtained the answer of 20 for m in the first code. This ignored the fact that both i and j are bound to n in the main program so that when i changes, so does j automatically.

Prob 11: Some people failed to use a real number in division or multiplication, which would have rendered a final answer without any "cents" portion (i.e., since all variables are of type int, division by an integer number would truncate any decimal portion).

Prob 12: A number of people had something such as temp=n*n which only computes n2 repeatedly, since the value of n was not changed. Also some people fell into the trap of including a cout statement inside both routines -- there is no reason the PRINT OUT the value which should be returned.

In the recursive code, some people included a loop which, as a rule, is NEVER included in recursive code. Also, since recpower is a value function, the return value must be stored in some variable.

Prob 13: This was basically the same problem as on Midterm II. The last cout is NOT done because the return statement in the middle of the loop either pops out of the function (if this were a function) or quits the main program (if this were a main program).

Prob 14: A several of people reversed the first assignment for some unknown reason.

Prob 16: A number of people went into the recursion, but did not "pop" out if it. In other words, there were correct answers from the first cout statement, but the second cout was ignored.

Some people included a 0 as part of the output, I guess, by assuming that the return statement printed out a 0 (which it doesn't).

Statistics

Scores, raw and normalized
      final   nfinal
        194       77
        191       75
        186       72
        186       72
        182       69
        179       67
        178       66
        170       61
        168       59
        167       58
        167       58
        163       56
        163       56
        161       54
        160       54
        158       52
        156       51
        152       48
        149       46
        142       41
        141       40
        140       40
        135       36
        133       35
        132       34
        124       29
        124       29
        124       29
        123       28
         97       10

MAXIMUM 200      100

Distribution

                       x
                       x
                       x
             x    x    x
             x    x    x
             x    x    x    x
             x    x    x    x
             x    x    x    x
             x    x    x    x
   x         x    x    x    x
  80- 100- 120- 140- 160- 180-
  99  119  139  159  179  200

Number of Perfect Scores per Problem

  1. 9/30
  2. 30 "Easiest"
  3. 24
  4. 11
  5. 10
  6. 29
  7. 8
  8. 13
  9. 18
  10. 0 "Hardest"
  11. 16
  12. 4
  13. 12
  14. 21
  15. 4
  16. 7

This page is maintained by Dennis C. Smolarski, S.J. dsmolarski@math.scu.edu
© Copyright 2000 Dennis C. Smolarski, SJ, All rights reserved.
Last changed: 7 December 2000.