COS 226 Final Exam Information, Spring 2023

DATE, TIME, and ROOM

The final exam is 9am–12noon on Friday, May 12. You will have 180 minutes to complete the exam.

You must take the exam in the assigned room.
- McCosh 46: P01 and P02
- McCosh 50: all other precepts
If you have been approved for special accommodations by ODS, you will take the exam in accordance with your approved accommodations in a separate room. Please contact Dan Leyzberg to coordinate.
All final exam rescheduling requests must be made through the Registrar.

FORMAT

The format will be the same as for the midterm. The exam will be administered in-person, on paper. The exam is preprocessed by computer.

Write neatly, legibly, and darkly.
Put all answers (and nothing else) inside the designated answer spaces.
Fill in bubbles and boxes completely
To change an answer, erase it completely and redo.
You may use pencil or pen, but we recommend pencil so that you can fix mistakes.

RULES

The exam is governed by Princeton’s Honor Code for in-class exams.
The exam is closed book, closed notes.
You may bring one reference sheet (8-5-by-11 paper, both sides) with notes in your own handwriting to the exam. (The reference sheet may not written be digitally, say with a tablet, and printed.)
No electronic devices are permitted, including calculators. Turn off your cell phones.
No communication during the exam is permitted (except with a staff member to ask a clarification question).
Discussing the contents of this exam before solutions have been posted is a violation of the exam rules.

FINAL EXAM MATERIAL

The final exam will stress material covered since the midterm. However, some material before the midterm is also relevant to putting new algorithms in context. For example, you might see a question on sorting/searching that covers both standard and string algorithms.

Material covered after the midterm includes lectures 13–24, programming assignments 4–7 and the following sections from the book Algorithms, 4th edition:

Section Exclusions

3.4 -

4.1 -

4.2 Strong Connectivity

4.3 -

4.4 -

5.1 -

5.2 -

5.5 -

6 Only Suffix Arrays and Maxflow are included

Section	Exclusions
`3.4`	`-`
`4.1`	`-`
`4.2`	`Strong Connectivity`
`4.3`	`-`
`4.4`	`-`
`5.1`	`-`
`5.2`	`-`
`5.5`	`-`
`6`	`Only Suffix Arrays and Maxflow are included`

When you study, you should focus on understanding basic issues, not memorizing details. For each algorithm, you should make sure that you understand how it works on typical inputs and then ask yourself some basic questions:

How is it different from other algorithms for the same problem?
In which situations is it effective?
Besides its correctness and running time, what interesting/useful properties does it have?

FINAL EXAM REVIEW

A good way to practice for the final exam is to solve problems from old exams.
You may also use these Quizzera questions. These questions are for practice only and are not graded.
Check the office hours schedule on the course Help page. Feel free to bring questions, listen in on other students asking questions, or a combination of the two.

Good Luck!