Tests and exams: COMPSCI 373 Semester 1, City Campus

The Information on this web page has been last updated on the 14^th June 2016.

Date: Thursday, the 23rd June 2016, 14.15am. NOTE: This is according to the preliminary time table I received long ago - please check Student Services Online for any changes.

Venue: You can check this at http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/cs-exam-room-allocations the afternoon before the exam. Or you can check the notice boards around campus for your room allocations the morning before the exam time.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CS771 STUDENTS: The exam Room for you might be different. Please check the link above and the communictaion you obtain from the university.

Content:

• The exam has 50 Multiple Choice Questions: 25 questions about Patrice's part and 25 questions about Burkhard's part.
• Each question is worth 2 marks. Not all questions have equal difficulty and the questions are in no particular order - please make good use of your reading time and answer the easy questions first.
• Each question has 5 options. There is no penalty for wrong answers (but of course you can only choose on option for each question).

Information to Burkhard's part of the exam:

• My part of the exam has 4 questions related to chapter 1/2 of part 2 of the lecture, 3 questions about chapter 3, 2 questions about chapter 4, 3 questions about chapter 5, 3 questions about chapter 6, 5 questions about chapter 7, and 5 questions about chapter 8. Note that a question referring to one chapter can (and often does) also require knowledge of other chapters. For example, a ray tracing question might require knowledge of ray tracing, 3D geometry (Patrice's part), and illumination models. So it's a bad idea to use the above information as motivation to study only part of the lecture.
• You are expected to know everything from the assignments/labs and the lecture notes of my part except of section 7.8 (Parametric Bicubic Surfaces).
• You should be familiar with the basic OpenGL commands. In particular I assume that you know how a window is created, how something is drawn (ie. glBegin(..), glVertex, glNormal, glColor, glEnd), how objects are transformed (glTranslate, glRotate, glScale, glMultMatrix) and how matrix stacks are manipulated (glMatrixMode, glPushMatrix, glPopMatrix).
• The type of questions is similar to the relevant parts of the 2014 and earlier exams (the 2015 exam might differ quite bit).
• In general I avoid questions requiring memorisation and I prefer questions testing your understanding. For example, I wouldn't expect you to memorise the Hermite basis matrix, but I do expect you to know how to derive the basis matrix of a parametric curve with given polynomial order and constraints.
• Many of the questions have the choice "None of the above". Note that for some questions this might be the correct answer.
• Please note that many of my questions require you to think and to work out the answer on paper - i.e. please don't expect that you can see the answer just by looking at the question.
• In many cases the answer will become easier if you make yourself a little illustration of the information given in a question.
• I do not give practice quizzes to my part.
  In my experience practice quizzes are counterproductive because they set up an expectations about the type of questions students will encounter in the exam. Students tend to concentrate on the topics in the practice test and omit other topics, which reduces the amount of learned material and (depending on the type of exam) can actually lead to lower exam scores.
  University staff use different approaches towards exam design. I like to take mix of variations of old questions and completely new questions. Also I try to find exam questions which reflect the assignments content. If a topic was studied in detail in an assignment you can expect more detailed questions about this topic. Practice quizzes are usually composed of randomly selected questions from a question bank. In our course we use Coderunner, which is is limited in the type of questions which can be input (e.g. no images inside answer choices). Hence using such a practice quiz would be very misleading for my part of the exam.
  The best preparation are the lecture notes, tutorials, assignments, mid-term test and (with some limitations) old exams.