COS 341: Discrete Mathematics

The take-home COS 341 final exam will be available on-line on Monday, January 15, beginning at approximately 4:30pm.  The exam will be due the following Monday, January 22 at 5:00pm.  Late exams will not be accepted.  Exams must be submitted in hard copy to my office, room 407 of the Computer Science Building.  (If I am not around, you can slide your exam under my door.)

In principle, everything covered in the course (including lectures, precepts, homeworks and readings) is fair game for this exam.  However, you can expect that the exam will strongly emphasize material covered in the second half of the course, i.e., after the midterm.

The rules for the final exam will be the same as for the midterm.  During the exam, you may not collaborate or discuss the exam or any course material with fellow classmates, friends, TA's or anyone else.  Of course, you can ask me to clarify specific questions if they are unclear or ambiguous.  However, you should be sure to get any questions you have about course material answered before the exam begins (including questions about the final homework which, if you are using late days, can be turned in after the exam has begun).  For this reason, Mohammad has scheduled a review session for the purpose of answering questions about any homework, precept problem, general topic, or anything at all covered in the course.  This session will be held on Thursday, January 11 in Friend 009 at 11am-12:30pm.  In addition, although we will not be holding regular office hours, both Mohammad and I are around to answer your questions individually.  Just drop us an email to set up a time, or you can drop by if we happen to be around.  (Siddhartha is out of town, but should be reading email in case you have a question about a homework he graded.)

During the exam, you may use only the following materials:

1. your own lecture notes
2. the Lehman & Leighton notes
3. other miscellaneous materials that may have been distributed, such as homeworks, precept problem sets, miscellaneous readings or email help messages sent by the course staff.

In addition, in case you need to review relevant material covered in MAT 103/104, the prerequisites for this course, you may use “Karl’s Calculus Tutor” which includes such topics as factoring polynomials (in Prependix C), limits (Chapter 2), and the method of partial fractions (Section 11.7).  Alternatively, you can use another standard single-variable calculus textbook; if you do, please indicate on your exam which book you are using.  (Let me know if you are aware of a better on-line calculus resource.)

Other than what is listed above, you may not use any other materials, including books, articles, materials from previous years or other courses, or any materials taken from the web.  If there are any other materials you feel it is important that you be able to use, please let me know now.

To prepare for the exam, I would suggest first and most importantly making sure that you understand how to solve all of the homework problems that have been assigned up until now.  For additional practice solving problems, I would recommend the many problems given in the optional Rosen text (on reserve at the Engineering Library).  You also can work on the precept problems.  Finally, you can try some of the problems on exams from previous years as provided below, keeping in mind that the material covered in previous years is not entirely the same as was covered this year.

Good luck!