Exam Format

Exam

The exam is organized as a discussion between the examiner and a group of 5-7 students, which covers all main topics of the course and takes about 2 hours. During the discussion, the examiner asks questions related to the course topics and the students answer to these questions in an arbitrary order. The examiner writes down an exam protocol in a simple form («student, topic, point (+/-/±)»). For each of the questions, students can earn the following points:

• «+»: Complete enough answer in any form (including «I don’t know, but think that…», adequate retelling of documentation, etc.).

• «±»: Significantly incomplete answer, answer that contains both correct and incorrect statements, a correct answer the student cannot correctly explain (for example, a random answer).

• «-»: Totally incorrect answer, answer irrelevant to the question, general discussion demonstrating absence of understanding of the topic, reading aloud texts without their understanding, retelling answers of other students.

• Collective «0»: Absence of an answer to a simple question (from a point of the examiner). This slightly decreases the grade of every student in the group.

It is allowed to use any materials during the exam. However, it is illegal to answer questions by simply reading from these materials. Also, it is forbidden to retell answers of other students.

Grading Policy

For each student, the assessment is done by the following criteria:

• Ratio of the number of correct answers to the number of incorrect answers.
• Degree of coverage of course topics with answers.
• Any additional knowledge related to the course topics.

Formula

The overall formula for the exam grade:

\[G = 10\cdot \frac{P_1 + P_2}{12}\]

The exam consists of 2 parts \(P_1\) and \(P_2\) each containing questions that cover topics from module 3 and module 4 respectively. To get a maximal grade, a student needs to successfully answer 3 questions from each part. Each answer can give 0 to 2 relative points (0 for «-», 1 for «±», and 2 for «+»), which are then divided by maximal point 12 to give a grade.

Points for each part \(P_i\) are calculated with the Zscore function, which counts points for each of the questions and divides them by the total number of answers given by a student.

Examples of calculated grades:

Student	Answers in \(P_1\)	Answers in \(P_2\)	\(G\)
Student 1	+++	+++	10
Student 2	++	++	6.67
Student 3	++/	++/	8.33
Student 4	///	///	5
Student 5	++-+	+++	9.17

Notes

• In a group of students, there are always some shy people who try to avoid participating in the discussion. Typically, they sit in the back row. The examiner must control this and ask some questions to these people personally (not to the entire group).

• Nevertheless, people who choose to keep silence during the exam are their own enemies.

• A good strategy for taking the exam is to distribute questions in advance so that there is always somebody to answer hard questions while easy questions are left to less confident people.

Topics

Topics are not questions. They are areas, from which questions are selected. Usually questions are of the following types:

• What it is?
• How does it work?
• What is it for?
• Why cannot we use [something else]?
• Why [correct statement] and not [less correct statement]?
• What is the difference between [read documentation in one place] and [read documentation in another place]?
• etc.

When answering questions it is allowed to use documentation. Moreover, in some situations, it is necessary. However, there are several important notes:

• Ability to quickly find an answer in documentation is a skill and the exam assesses this skill among other things.

• Information from external sources is accepted only as a retelling or must be provided with explanations. Reading information does not give any points.

• If you do not really understand what your are talking about, reading aloud an unfamiliar text will clearly demonstrate this absence of understanding.

Topics are grouped by modules to simplify exam preparation.

Topic Examples

Examples of exam topics for year 2019/2020 can be found here.