ECE265: Advice on Exams ======================= Exam Preparation ---------------- The tips below are offered to help you prepare effectively for exams in the course. Most (but not all) exam questions tend to be similar in type to ones seen in assignments or lecture examples. For this reason, ensuring that you fully understand all of the assignment exercises and lecture examples is a good place to start when preparing for exams in the course. Most chapters/appendices of the textbook have a section (in the end-of-chapter/appendix exercises) that has exercises with an answer key. These are likely to be very helpful for finding additional exercises for practicing for an exam. For each assignment, it is recommended that you at least quickly compare your solutions to those in the posted solution set (even for answers that were awarded full marks). This practice can be beneficial for at least the following reasons: 1. Often, multiple approaches to solving a problem are possible, and very importantly, these approaches can often differ very substantially in the amount of work involved. A correct solution that uses a very inefficient approach (resulting in a significant amount of extra work) will still receive full marks (since it is correct). So, a perfect grade on a question does not necessarily imply that the solution method used was an efficient one. On assignments, time efficiency is not a major concern. On timed exams, however, solving problems in a time-efficient manner is clearly very important. Wasting time with inefficient methods on an exam could easily result in a student having insufficient time to complete the exam. 2. Exam questions sometimes ask for a specific solution approach or notational convention to be used. It is important to ensure that you have exposure to using approaches/conventions similar to those used in the solution sets since you may be required to use similar approaches/conventions on an exam. 3. When grading assignments (as opposed to exams), TAs may sometimes be more lenient with respect to student errors in solutions. As a result, for some assignment questions, the grade given might not always fully capture the number or severity of errors made in a student's solution. So, if only the grade is considered (without comparing to a correct solution), a student might, in some cases, fail to realize the number/severity of mistakes in their solution. By quickly comparing your submitted solutions with those in the solution sets, you can identify the above types of issues. While starting exam preparations by reviewing and possibly retrying some assignment questions is not unreasonable, it is also important to try questions that you have not previously completed and for which you have not already seen the answers. When you revisit a previously encountered problem, your brain will often retain part of the solution, leading you to simply recall what you have seen before without truly testing your understanding. The most critical step in solving any exam question is identifying the general solution approach. Without this step, there is no way to make any meaningful progress towards solving the problem, and this lack of progress usually leads to zero marks being awarded. When you attempt questions you have previously seen, you already know the general solution approach, so this critical part of the thinking process is not tested. Writing Exams ------------- Based on considerable experience marking exams and reviewing TA grading for courses similar to this one, the following guidance is offered to help you avoid some common pitfalls that often lead to unnecessary mark loss. When answering an exam question: 1. You must show all of your work and must not skip steps in your solution (unless explicitly indicated otherwise in the wording of the exam question). There are a number of important reasons for this, but the most important ones are: (a) Distinguishing between guessed and well-reasoned answers: Since many (but not all) exam questions tend to be of a similar type as ones on the assignments, guessing the general form of a final answer is often possible to do. In such cases, if steps are skipped, the marker cannot distinguish between an answer well reasoned by a student who understands the subject matter being tested and one guessed by a student relying on a memorized pattern. It is the responsibility of a student writing an exam to demonstrate that they are not simply guessing, and this is only possible to do when all steps in the solution are shown. When it is unclear whether an answer is well reasoned or guessed, markers have no basis to assume the former, and marks will very likely not be awarded. (b) Part marks: Showing all of your work makes it possible for the marker to give marks for partly correct work instead of being forced to mark with a binary marking scheme (i.e., full marks for a completely error-free answer and zero otherwise). Since it is impossible for you to know the exact marking scheme for an exam question when writing the exam, you cannot know if a step may have marks allocated to it, in which case skipping that step could result in a mark penalty. So, not skipping steps avoids this potential problem. In addition, skipping steps also tends to increase the likelihood of making mistakes, which also cost marks. Although students sometimes feel pressure to skip steps and not show all work in an effort to conserve time when writing an exam, in practice skipping steps tends to cost more marks than running out of time would. 2. You must present your answer in a way that the marker can clearly understand. Even if your understanding of the subject matter is excellent, a marker can only assess what is clearly communicated through the answer you have written on the exam paper. A marker cannot give marks for parts of an answer that they cannot understand; if something cannot be understood, there is no basis for saying it is correct. Sometimes adding some brief comments can be helpful to make an answer easier for the marker to understand. In most cases (unless explicitly indicated otherwise in the exam question), point form should be adequate for such commentary as long as the meaning is sufficiently clear. 3. You must be careful to follow the instructions in the exam question. For example: - you may be asked to add commentary to explain steps; - you may be required to use (or not use) a specific method; - you may be required to present your answer in a particular way; - you may be asked to answer in complete sentences. Failure to follow instructions like those above can often result in a significant mark penalty or, in some cases, zero marks being awarded. 4. Any symbols or variables introduced should be clearly defined unless their meaning would be obvious to the marker from the context.