Lecture 14 - Announcements / Notes

Announcements

• Those with a Monday lab: for next week’s lab, you need content from the videos due Wednesday. Please watch the L17 videos before your lab on Monday.
• Team-based exercises: if you are the lone member of your group present, you must join another group. From today onwards, solo E*T submissions will not receive credit.

Exam 2 Debrief

This is not the sort of distribution I hoped to see!

My Reflections

• This was too much to ask you to do in 50 minutes.
• The exam could have been more granular: I could provide more opportunities to show skills you’ve gained without yet having the ability to put them all together.
• The exam relied on you having a working knowledge of functions, and it was hard to get any points without this.

Your Reflections - Exam Wrapper

If you did not get at least 10 points on the exam, you can submit an Exam Wrapper for up to 2 points of credit on the exam (scores remain capped at 10). The wrapper includes your reflections on the following questions:

1. What did you struggle with the most? Were there particular concepts, structures, or syntax that prevented you from getting your code working? In the case that seeing your code would provide helpful context for you reflections, please include your code in a monospaced font such as Courier New.

2. How have you approached the assigned work for this course? Have you been doing anything else to study? How effective has your approach been? Are there ways you think you could change your approach in order to improve your learning going forward?

3. In class I identified several factors that made the exam challenging - too long, not sufficiently granular, and too reliant on understanding of functions. I’ll be working to address these in future exams, but did I miss anything? Are there any other steps I can take to help you become a better programmer?

Adjustments - my attempt to make this as fair as possible

I’m going to rescore the exam out of 10 points, so it becomes (approximately) as if I’d asked you to choose one of p1 and p2, with p3 as a bonus question:

def calculate_score(raw_score, wrapper_points):
    score = raw_score + wrapper_points
    if score > 10:
        return 10
    else:
      return score

This also gives Exam 2 half the weight of Exams 1 and 3. The lowest exam is still dropped, where “lowest” is the one that hurts your overall grade the most.

Plan for Today

• Exam 2 - p2.py
• E14T
• Setup for P14: rotation ciphers, ord and chr
  • alph_order
• P13 code review
• find_in_str
• Turtle colors