Exam 1 will be in class on Thursday, 2 March.
It will cover material from Classes 1 – 9, Problem Sets 1 – 4 (including the provided comments), Quizzes 1 – 4, and Chapter 1 – 5 of the TCS Book. Nearly everything on the exam will have been covered in at least three of these places (e.g., in class, on a problem set, and in the textbook; or in multiple classes, the textbook, and a quiz).
As a reminder from the syllabus, you may prepare a one-page (letter-size, two-sided) reference sheet for use during the exam, but all other resources are forbidden (no internet, textbook, other humans, magnification instruments, etc.). We expect that students will benefit from thinking about what to put on your reference sheet in preparing for the exam, and you may work with anyone you want (including other students in the class) to prepare your reference sheets together.
The problems in the PDF linked above should give you an idea what to expect on the Exam — problems 1 – 9 are essentially an example of a full Exam 1 (from the Fall 2019 course, but with a few edits to some questions and whitespace removed), so similar in length to what you should expect for the exam on March 2. If you want to see the original exam that was given to students in 2019 (which is closer in content and structure to this semester’s course than the pandemic-adjusted offerings since then), you are welcome to look at that also: https://uvatoc.github.io/f19/exam1comments/.
The 2019 exam does not cover some of the topics we have covered for this Exam, so we have also provided some additional practice problems after the practice exam.
We will post solutions and comments for some of these problems (and are happy to answer any questions you have about them), but encourage you to first try them on your own, then in discussion with other students if possible, before looking at the solutions (hopefully to verify your own answer is correct, and to see other approaches). We emphasize, though, that you are not expected to solve all of these problems and there is no submission expected for these. The problems are provided to give you problems to practice and check your understanding in preparing for the exam. If you are able to solve these problems, you should be confident that you’ll be able to do well on the exam.