CSCA02 Exams

CSCA02
The Why and How of Computing
Exams

As you enter the exam room, you will be asked to leave your belongings at the front or back of the room. Purses may be kept under, not on, the desk. Cell phones and any type of e-mail or instant messaging devices must not be brought to your desk. Be sure that your cell phone is turned off, even if it is in your bag.

CSCA02 Midterm Exam Winter 2007

Monday March 5, 2007, from 5:10 to 6:10 PM

You will write in one of these rooms, depending on your last name:

AA112 surnames A-G
HW216 surnames H-Liu
AC223 surnames Lo-Z

Type: 50 multiple choice questions; answers on Scantron

Before the midterm, read the Instructions for Filling out the Student Answer Sheet
Bring the following to the midterm:
- your U of T student ID card
- a couple of HB (or dark No.2) pencils
- an eraser that doesn't leave a smudge
No calculators of any type are allowed
At the end of the exam, hand in
- the Scantron sheet
- the question booklet
During your instructor's office hours, you can view the questions and your answer sheet.

The midterm covers the first six weeks' materials:

lecture 1 to 8 inclusive in the Course Package
Course Package sections on Number Systems and HTML, but not the two short sections (5 and 3 pages long) on the VB environment towards the end of the Course Package
additional information given during lectures
assigned readings from the Beekman text (except the timeline on pages 54-55, and any of the "Screen Test", "Working Wisdom", "Inventing the Future", or "Crosscurrents" sections).

We will only ask about the basic HTML commands, such as the commands given in the example that starts on page 14of17 in the Course Package. You do NOT need to know the attributes of the <HR> command on page 5of17, the Special Characters on page 6of17, the attributes for the <FONT> tag on page 6of17, the attributes of the <IMG> tag on page 11of17 and 12of17, the attributes of the <BODY> tag on page 12of17 and 13of17, or the <TABLE> tag on page 13of17.

We of course cannot ask you to write Visual Basic programs on a multiple choice exam, but you must understand how the code works in case you are asked to trace a program to determine its output. You should know the theoretical material about programming from the lectures too. We will be asking programming questions, not questions about using the Visual Basic software environment.

CSCA02 Final Exam Winter 2007

The final exam will take place according to the Winter 2007 examinations schedule.

The final exam covers:

all lectures in the Course Package
two videos shown during lecture
Course Package sections on Number Systems and HTML, but not the two short sections (5 and 3 pages long) on the VB environment towards the end of the Course Package
additional information given during lectures
assigned readings from the Beekman text for weeks 7 to 12 (except any of the "Screen Test", "Working Wisdom", "Inventing the Future", or "Crosscurrents" sections.
materials in weeks 8 to 12 of tutorials

Concentrate on the material that has been covered in the lectures. The final exam is perhaps more general than the midterm, but perhaps tests your understanding of concepts more.

The exam format:

length: 3 hours
no aids allowed
point form answers are allowed, and preferred
you will not get extra marks for rambling; stick to the point, and answer what has been asked
the amount of space given for each question is sufficient to give the answer we are looking for
Possible types of questions are:
- short answer (majority of questions)
- fill in the blanks
- write visual basic code
- match an answer with a definition
- true or false
- multiple choice

Tentative mark breakdown:

Hardware & Number Systems
Software Eng. & Visual Basic
Networks & Internet
Software
History
Society
Theory
Artificial Intelligence

20%
20%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%

Preparing for CSCA02 exams

The sample exam at the end of the Course Package is very similar to the format of the final exam you will be given this term. Here is a link to the solution of the Visual Basic questions from the sample exam in the Course Package:

VB Questions in Course Package Note that question 6 on Visual Basic is more difficult than what we would expect you to answer.

Previous Exams in this course

Note that many of the previous exams in this course used Turing instead of Visual Basic as the programming language. You could quiz yourself using the same questions, but use VB to write your programs instead of Turing. When VB is used, input and output for a program is usually done using Labels and TextBoxes.

Here are links for previous exams in this course. Please keep in mind that if there are questions in these exams about material that we did not cover in the course this term, you are not responsible for this material:

Scarboro campus (Search the digital STL collection)
St. George campus (Enter CSC104 in the "ERes QuickSearch" box - ignore exams from Prof. Lee)