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. Final Review, n. 1
  2. Cf. Practice Prob. 1, n. 11, Final Review, n. 2
  3. Cf. Practice Prob. 3, n. 7
  4. Cf. Practice Prob. 6, n. 3
  5. Cf. Practice Prob. 5, n. 4, Final Review, n. 5 ----
  6. Final Review, n. 6, Cf. Practice Prob. 6, n. 8 (converse)
  7. Final Review, n. 7
  8. Final Review, n. 8
  9. Final Review, n. 9, Practice Prob. 5, n. 1
  10. Final Review, n. 11
  11. Cf. Final Review, n. 14, Practice Prob. 4, n. 3, 4
  12. Final Review, n. 10, Practice Prob. 4, n. 1
  13. Cf. Practice Prob. 6, n. 1, 5

NOTES:

General:

Prob 1: Many people divided by 10 rather than by 10.0. Since an "average" is rarely an integer, one needs to divide by a float in order to get a float as an answer.

Prob 2: Some people divided by the conversion factor, or put TOTINCHES on the right of the assignment rather than the left.

Prob 4: Some people did not remember the class discussion on this topic (cf. Notes N22). A few, for some reason, reversed the order of the assignment (the left side became the right and vice versa).

Prob 6: The last part was to create an "assignment" statement, i.e., one with an equals sign in it, which is the "equivalent" of the sequence of operations. The order of the variable should have been the same (except for the D at the end). There should not have been values included in the final expression.

Prob 10: Some people tried (ingeniously) to reverse the "function" of first and last. Using this startup, the sample version of binary search given in class will work.
What I intended was that one would keep "first" as the initial pointer to the lower end of the array and "last" as the pointer to the end and modify the other statements.
Some people ignored the necessity of shifting last and first by one (i.e., of using middle-1 or middle+1).

Prob 12: The iterative version (first code) should have an explicit loop in it (the for loop is the easiest to use) and no function call to itself.

The recursive version (second code) should have NO loop and an explicit call to the same function. Recursive routines must have some way of stopping, usually corresponding to "base" case of the function (in this case, most correct codes returned a value of 1 if the input was 1).

Prob 14: This was basically a problem in seeing if people understood truth table logic and the use of nested if statements.

Prob 15: Overloading functions names -- see Notes N21. 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)

const variable parameter modifiers -- see Notes M1.

inheritance -- see Notes N14.

Prob 16: Some people seemed to reverse the meaning of value and variable parameters. Some people had the same answers for both sections of the problem.

Statistics

Scores, raw and normalized
      final   nfinal
        189       87
	180	  78
        176	  74
        171	  70
        169	  68
        168	  67
        166	  65
        163	  62
        162	  61
        158	  57
        155	  54        
        155	  54        
        154	  53
        153	  52
        150	  49
        149	  48
        149	  48
        149	  48
        148	  48
        146	  46
        143	  43
        142	  42
        140	  40
        139	  39
        136	  36
	134	  34
        132	  32
	126	  26
        125	  25
        122	  22
        119	  20
                    
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    x
  110  120  130  140  150  160  170  180

Number of Perfect Scores per Problem

  1. 5/31
  2. 22
  3. 28
  4. 8
  5. 14
  6. 4
  7. 23
  8. 11
  9. 6
  10. 1 tied for "hardest"
  11. 22
  12. 2
  13. 29 "easiest"
  14. 12
  15. 1 tied for "hardest"
  16. 3
  17. (ethics discussion)

This page is maintained by Dennis C. Smolarski, S.J. dsmolarski@math.scu.edu
© Copyright 1998 Dennis C. Smolarski, SJ, All rights reserved.
Last changed: 21 March 1999.